If the members of your team show up for work each day primarily motivated to get through the week, the month, the year, etc., until retirement, you will never see excellence. Imagine a professional baseball team who looks at each game as just one step closer to off season. My guess is that their season will be short; no post season play.

Let me suggest instead, that each day at work, like each game in sports, is a new chance. What would happen if a leader took the mindset of a great coach, preparing his/her team for each day being another chance to excel?

I learned while a manager at United Parcel Service, the most important part of the day was the first fifteen minutes of the shift.  Think of it as pre-game. We used the time to assess the driver’s mental attitude and physical preparedness to win at their game everyday. Rarely did we talk about work. The primary purpose was to connect, and to connect them to the game. We talked with each driver everyday, not just the ones who had a great or poor performance the day before. It was our chance to reaffirm the importance of each one of them and to fuel them up for the day.

It is far better to coach a team to victory before the game, not after when the results are in.  Each employee has a chance everyday to excel. A work day starts with a perfect game. What happens the rest of their day often depends on their outlook as they move into action.

The pre-shift is often the busiest time of the day for the manager.  We are reviewing plans and results from our previous day. Getting assignments ready. Answering emails. Finding out if we have a full team to work with. Making sure equipment and tools are ready to go. Time with the boss. Devoting this time for one on one’s with each of your employees may not seem a priority.  I would argue it is the most important use of your time. You, and your team, will never get a chance to replay the day.  Give them your best and they will give you theirs. Give the day the best chance to be one you all celebrate.  There is another game tomorrow.  Start it with a win!

I’d like to take a moment to amend some counsel I gave.  Turns out, it may have been, well, wrong.  I have shared with my clients that you really don’t need to be charismatic to be a great leader.  Perhaps I was trying to offer comfort to those that didn’t think they could be charismatic.  I would offer that substance was more important than flair.  You still need substance, but if you can’t inspire raving followers, your substance will not translate to results.

Great leaders need followers that do more than understand the purpose or vision.  They need people to act upon it.  They need to turn them into what Peter Drucker called, maniacs on a mission.  You need to inspire if you aspire to be a great leader.

I do my best to help others create a compelling vision.  I think too much effort is being spent to craft a product; a vision statement.  I believe that much more could be accomplished if we thought about working on being compelling. Being charismatic.

Unfortunately, there is no charisma in a can product available. Fortunately, there are skills that can be practiced and mastered.  It comes down to powerfully communicating your message. It means communicating your passion (and I should add if you are not passionate about your message, forget charisma.  Oh, you can also forget leading others.)  Business schools rarely teach the skills to powerfully present your message. They seem to believe the numbers will present a compelling direction strong enough to get others on board.  Here is a clue.  The numbers are necessary, but boring.  They are not enough.

There are a number of scholars and practitioners that are filling this gap in executive education.  My recommendations include Carmine Gallo’s great book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs”, Ron Crossland and Boyd Clarke’s great work on executive communication, “The Leader’s Voice”, and something completely different, poet David Whyte’s, “A Heart Aroused.”

While you cannot be taught the passion necessary for charisma, you can learn the skills necessary to communicate it with charisma.  That matters.

One hundred and forty characters.  The Twitter limit can actually be a useful learning tool for organizational communication.  Our world is full of interruptions.  Research shows the average person is interrupted every eleven minutes on the job.  Other recent research I have read asserts the human brain has difficulty processing more than three pieces of information at a time. Brevity is an advantage when you need to compete with the information overload most face daily.

One of the pieces of information that captured my limited attention span this week is the story of Google and Sequoia Capital. When the investors at Sequoia asked the young college students Sergey Brin and Larry Page what their vision for Google was, they answered, “to provide access to the world’s information with one click.”   Fifty nine characters. Ten words.  If you are making a pitch for venture capital at Sequoia they now want you to state your vision in ten words or less.

Creating a memorable, and more importantly, inspiring vision is the most difficult task I ask my clients to do when I work with them on their leadership skills.  Most of their attempts turn out to be  mission statements or statements of strategic goals. These are important pieces of information that help the organization stay on the road, but they give no hint of the destination or why in the world anyone would want to travel with you. They do not inspire, and inspiration is the seed of innovation. I cannot imagine a company ever achieving excellence without a compelling vision that ignites the passion of those needed to accomplish it.

I note that this post has crossed the three hundred word threshold. Feel free to call me out on it.  I need to work on my own brevity.  Or maybe “I need 2 wrk on brevity.”. I would guess that you, and I, could use some work on your vision. get 2 it