A leader shoots crumpled paper at a trash can to show how best practices work. Without guidance, he misses most shots. After two tips from a basketball coach—visualize the ball going in and use an arc—his success rate jumps. The lesson: clear instructions act as guardrails that boost team performance.
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 10ft away from you, and secondly, crumple up some balls of scrap paper. Then what I want you to do is just take 10 shots, tap the basket. Got one in, three 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 going to 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 got. 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.
