Your running a small business which happens to be a sports league. You need people to help you … office staff, field staff, refs, umps, scorekeepers, maybe even coaches and volunteers.
People are People.
People are incredibly complex, and also incredibly simple.
The human brain craves a few things universally:
1) Completion
2) Achievement / Goals
3) Recognition
People like to finish stuff, to cross stuff off their list. People like to get stuff done. Whether they are working on the right stuff or not is your call, but everyone likes to get stuff done … finish a project, finish a paper (blog post), sign a deal, celebrate completion.
Getting something done can be a goal, or it can be one piece of a larger goal. I want to build a business. Getting this deal done with this new field or facility is completion, and gets me moving towards my larger goal of wanting to capture 300K in revenue this year for my awesome new co-rec sports league.
And then of course comes recognition…. which is what we will spend most of our time focusing on for right now.
Everyone likes a gold star, and award, or at least a nice job. Even the most humble CEO’s still like a gold star. They don’t ask for it, but they will never say no.
People gravitate towards the simplest recognitions, which are often milestones. You have a 1 year anniversary, you refereed or umpired your 200th game, you closed your 100th client … we gravitative towards big round numbers and give someone a gold watch for the 30th year they work for a company (hopefully).
We all like and gravitate towards the most common milestone of all …
Your Birthday.
Congrats … you made it another year from your origin date – your birth! – now lets eat some cake and maybe dance or have a drink. Maybe we will even surprise you and PRETEND like we forgot this milestone … only to have a bunch of your close out of town friends jump up from behind the couch to help you celebrate your milestone.
When your friends fly in from out of town, this is another form of recognition, and because we like round numbers, you get way more recognition … and way more stress – especially if you are the party planner …. when its a big round Birthday milestone – 30th, 40th 50th … you get the idea.
I grew up watching some weatherman celebrate 100 year milestones every day on the Today Show, sponsored by a jelly company. Pretty nice recognition … and a pretty big round number… 100 years.
The thing about milestones … is two fold. They are normally kind of driven by formulas – there might be some outside intervention by the person who throws you that kickass surprise 40th birthday party… but the party organizer isn’t dragging you across the finish line – That’s life and time and momentum.
The earth spins around the sun and every 365 days you drink for free and get to eat free cake – hopefully an ice cream cake – if you are lucky.
There is no outside judge deciding whether you earned that cake, or whether all of your days were good, or decent, or valuable, or productive.
What did you do in those 365 days ? Did you sit around and play video games? Did you go around the neighborhood saving lost cats ? Did you write a silly blog post on a SAAS Software Website for co-ed sports leagues ?
No one really cares – You made it another year – come get your gifts and your cake and also come up with a wish and blow out these candles in front of everyone … no pressure …
If you referee your 200th game that’s freaking awesome. You should get recognition … since many people will never get that far….
but …. did you actually do a good job as a referee? Did you defuse conflict … or did you create more of it?
Did you help and teach, or did you ignore and strong arm every call: “no more arguing or that’s a penalty for you.”
The players might care, but the milestone doesn’t – Its a formula…. its math … and its GOOD math…. its math worth tracking and spending time on.
You should have milestones for your employees, for your staff, and even for your customers.
You should celebrate when a captain signs up their 10th team, or their 50th team. That’s also freaking awesome, and also very rare.
Last year we had two captains in two different cities hit 100 teams captained across several sports … that’s pretty awesome!
Some businesses might not have that opportunity.
They might simplify milestones down to something much easier …
Here is a punch card – When you buy 10 coffee’s I will give you the next coffee for free – Completion, Achievement, and recognition all wrapped up into one … assuming you don’t lose the damn punch card.
Please don’t lose the card …
<Side note – I actually had a friend who ran a sports league who would do this for teams, sign up 10 teams and your 11th team is free. I’m not sure how it ever worked out, but that could be a bridge too far. Yes to free coffee, maybe no to a free full kickball team. >
So here’s the main issue. Because milestone math is so necessary and can be so valuable, people often spool this logic out and then use it everywhere in your sports league small business, and with your most important refs and umps and field staff.
They treat milestone math as the only way to get promoted, to get into a more important and valuable position, or to “Qualify” for something.
Back in the day you used to need 30 hours of driving before you could even apply for a learners permit. Pilots need a certain amount of hours in a simulator in order to keep advancing and even get to a real plane.
So naturally your referee should need to hit 100 hours to become a supervisor, and 300 hours to become a trainer? They should have to put in a “minimum” amount of hours on the field, before they start helping out in your office …
Right ?
Nope … and also… never.
You don’t want to use milestones when it comes to making decisions on people who are going to help your business grow and thrive – you don’t want to be stuck using math … you want to use your gut and your eyes to make decisions on MERIT not on milestones.
Take sports out of it. If you have someone who is a 10x better barista at your coffee shop then everyone else, and you notice this and see this over and over again with your own eyes, because you are (hopefully) in your own coffee shop paying attention…. watching them make coffee – watching them interact with customers when there is a problem with an order – seeing how they teach and communicate with new staff members on their first few shifts …. you might quickly decide that this is the person you want to be in charge of managing and training in every other new barista you have work at your coffee shop.
Well how many hours have they worked so far ?
The answer is: it doesn’t freaking matter.
The issue is … can that barista train and teach.
The issue is actually not just are they an amazing barista, because a lot of awesome refs and umps and baristas are good or great at doing the job and actually bad at communicating with other refs and umps and really bad at teaching.
This is a fairly normal problem for most people … most people have a paradox, where the more experience they get, the HARDER It is to teach and educate brand new people.
They know everything and then they simply assume other should know it too, and more importantly they FORGET was it was like when they didn’t actually know anything. So they get frustrated and impatient when something that seems obvious to them … because they are so experienced and so good … is not obvious to the new person.
They will jump in at a small mistake, take over a situation, and not let a new person make a mistake, or push through an issue on their own.
Mistakes are lessons.
They will often teach by osmosis … hang around and watch me do this thing I am really good and experienced at, and then you too will be really good at it.
That’s not how teaching works. That’s not how life works.
This is the teachers paradox: who is the best person to teach and educate all your new refs and umps? Because there will ALWAYS be new refs and umps and field staff when you run a sports league …
Well its the person who has worked for you the most right? The most games. Joe has 1k games and John has 200 games, so Joe is your head trainer … everyone who starts their first shift should work with Joe … right ? right ????
Probably not …
Joe has the milestone of 1k games … so they get the new refs, the new umps, or the new baristas.
Joe is often not your best intro to your company for new staff, or your best trainer, because Joe has been doing things for so long … 1 thousand hours!! … that he has all kind of weird habits and quirks that he gets away with that a new ref or ump should never do …. and if they do them to start … they might end up failing.
oe THINKS he is a good trainer – because he has 1k hours – but he really just says “watch and learn dude” and then goes about his weird quicky habits that really don’t match up with any videos or manuals you have provided.
Most importantly, Joe can’t remember what it was like when he didn’t know how to umpire, so when he is actually teaching – or trying to teach – he focuses on weird outliers and crazy stories that he has accumulated over the last 8 years, and not on the core habits and systems a rookie ref needs to survive.
Joe gives generic feedback like “the new trainee was nice and started to pick things up but needs more work” and doesn’t give any detail like “the new trainee got the score wrong twice in the 6th inning, and got the outs wrong 3 times in the seventh” –
BTW the new trainee got these scoreboard info pieces wrong because Joe wasn’t emphasizing the right way to build these habits … because he ALREADY built these habits long ago. It’s second nature to Joe on how to keep score and innings and outs, but he doesn’t know how to teach that to someone new, because he just does it and assumes everyone can do it too … instead he spends time worrying about strange ideas that might crop up once a week or once a month (edge cases), instead of things that crop up every play and every inning.
So if you find a person who is a great worker, and a great teacher, and a great communicator, and doesn’t fall into these normal traps, you need to get them in the right spot as fast as possible based on their merit and not based on their math or their milestones.
You don’t need to follow math when it comes to a superstar that can change the future of your coffee shop, ice cream parlor, or co-rec sports league.
When you are dealing with people that are multipliers, realize that the only math that matters is that they can do the work of 2 or 3 people … they can be a barista, and a manager, and a trainer … the hours spent on the job – the hours spent at YOUR job or YOUR business probably don’t matter, because that person probably has something in their background or origin story that makes them supremely unique –
Maybe they only have 30 hours with YOU, but they have 100’s of hours as a coach or tutor or teacher or volunteer or dealing with high pressure situations. Maybe their family and their background and origin story has more experience with the job you have for them then any other training video or manual you could ever provide.
Said a different way … your small business is normally not a democracy.
Sure you should listen to your employees and your staff members. You should also listen to your customers. But you also don’t want your small business to be run like a government agency or a university, where you need a set amount of hours for tenure or a promotion.
And you also want to avoid just going along with the vote of the crowd … a poll the audience situation … especially for a sports league. Sometimes the right rule change to make your league more accessible or more fair or even more safe will be met by huge opposition, normally by the teams who always win and dominate and like things just the way they are right now.
A democracy says Joe is the most qualified candidate to be the head trainer, because he has earned it … he put the hours in…. the most hours.
A meritocracy says … every time I send someone to Joe, I have to retrain them, because Joe didn’t teach them the basics correctly.
This is not because Joe is a bad guy, or dumb, or trying to wreck things, but rather because the basics come so naturally to Joe he doesn’t even think about them anymore … the teachers paradox.
You want Milestones AND you want merit. Milestones are important, big round numbers are important, anniversaries are important and birthdays are important.
But you also want to trust your eyes and your ears, and when you see natural talent, when you see a multiplier in action, don’t wait to see what else they can do, give them a chance based on their merit, and not just based on the math …