Chad Silverstein argues that deliberate team practice, time spent away from daily work to focus on growth and alignment, transforms organizations. He shares how creating a new role for an employee emerged from practicing together, and compares teams that skip practice to athletes who stop training.
Chapters
It's funny when I come across a daily discipline that Chet mentions my company, something that we did, and what's really ironic about it was that my opus became reality at a Build to Lead practice. I've told the story before, you may have heard it, but I heard one of my employees set out this big dream that she wanted to change people's lives. But she wasn't specific and I don't think she knew how that she wanted to change people's lives. But we always say, when you're going to start to dream, don't worry about the how, just start putting pen and paper. And the more you rinse and repeat that process of trying to figure out your vision, the more clarity will come. It just sometimes when you least expect it. And for this individual in my system, you could certainly say that that happened because I came in one day and told her she was going to be taken off her position and into a brand new role that I created for her. And you know, again, it was, it was part of my magnum opus to help people get jobs once they got put into collections. It was something that nobody else was doing at the time. And, you know, I think, you know, it's something I wanted to do, but I couldn't do by myself. And I needed, I needed someone else. And so this is how you have this vision and you have this alignment within your system. And when you can spend time with your team, these kind of things happen. You invest. You know, can you imagine if there was a sports team who was really good and then one day the coach just said, no more practice, we're done practicing. Can you imagine how bad that team would be when they try to go out on the weekend and play their next game compared to all the teams who are practicing? So if that's true, then as a corporate team, as a, as an operation and business, how could you not think about putting in some time and investing time being with your team outside of just doing the job? And how could you expect to be great and outperform your competitors if you're not practicing? And again, most people who don't know what practice is, and you know, it's like, practice, what is that? What is it? What is it? And you just have to come to a practice and you have to, you have to explore and see for yourself. Because I would say magic happens at practice if you're tuned in and if you want to learn and if you invest time and energy into being focused and not distracted and you pull yourself into that process of just saying I'm just here to work on myself. Selfishly, magic happens. It just does. Because most people will never do this. And I think that's a, that is an incredible gift. If you're in a team practice right now and you get that, take advantage of it, come prepared and catch yourself when you're distracted. Magic happens at practice. I cannot tell you how many times over 350 plus practices with my team, how much magic happened during a practice, how much came out of practice that changed everything, that changed someone's life. And if you want to grow your team, then you got to invest heavily in being with your team, getting tired with your team, challenging your team, and that stuff all happens outside. You know, a lot of companies will do retreats and what they'll do is they'll leave their office and they work on their business and they, and they do that on purpose because they don't want to be at the office because you feel like you're still working. And when you're somewhere off site and you're working on the business, you kind of can separate yourself from the business to be able to see things differently and give yourself the space in the room to work on things that you normally wouldn't work on. Priority practice allows you to do that with yourself. It allows you to get out of your own head, get away from your job and work on you, which most people will all tell you they never have time to do. And so again, a company and a team that invests to practice with their teammates is invaluable. And it's a big reason why so many build to lead clients have so much success in their system. And so when a client cuts off practice, it's always because the leader has pretty much cut off themselves from that growth model, that growth mindset. They're done. And you could expect things to change pretty drastically when that happens. So show up to a practice and check it out for yourself.
