A speaker tosses paper balls at a waste basket to show how best practices improve performance. First round with no guidance fails. After two tips from a basketball coach—visualize the ball entering the center and use an arcing motion—success rates jump dramatically.
I'm about to demonstrate to you through an experiment what great leaders do to support their team. It's called best practices. Here's the experiment. I want you to grab a waste paper basket, put it about 10 feet away from you. And secondly, crumple up some balls of scrap paper. Then what I want you to do is just take 10 shots inside the basket. Got 1 in. 2 in. 3 in. Now let's try best practice. Not that I was ever good at basketball, but I did know from a coach once, and I'm gonna try it. He said, always to visualize the ball going in the center, secondly, and have an arc so that dropping in as opposed to shooting across. So let's try it now, see how many we got. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Not perfect, but remarkably better. Give your team the best practice to follow, and those few pieces of instructions could be a game changer in their performance.
