Chapter 35.
Score the Performance

Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.

—Harold Geneen, CEO, ITT

Can you imagine playing a game in which you don’t know how it’s scored? Or competing in front of judges when you don’t know their criteria? And the judges are not going to tell you for a long time how you did? That would be an athlete’s nightmare.

We sat in a meeting run by Megan who was having a hard time motivating her team to hit the company’s expected goals.

“Exactly how are we doing right now?” her team member Clarence asked Megan from the end of the round table around which we were all sitting for the team meeting.

“Oh, I don’t know, Clarence,” said Megan. “I haven’t looked at the printout yet. I have a sense that we are doing pretty well this month, but I haven’t gotten to the numbers yet.”

You could see the look on Clarence’s face. It was a cross between disappointment and pain.

Later, we met with Megan alone and explained to her why she needed to change her approach immediately if she had any hope of motivating Clarence and his teammates. She had to know the score.

“I just don’t enjoy numbers,” Megan said. “I never have. I’m not a numbers kind of person.”

“Whether you enjoy numbers or not, if you’re in a leadership position, it is imperative to be the numbers person for your team. There’s no way you’re going to have a motivated team here, Megan, until you do your homework, put the numbers in front of you, and talk about those numbers when you talk to your people. If you’re their coach, and you are, then you talk about the game and the score.”

“Well, I played a little basketball in high school,” Megan said. “Maybe I can relate it to that.”

“Imagine your basketball coach during a game. Your team comes to the sideline, it’s late in the game, and your coach says, ‘Now I haven’t looked at the scoreboard for a while, so I don’t know how many points we’re down, or are we up? Anyway, here are some plays that I think we ought to run after the time-out.’”

Megan smiled and said, “That would be a coach that I wouldn’t have any confidence in whatsoever!”

“Why not, Megan?”

Megan said nothing.

“Aren’t you that coach, Megan?”

Megan said, “I think I see what you mean. My best coaches were people who rewarded numbers and got excited.”

“Right! Great leaders are the same. They are leaders who call team members and say, ‘Hey, I just got your numbers for last week. Wow, that’s better than you’ve done all year!’ These are the leaders people love to follow, because they always know whether they are winning or losing. They always know the score.”

We reminded Megan that earlier in her team meeting she had said to her group, “Well, you guys are really trying hard and I know you are making the effort. I drove by last night and I saw your lights on late, so I really admire what you guys are doing. You’re really giving it the old college try.” We told her that she might be on the wrong course with that approach.

“What was wrong with saying that?” Megan asked.

“It’s wrong because respect for achievement is replaced by respect for ‘trying.’ Megan, listen, we have a phrase in our society’s language that sums it up. When someone is willfully obtuse and ineffective, we say that person doesn’t ‘know the score.’ Why? Because ‘knowing the score’ is the first step in all achievement.”

What we wanted Megan to see was that this mistake of hers was immediately correctable. It was only the mistake of not looking over some numbers before sending an e-mail or making a call.

But that one little mistake will give her team the impression that they’re here for reasons other than winning and achieving precise goals.

The coach has to be the one to explain to the team with tremendous precision exactly what the score is, exactly how much time is left, and exactly how the strategy is based on those numbers. When you have a numbers-based team, you know when you are winning, you know when you’ve had a good day, you know when you’re having a good run, and you know when you are not.

That creates a wonderful sense that there is no hidden agenda from this leader. So look for ways, as you communicate with your people, to improve and increase the way they are measured and, especially, to increase the consciousness of that measurement.

But it has to come from you. You can’t wait around for the company policy to shift. That’s what most people do. They wait for their own management to come up with some kind of new system, new scorebooks, new posters, something like that. But don’t do that. Don’t wait. Have it come from you.

It has to be your personal innovation to find more ways to keep score. That way, people will link it to you and know how much it means to you. Is there anything that you want improved? Find ways to track it, to keep score. The love of games that is in every human being is something that you can tap into. The more you measure things, the more motivated your people are to win those games.