In terms of trying to equate business to sports, take the simplest difference between sports and business: sports has an off-season, business does not. Yes, work is done during the off-season, but what counts are the games during the season. In business, everything counts all the time.

When I started reading Confidence: How winning streaks and losing streaks begin and end, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, I was hoping I wasn’t going to get a rah-rah sports to business analogy that just doesn’t make sense in the real world.

Fortunately, that wasn’t what the book was about. Instead, I got the best team-building book I’ve ever read.

While one can interpret the book as what leaders do to build a team, a perfectly acceptable interpretation, the work holds great insights about teams for people who work in cubes.

The four levels of confidence:

1. Self-confidence: an emotional climate of high expectations. Success (on a team) makes it easier to view events in a positive light, to generate optimism.
2. Confidence in one another: positive, supportive, team-oriented behavior. (Success) makes people feel more engaged with their tasks and with one another.
3. Confidence in the system: organizational structures and routines reinforcing accountability, collaboration, and innovation. (Success) makes it likely to turn informal tendencies into formal traditions by building winners’ habits of responsibility, teamwork, and initiative into routines, processes, and practices that encourage and perpetuate them.
4. External confidence: a network to provide resources. (Success) makes it easier to attract financial backers, loyal customers, enthusiastic fans, talented recruits, media attention, opinion leader support, and political goodwill. Continuing to win stimulates this network to grow in size, scope, and magnitude of investment.

The book makes the case that each of these levels of confidence, starting with self-confidence, build and sustain winning teams. The author then goes on to show how each of these confidence builders can be applied to your team at work.

What this book shows is how to build adaptive change into an organization using these principles of confidence.

The reason this book is important for knowledge workers is that it shows a high-performing work environment for your job. By understanding the dynamics of what it takes to build these confidence levels, you can ask questions in the job interview that will tell you the culture you are choosing for your work.

Cube Rules Rating: 5 of 5 cubes

This is a must read book for knowledge workers to understand the type of team they are working with today and what can be done to improve the dynamics of the work place. Perfectly readable and understandable, Confidence will help you develop your winning streak in your career.

Scot

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When I write about sports, specifically the Green Bay Packers, my readers yawn. I get a few sports fans, especially those who are focused on the team, but rarely any comments from people who work in cubes.

While sports doesn’t relate to business (business has no off-season), the management, players, and building a team principles do relate to Cubicle Warriors.

The background

Here comes Brett Favre back into the Green Bay Packers business after retiring in March – but the Packer management team isn’t playing to Favre’s script.

Essentially, Brett, at  the eleventh hour, decides he doesn’t want to play for the Packers any more. He wants to be unconditionally released by the Packers – something no player has ever achieved – and go play for another team.

Management basically said “no,” told Brett that he would be the backup quarterback and – oh, by the way – all of this is moot unless Brett requests back into the league and out of retirement from the NFL Commissioner. A specific, required act, that Brett has not done.

Team building

Building a professional team in the NFL is obviously different than building a team around a manager. In practice, not theory. In theory, people on a team have specific skills and other team members count on those skills to do work.

Building a team means that each person is accountable for his or her role on the team. A person who can be counted on in their role means the team becomes stronger.

This is an important lesson for people working in cubes.

Leadership on teams

The lesson about Brett, though, is about leadership on a team. He has, in my opinion, ruined his personal and professional brand by making his fans significant emotions about his retirement (including mine) cheap by waffling on retirement.

But the other leadership dynamic is that teams have emotional attachments as well. And teams move on. If one of their highly respected leaders changes roles, the team goes through the same grieving process we all go through with a significant event in our lives.

And then they move on. The Packers management team has worked through this emotional transition and have spent months doing the same thing with their team.

Brett, waving the “I’m the most important person here” flag is running right into that emotional transition. The Packers are being respectful of the legitimate accomplishments Brett has made to the team, but they have moved on.

Brett, in threatening to come to training camp and make a spectacle of the whole thing, simply claims to want to compete for the starting position. But management – rightly – has already determined that Brett’s skills may be there, but his mental attitude is questionable at best and is no longer the leader of the team.

Now is what matters

All fame is fleeting. Teamwork is about leadership now, not how great you thought you were in the past. People make emotional transitions and what was a given yesterday is no longer today.

A person who was a leader under one manager is a pain in the rear with a new manager. The team that tolerated behavior under one manager because a manager put up with it no longer tolerates the same behavior when conditions change. A person sliding by on questionable skills and poor deliverables under one manager will be fired by the next.

The ability to recognize what the truth is today about your environment is a job skill. “What have you done for me today” means the past doesn’t matter.

What situations have you encountered where you were golden on one team and not on the next?

Scot

Picture credit: Green Bay Press-Gazette

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Most people who read this site know that I am a full-fledged Green Bay Packer fan. Moving from Wisconsin to Illinois (to have to put up with the Bears!), I specifically selected DirecTV because I could buy all NFL games during the season. Including the Packers. Moving to Seattle-land allowed me to join the 300-strong Northwest Packer Backers. Yeah, green and gold flow through my veins…

In March, Brett Favre, the distinguished Green Bay quarterback, retired. I recorded his entire retirement press conference and shed a few tears with him. I recorded and watched, through the magic of TiVo, his NFL Network highlights show and the Super Bowl that he won.

It was the only way I knew how to both celebrate, and, yes, grieve his retirement after 18 years in the NFL. Despite all the back and forth about his retirement in previous years, almost a ritual in Wisconsin, it was clear to me that this was a retirement. Not because he no longer had the skills, but because the grind and the mental discipline were taking too much of a toll to do the job.

There are many lessons for Cubicle Warriors in this tale.

I admired the way Brett left the game. He and his wife, Deanna, were going to take a year off from events. Money was not an issue (and shouldn’t be, given what quarterbacks make and how long he played). He was going to work his ranch in Mississippi and figure out what to do next in his life. Not many people get the chance to go out admired — or adored — by their work.

Brett did. And then he blew it.

This past weekend, he publicly announced that he wanted an unconditional release by the Packers because, to Brett, the Packers didn’t want him to return. This would allow Brett to negotiate with other teams, without compensation to the Packers, and play.

This, although he said he retired. Then, just weeks after the retirement press conference in March, Brett had second thoughts. The Packer management said fine and set up a chartered jet to bring him back. But before that happened, Brett said no again and stayed retired.

Packer management moved on. They needed to because they needed to plan and organize the team without the Hall of Fame quarterback. They drafted quarterbacks. They adapted the offense. They worked the leadership of Aaron Rogers, who has been the backup to Brett for three years.

The Packer management team is taking many hits the last few days by not unconditionally releasing Brett. They are taking heat because they said the team has moved on and if he came back he would not be the starting quarterback. They are being polite, but firm. You can only go through so many hoops with a person who has “the (retirement) decisiveness of a squirrel on a freeway.”

The lesson for Cubicle Warriors?

You build a reputation one play at a time. Judged by what you do with a team. You have ups and downs, but work with people enough times so they work with your strengths. You build integrity and then leadership. You build a following that makes people want to go where you go.

You then take people on an emotional roller coaster ride, blowing all that up by making those heart-wrenching emotions of March now feel cheap. Combine that with the betrayal of integrity and you’ll lose everything you built about your reputation.

Brett has now become a huge distraction on a group of people who have jobs to play on a football team that was one game away from the Super Bowl.

It is a sobering lesson on Personal Branding for Cubicle Warriors.

Scot

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Studying how football teams win — and lose — is a passion of mine. Especially when it comes to the Packers, where I have been a fan since 1960(!). The Ice Bowl, the NFL Championships, the three Super Bowls are all things that I have experienced. Along with the horrendous 30-years between championships where the fans still came to support Packer football.

There are the highs, the lows — and the loyalty. There is the intense feelings that come with game time as well as the off-season. This, surprisingly, is my passion. Playing through others while learning what it takes to make a team. Learning how coaching and leadership develop a team. Determining how personnel can find and develop talent that can help you win.

Sure, there are differences between sports and business and I think sports has a tremendous advantage over business as there is downtime to rethink what we do both as a team and as a person.

But with sports, there is a mission. A goal. An objective worth fighting for.

How much of business is a mission? How much do your goals really count? How much time do you really have to develop your team and what you need as a person?

Business, at least large business, has lost the ability to inspire, to develop people, and to have a mission. That loses the passion that people desperately want to have when they work; to lose themselves working for something bigger than themselves.

Tell me if I’m wrong; I’d really love to know.

It was a great game even though Green Bay lost. But watching the game was passionate. Don’t you wish you could feel the same passion at your work?

Scot

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But when the NFL season starts, I’m all about the Green Bay Packers. I even subscribe to the premium NFL package on DirecTV just so I can watch their games every week even though I am in the Seattle Seahawk coverage area.

You see, I’ve been watching them my whole life because I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I’ve seen the Lombardi glory years, survived the 30-years of no championship, celebrated the third Super Bowl win (the twelfth championship), visited Lambeau Field, and touched the sacred grass on the field.

It is true: for better or worse, I think Brett Favre is a great quarterback.

And hope springs eternal.

Yes, I am a hopeless romantic. But the Pack is 3-0, their best start ever since their wins are all against last years playoff teams. And with the Chicago Bear loss of tonight against Dallas, the Packers have a two game lead in the NFC Central division.

Yes, it is early. But it does. Feel. Good!!!!

We will now return to our regularly scheduled blog posts. But, is this fun or what?

(Picture: Scot and wife Kate at Lambeau Field in 2006)

Scot

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