Grab the clipboard: The Leadership Playbook by Nathan Jamail

Nathan Jamail’s The Leadership Playbook: Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Business Teams jumped off the shelf at me at Barnes & Noble. It wasn’t the book jacket, but the title. With my wife coaching my son’s city rec basketball team, I am now spending three days a week assisting her with motivating and directing a team of 10 12-year-olds. As when I’ve coached teams in the past, I have found the experience both gratifying and humbling.

My role with the team is to pull out individual boys who need help dribbling or shooting, encouraging them and handing out drills to try at home to increase their ability. It occurred to me more than once that a little more time spent in a similar effort at the office would make my job even more satisfying. Even better, I knew that such efforts would make me more valuable to my teammates.

So, I picked up the book hoping for more reasons to set aside additional time for coaching. I wasn’t disappointed.

The author is a serial entrepreneur and salesman. His stories of coaching-done-right are often of interventions and engagements with a large sales team. No problem. And while I expected a lot of coaching analogies, they weren’t here. I actually appreciated that. (Trying to emulate a college or pro coach’s philosophy in the office hasn’t made sense to me in the past, and I read a lot of biographies and books on college basketball in particular. I grew up idolizing "The General" but as my mom would say, I "know better.")

That said, I really bought in to Jamail’s insistence that high performing teams practice a lot and have a coach who engages with them individually and collectively in that practice. The Steve Jobs philosophy of hiring good people and letting them work? Good to a point, but hardly relevant to what most managers face in the workplace.

Key takeaways:

• Mandate skill development and practice. Five percent of each employee’s time should be focused on practicing and skill development.
• Have a game plan for each employee. Outline specifically what they need to do, practice and achieve, and work with them on that effort.
• Build your bench. He advises one meeting a week with individuals that may be a good fit on your team.
• Coaches prioritize, review the game plans, set the tone, and motivate the team.
• Don’t let obstacles be your excuses. Get out of the office and work with your players. Do not let all of the other emails and expectations derail you from fully empowering your team.
• “Dream and think big as a coach and you will become big.” His point is that positivity rules. He believes that everyone on his team should love their job and it is his job to help them love it. That starts by having a positive attitude.

Quotable:

• “A coach’s job is not to be better than the rest of the team. It is to make the team better.“
• “Coaches set the thermostat for morale: they motivate, scrimmage, reward, peer present and review the game plans.”
• “Sympathy is toxic.” Team members are not coming to the leadership for sympathy but for redirection and perspective. Keep sympathy out of it when a bad attitude or unhappiness is present.
• “The desire to win starts with the desire to get involved." This point is related to the need to be hyper involved in the work of the team. He also says “expectation requires inspection.“ Here again, he is saying that we have to set expectations and constantly attend to them.
• ”Glad makes us great.”