Executive Toughness and Focusing on Process

When leading any team to victory, you can’t underestimate the value of strategy or that burning desire to win built deeply within yourself and everyone else on the team.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

While these are the most visible and exciting parts of the story, they represent a very small part of the whole picture.  

Quote: The problem lies in the fact that they are so focused on those results that there is less and less emphasis on the process of what it takes to achieve those results. John Wooden. Book: Executive Toughness by Dr. Jason Selk.

Whether in the military, sports, or business, few failures can truly be attributed to a failure of strategy or the team really not wanting to win bad enough. The book Executive Toughness describes this well.  

Consistently winning comes from rigorous and daily practice of hundreds of details over years.  

The reason behind many of these details will be completely misunderstood by those going through it the first time.  

Craig Mullaney describes this very well in The Unforgiving Minute:  A Soldier’s Education. 

A great coach (or manager) has the stamina to stick with the rigorous training, providing small corrections to the process along the way.


Think of a contracting business like you would a project. Consider a few major outcomes on your scoreboard.

Which one are you the most unhappy with? 

Drill-down on that outcome metric until you have the equivalent of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and can see the Critical Path.




Off-Boarding: Basic Categorization and Management
Contractors will improve their whole Talent Value Stream (TVS) including planning, recruitment, and retention by being intentional about how they off-board team members.
Retirement Onboarding - Transferring Your Knowledge to the Team
Knowledge transfer is hard. How do you effectively take the knowledge that one individual has accumulated over a lifetime with a company and transfer that knowledge to the next person in line?
Leadership and Management of Details
Building a great contracting business requires the right balance of leadership and management. While it is possible to separate them the truth is that many of the top leaders are relentlessly disciplined managers.