Fundamentals are an Investment
If you don’t constantly reinforce fundamentals, you will lose them.
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I coach my son’s youth soccer team, and while I don’t know if I’m a great coach I do work hard to teach them the fundamentals. The first few practices of every season we focus on fundamentals before moving onto anything more complex. If they don’t understand the basics, nothing else matters!
Eventually, the fundamentals are strong and we move onto more complex things like strategy. Every year I get excited during this transition, as strategy is more fun! And Every year I get disappointed when, a few weeks later, our fundamentals start to disappear. You’d think I’d learn my lesson, but no. This same cycle repeats every year.
It’s easy to think about fundamentals as something you achieve, like a college degree. Once you have a college degree you always have a college degree, no one can take that away from you. It’s an achievement!
Fundamentals are much more like the things you study in college. I have a degree in engineering, and I don’t think I could do calculus anymore. I’ve lost my engineering fundamentals due to a lack of practice over the years.
Your business has fundamentals too! They include everything from the way you communicate, to the way you collaborate to the values in your corporate culture. Those fundamentals are easy to focus on at first, and tempting to believe that once your team masters them you don’t need to worry about them anymore.
Unfortunately, just like my soccer team, that’s not how it works.
You need to constantly reinforce and retrain the fundamentals of your business. Never assume the team remembers or are following them, instead you should assume your fundamentals are slipping. Communications are getting sloppy, collaboration isn’t happening and the culture is fading. If you don’t have a regular focus on reinforcing them, that’s exactly what will happen.
That doesn’t mean you need to constantly put your team through bootcamps, or lecture them during every all-hands meeting. Reinforcing the fundamentals can be as easy as leading by example, publicly recognizing team members for great fundamentals and writing them down. It’s about consistency, not intensity.
If you’re not sure where to start, just think about the most important habit you want everyone on your team to have. Then, demonstrate that habit yourself, publicly, and recognize people that do the same thing. Follow up with people who don’t have the habit and offer to help them learn it! Start small, then build.
You can usually tell which teams have a regular focus on their fundamentals, because the fundamentals are crisp. There is clarity and focus, since strong fundamentals allow the team to spend time on more complex things like strategy. That’s what every team wants, in the end.
Now if only I could remember that next season for soccer…
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Right! Reminded me of the line Bryant story: Kobe was practicing the basics for 45 minutes. Later that day Stein asked Bryant why he was practicing the basics and Kobe's response was golden: “Why do you think I'm the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics.”