Full-Court Press

Accelerating Business Success Without Sacrificing Quality

Efficiency: The ability to complete tasks in the least amount of time or with minimal waste of resources such as time, energy, or materials. It focuses on optimizing processes and reducing unnecessary effort to achieve a desired outcome.

Proficiency: The level of skill or expertise someone has in performing a specific task or set of tasks. It involves mastery and competence, emphasizing the quality and accuracy of the work rather than just speed.

Sports have always influenced my operating system, offering far more than just a game – they're a window into the world. They’ve taught me invaluable lessons: the power of collaboration, the strength in diverse thinking, how to bring out the best in others, and the relentless pursuit of making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In basketball, as in business, your chosen style of play demands balance. Simply "playing fast" isn't enough – you must excel while maintaining that speed. The 2016-2017 NBA season is a good analogy of how successful teams build around finding the right balance. (Note: I also acknowledge that there are a lot more variables at play in the sports analogies I’ll use in this article. These examples are just here to provide an illustration of the concepts being discussed.) The San Antonio Spurs won the second most games of any team, going 61-21 - all while being the 4th slowest team in terms of pace. Their personnel was better fit for a slower game where they rely on a deliberate offense that takes their time to get good shots on offense, while allowing their all-world defense to suffocate the opposing offenses.?

On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Steph Curry / Kevin Durant Warriors, who played with the 4th fastest pace in the league. This team was a must watch experience known for their exciting fast-pace play. The roster was perfect for playing an up-and-down game due to the complementary skill sets of its players and high-level of shot making. They went on to a league best 67-15 record and won the championship in dominating fashion. While the Warriors and Spurs played very different styles, they found the balance that allowed their players to thrive.?

The key lies in identifying where we can sacrifice, knowing the marginal gains pale compared to the benefits of accelerating elsewhere, and what fits best within your situation. It's this delicate balance of efficiency and proficiency that propels teams to victory.?

My passion for this topic stems from during my early experiences in digital marketing. I witnessed companies frantically trimming essential processes to save time, only to watch their efforts result in subpar outcomes. Efficiency should not lead to a race to the bottom where prioritizing cost-cutting and rapid output at the expense of quality - and trust. Efficiency without proficiency is like a fast-moving train without a clear destination—it may cover a lot of ground, but it ultimately fails to reach its intended goal.

The Hidden Costs of Over Pursuing Efficiency

Key Point: Prioritize balanced performance over pure speed to avoid sacrificing quality for quick wins, much like a team focusing solely on offense at the expense of defense.

Picture a basketball team obsessed with speeding up their offense, disregarding shot quality. They might attempt more shots, but rushed, off-target attempts rarely win games if you don’t have the skill set to thrive under those circumstances. Building on the 2016-2017 NBA example above, the 2 fastest pace teams were the Brooklyn Nets and Phoenix Suns - they won 20 and 24 games respectively and were also the 2 worst teams overall. Similarly, in business, excessive focus on speed often sacrifices quality. I've seen companies reduce strategies to mere box-checking exercises, discarding the expertise and foundational work crucial for excellence.

I once partnered with a large manufacturing company rushing to launch a paid search program before an arbitrary leadership deadline. Starting late, they pushed to skip crucial onboarding steps that align everyone on company operations, goals, and expectation - the game plan. We launched generic campaigns, promising to "circle back" post-launch. Veterans of such initiatives recognize the familiar and vicious cycle: new projects emerge → fresh deadlines loom → no time for "circling back" → leadership axes the underperforming program.

But the program never stood a chance. Rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline, they cut corners on essential steps, yielding predictably lackluster results. This outcome demoralizes the spirits of dedicated team members investing time and effort. After witnessing this scenario repeat, we began incorporating "client commitments" into our agreements, clearly defining non-negotiables for success. We embrace flexibility, but not at the expense of results.

At times, increasing velocity can yield greater benefits over adhering to full procedures, but this demands careful evaluation. Pause and assess potential speed gains against any compromise in delivery quality or results. When implementing strategies or tactics, always anchor back to the 'why' – both for the overall goal and for each step in the process. This approach helps identify where you can trim timelines while maintaining high-level execution.

Optimizing Resource Allocation

Key Point: Allocate resources strategically to maintain quality in critical areas while using productivity tools for less critical tasks.

It’s not for everyone, but I find resource allocation fun. I think of it like building a basketball team. You define the team identity and style of play, then find players with the skills and experience to execute. In business, team identity emerges from the culture and expectations you want to set, growth stage, company (+department) focus, operations, strategy and tactics. This clarity helps you find people with the right experience and skill sets to take you where you want to go. Depending on your goals, you can better define which roles demand extreme proficiency and which benefit from all-around players who keep things moving.

For example, a startup building a marketing department might need a CMO with a history of building teams from scratch and getting their hands dirty, rather than someone with a decade of experience optimizing teams at a Fortune 500 company.

Even with an established department, it’s important to consistently evaluate the team identity and look for areas needing a jolt or a shift in responsibilities. Do the skill sets on your team match your style of play? Are you underusing someone? Does anyone excel at certain tasks but struggle with others?

This approach ties into cultural fit. When hiring, focus your search on candidates whose skills align with your needs for speed and expertise. During the process, clearly communicate your culture and expectations to help both sides evaluate if the role and company fit well.

Having a cadence to evaluate what the team needs allows you to maintain high proficiency where it matters most, maximizing your likelihood of success.

Enhancing Proficiency within Teams

Key Point: Empower team members by aligning their roles with their strengths to enhance both proficiency and overall engagement.

Just as a coach puts players in positions where they can excel, leaders should focus on enhancing the skills within their teams. This involves recognizing and nurturing individual strengths, whether by upskilling current employees or bringing in external expertise. Empowering team members to take on roles aligned with their strengths fosters a sense of purpose and engagement, like a player thriving in their preferred position on the court.

I recently worked with a SaaS company struggling with an underperforming sales rep who was ready to leave. Helping to dig deeper with the VP, three things jumped out:

1. They excelled at building relationships (internally and externally)
2. While they didn't close new deals at the expected pace, they were automatic with upsells and renewals
3. They embodied the type of person the company wanted on the team

How did we set this person up for success? We shifted their role to focus on upsells and renewals, transitioning them off new deals and reallocating that pipeline to our top-performing rep. The result? Net-new sales improved, client retention rate stayed above 97%, upsell revenue grew 150%, and they earned a promotion to team lead within 6 months. This shift not only boosted overall performance but increased the employee's job satisfaction and productivity.?

A quote I lean back on is from Mike Tomlin, Head Coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers: "Leadership is not about being in charge. It's about taking care of those in your charge." No one, personally or professionally, is a finished product. Being a good leader means taking on the challenge of helping people grow into the next phase of their evolution through empathy, understanding, and not running away when they need help finding their way.

Empowering Teams

Key Point: Empower teams by setting clear guardrails, fostering collective intelligence, and enabling autonomy within defined boundaries to balance time and quality

There's a difference between what a coach sees from the sideline and what the players experience on the court. As a coach, you limit your team's potential if you rely solely on your own game plan without player input. They experience the game from a unique perspective that should be integrated into your strategy. Incorporating their perspective makes your strategy more dynamic while investing your team in driving things forward. Without that investment, you risk making them feel like pawns and losing them completely.

Collective intelligence thrives in both sports and business. As a leader, I surround myself with experts in areas where I'm less knowledgeable, aiming to be the best listener and enabler rather than the smartest person in the room. However, there's a delicate dance between empowering and being run over when it comes to enablement.

I learned early on to explicitly set guardrails so team members understand their operational boundaries. This means setting clear expectations, providing necessary resources, and fostering an environment that values continuous learning and improvement. These guardrails help empower your team to make informed decisions without constant oversight while maintaining control over critical aspects of projects and strategies. Your team's valuable experience and insights into how your machine runs allow them to work within reasonable boundaries to find areas of growth and optimization.

We've worked with companies where our most crucial contribution was facilitating workshops to help founders and CEOs empower their leaders to not just manage, but to lead. This involves honest conversations about what permission slips your leaders need to be their best selves. The goal is to understand different viewpoints and agree on guardrails that allow you to operate the business while your leaders drive results.

For example, you might set comfortable targets for result fluctuations (e.g., "I'm comfortable running this initiative at X cost as long as our revenue and pipeline don't dip below Y for any given month"). Guardrails serve as check-in points, not automatic shutdowns. When hit, they activate honest discussions about what's happening, what we're learning, what strategic byproducts we're creating, and where we see the program going. This fail-safe prevents things from reaching a critical tipping point.

By giving your leaders autonomy to lead their teams and make informed decisions, strategies get implemented with greater impact and efficiency. This empowerment extends to encouraging feedback and involving team members in the decision-making process, boosting morale and enhancing overall performance.

Encouraging Continuous Learning and Iteration

Key Point: Foster continuous learning and improvement by treating initiatives as hypotheses, setting collaborative benchmarks, and embracing an iterative approach to continuously evolve your organization.

In any sport at any level, the daily goal is to be better than you were yesterday. This means learning and improving with each practice, rep, and game - win or loss. In go-to-market strategies, continuous improvement is key. An unwavering focus on efficiency shouldn't come at the expense of developing proficiency. A program falling short doesn't mean scrapping it immediately. Instead, an iterative approach allows teams to learn from each campaign, refining strategies and processes based on real-time feedback. Each iteration provides more data points to make informed decisions on how to go faster AND better. This mindset brings the team closer to achieving their goals while building proficiency.?

Enabling this approach requires setting guardrails on investments and results, created and documented in collaboration with your team. Too often, top-down edicts lead to unrealistic projections, aggressive timelines, and unmotivated output. By defining your expectations and getting your team's thoughts and buy-in, you empower them to operate, learn, and improve - not just check boxes.

Treat each initiative as a hypothesis. Set clear benchmarks and thresholds to evaluate success and iterate based on the results. Consider these questions throughout the process:

• What are we trying to learn?
• What are we willing to invest to learn this?
• When will we re-evaluate?
• Are our timelines and expectations realistic?

This approach generates positive momentum even when things don't go as planned, and makes your organization smarter. As the great John Wooden once said, “failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”

Infuse Humanity Into Your AI Efficiency Quest

Key Point: Strategically integrate AI to enhance efficiency, while emphasizing human expertise for high-value tasks and maintaining clear communication to address concerns and drive adoption.

In basketball, reading the defense is key to making the right play. AI can provide the data, like analyzing the opponent’s tendencies, but it’s up to the players to interpret that data and make split-second decisions on the court. The same goes for AI in business—it can process information and suggest actions, but it’s the human touch that ensures those actions are aligned with strategic goals and executed with proficiency.

When done thoughtfully, AI can help speed up your processes without compromising quality. Integrate AI into workflows by identifying tasks that would benefit most from it. This involves talking to your team to detail those tasks.

While there's seemingly an endless supply of AI use cases and integrations for various tasks, avoid the shiny new tool approach, purchasing everything that seems to “make sense” and giving your team no time or space to learn and understand. Instead, rely on your team's expertise to understand where efficiencies can be gained and what technology can actually drive better performance. As a starting point, identify tasks that don't require human experience but do consume time, such as organizing information, synthesizing summaries, or performing basic QA (depending on the job).

AI's efficiency boost comes with a caveat: the real risk of job displacement. However, this technological shift offers an opportunity to elevate your team's capabilities. Assist your employees in adopting AI, while creating roles that capitalize on their unique human strengths. Rushing to cut headcount based on AI's promise can backfire, sacrificing brand integrity and institutional knowledge, amongst other things. As you navigate AI adoption, remember: leaning too heavily on efficiency at the expense of human proficiency carries severe consequences. Balance is key – use AI to enhance, not replace, your team's expertise.

From a leadership standpoint, it's easy to say these words. What's more important is providing a clear vision with specifics so your team sees it isn't just lip service and can get behind it. Lead with empathy in a time where your team is looking at an uncertain future. Put them in a position to build their skill set while helping your organization move forward.?

When integrating AI use cases into your business:

1. Don't just buy a tool and expect the team to use it. Assign a team member as the subject matter expert (SME) to lead adoption. Encourage sharing use cases and success stories, possibly through internal contests for existing tools. This harnesses diverse thinking and drives effective usage.
2. Remember, tools are only as strong as your foundations. Wearing Jordan's doesn't cover up poor dribbling, passing, or shooting skills. Tools rarely solve all problems - but good people and good processes do. Before investing in a technical solution, ask if the problem is really a tech issue, or a people and/or process issue.

Conclusion

The balance between efficiency and proficiency mirrors the delicate equilibrium of a basketball team's offense and defense. Success hinges on enhancing speed without sacrificing quality. By optimizing resource allocation, continuously improving processes, empowering your team, and strategically integrating AI, businesses can achieve sustainable growth and maintain a competitive edge.

The future belongs to those who navigate this balance skillfully, leveraging technology to amplify human proficiency and drive meaningful results. Just as a championship team brings together individual skills with team strategy, successful businesses will blend efficiency tools with human expertise to create a winning formula in today's dynamic marketplace.

Remember, the goal isn't just to play faster, but to excel while maintaining that speed. Identify where you can make calculated sacrifices, knowing that the marginal gains pale in comparison to the benefits of accelerating elsewhere. This delicate balance of efficiency and proficiency is what propels teams - whether in sports or business - to victory.

What to Do Now?

To apply the insights from this article and start balancing your team's efficiency and proficiency like a championship-caliber coach, consider these steps:

1. Assess Your Plays: Identify areas where you can increase speed without compromising quality.
2. Focus Resources: Allocate resources strategically to drive proficiency in critical areas and efficiency in routine tasks.
3. Scout for Cultural Fits: During hiring, match candidates' skills with your efficiency and proficiency needs, while clearly communicating your team culture.
4. Put Your Team in Position to Make Plays: Align roles with individual strengths and provide necessary resources and autonomy to your team leaders.
5. Talk to Your Leaders: Listen and incorporate feedback from how your team is seeing the game playout to make your strategy more dynamic.?
6. Review Game Tapes: Adopt an iterative approach, continuously refining strategies based on real-time feedback and learnings from each initiative.
7. Upgrade Your Playbook: Integrate AI effectively by identifying suitable tasks, assigning SMEs for proper adoption, and leveraging team expertise to optimize use.