Can Stress Be a Building Block to a Better Team?

I coached my kid’s hockey teams for a number of years and I’m always amazed how many of the lessons I learned there carry over to the business world. I led a solid team but often played against far superior opponents. Some coaches might get anxious or even bummed at the idea of going up against a much better team, but I always saw it as an opportunity.

See, in hockey it’s all about speed. If we played an equally matched opponent, we only needed to make minor adjustments to our game to adjust quickly and often win the game. But the better teams had figured out how to be a second or two faster when skating, passing, shooting, and hitting. This accelerated pace put a great deal of pressure on my team, but it was also where we learned the most about our weaknesses.

When we played much better teams, it would become evident in the first five minutes of the game exactly what we needed to improve upon. Moving up the speed of the game stressed my players into making repeatable mistakes that we could then go back and work on to get better. If I recognized and acknowledged these weak points and the kids committed to working on them, there would be a noticeable difference next time we played the same opponent and of course in our overall performance.

My business is no different than my old hockey teams. Because of our continued rapid growth and expansion, there has been a lot of added stress to different parts of the business. Back during our flat years, everyone was kind of coasting in his or her comfort zones. Sure we worked hard, but we really weren’t pushed all that hard to improve because the status quo was good enough. 

NOT TODAY – We continue to rapidly add customers and employees. This has really pushed us hard to both build and improve just about every aspect of every thing we do. Everyday is met with opportunity in the form of new challenges requiring new solutions. While we occasionally stumble, misstep and even fall short of our customers’ expectations, many more times we win by meeting today’s challenge while improving tomorrow’s service. 

How exactly do we up our game? It all starts with systems, systems, and more systems. We take as many mistakes as possible and tear them down to figure out why they happen and how we can do it better, smarter, and cheaper in the future. But to do this we first have to be vulnerable enough to admit both to our customers and ourselves that we made a mistake. 

In hockey there was only so much I could do as a coach to help the players improve as a team at which point I had to start looking at individual players. That was the hardest thing to do as a coach because they were all great kids. My business is no different in that we can only do so much to improve our systems at which point we have to start looking at Team Members. At that point it becomes all about people, people, and more people.

So I ask you these questions about your own organization:

•   Is your business getting stagnate on auto pilot or are you pushing your organization’s stress level to uncover the areas you need to improve to make it the best it the best it can be?
•   Do you see today’s challenges as tomorrow’s opportunities?
•   Are you systematizing solutions so that every customer benefits from a mistake made with an individual customer?
•  Are you be honest with yourself in dealing with limitations you may be experiencing with your own people?

So don’t be afraid to push your company to the point of stress to find out where you can make improvements. Improvements come in the way of new systems, more training for existing people and often adding some new talented people. Only you have the answers as the leader in your own company, but it all starts with a willingness to take on some additional stress to discover where you need to improve to take good to great and play at your highest level.