Lead Your Team to Be Average
Strap yourself in, kids. Uncle Danny is about to walk you through a sports analogy.
[Editor’s note: if you’re new, trust us: this will not go well.]
A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend who moonlights as a little league baseball coach. As he is often prone to do, he disregarded my personal feeling that the only good thing about baseball is the concession stands, and he started droning on and on about base hits and batting drills and catcher glove tensile strength and…I’m not sure what else. I zoned out after the first two letters of “base.”
But then he said something that snapped me out of my bored-to-tears, where-is-the-fire-alarm-and-what’s-the-fine-if-I-pull-it reverie, something that I made him repeat, which caused my sports-loving friend to wonder if I had temporarily been taken over by the spirit of Kevin Costner, who was in a baseball movie, I guess.
He said:
I don’t have the four best players in the league. I don’t want the four best players in the league. But I do have the average of the best twelve players in the league. I refuse to spend all of my time coaching my four infielders so that they’re the best. I focus my time on all of my players, to make them all the best they can be.
It’s been a few weeks since that one-sided conversation, and even now, when I stir back to consciousness from the baseball-induced coma, that leadership nugget sticks with me.
We all have people in our ministries who possess the raw material of rock stars. We all have some volunteers who are far easier – and more fun – to invest in than others. We all have staff who struggle in certain skill areas, and it’s simply easier to let them flounder than it is to coach them to be better.
But if we’re going to be great leaders, we can neither gravitate towards the great team members nor ignore the weaker ones. The test of our leadership is whether we make all of our team the best they can be. As my coach friend says, “having the best average for your whole team makes a better team than the one with the best ‘peak.'”
Are you spending your time with your best to make them better? Are you leaving out your weaker team because you’ve abandoned hope for them?
Or are you leading your team to be the best average they can be?
