The power of playbooks

If you are like most leaders, you have been frustrated with inconsistent results, outcomes, or interactions. This frustration is often driven by seeing or watching how people carry out different tasks in different ways and situations, which leads to incredibly inconsistent results. When polled, business owners and leaders share this as a top frustration for their organizations. It is also a top frustration for the clients and prospective clients as well.

Letting or allowing each person to pick the way they want to do things in each situation will absolutely lead to inconsistent results and outcomes. Not only will this lead to grief, anxiety, and frustration internally, it will do the same for clients, prospects, suppliers, partners, and etc.

Now, imagine an environment where each person knows what to do and the best ways to do it in each common situation. Think about how much better and easier it would be if the team could achieve positive results and better outcomes.

This is the case with professional team sports: each athlete regardless of position, experience, or skill is given a team playbook to follow. These playbooks are filled with best practices to help them learn what and how to do things in each specific situation. Each player is provided the playbook on the first day or often before they start. Even if they know how to play football, they don’t know how to run the plays of the specific team or execute the best practices for them to find success.

The good news is that your organization can (and should) do the same. Business owners and leaders can build and use playbooks for each part of their organization: leadership, management, hiring, sales, customer service, and etc. They can specifically:

• help each leader have consistency in how they run their meetings.
• ensure each manager follows the best practices for recruiting or hiring people to join their teams.
• ensure each sales professional always maximizes each potential interaction with prospective clients.
• help all customer service team members to provide consistent interactions with existing clients.

This is a simple concept, although it’s far from being an easy thing to do. Building playbooks for success in leadership, management, sales, and etc. will take time and energy. However, it is one of the best investments we can make in not only achieving greater success, but also in ensuring we find and deliver the best practices and consistency your teams, clients, and those who can do business with you deserve.

To start, simply make a list of things your team does regularly. Examples could be: run certain meetings, recruit, hire, or onboard new people, run sales calls, load trucks, deliver and install products, and more. Then, make a list of all the different people who are responsible for executing each of these things. Now, see how similar or different each person does them. Start to capture the best practices. Documenting is key!

Once we have some of the things listed, prioritize the highest touch or most inconsistent activities. Then, work on one at a time. This is only the beginning, and again, this is a challenging thing to do. Starting is always the most difficult part, but all you have to do is work on a plan.

Now let me ask—are all of your people consistent in their actions and reactions? Do they all know what to do in all common situations? Do they know how to execute best practices in each given interaction? What if they could become even better and more consistent? If you don’t know or don’t like the answers, find a business growth consultant who can help.