HOW TO BECOME THE MOST VALUABLE PLAYER ON YOUR TEAM

All the major sports leagues celebrate their best players. But what if there were a most valuable player award for your team? Would you take home the prize?

Being the owner of my school - AGN Schools Consultoria em Idiomas e Traduções - I established different awards for individuals. The winners received public recognition, banners, trophies, and prizes. I love giving these awards. Without the contributions of these valuable team members, my company would have made measurably less progress in achieving our mission. Instead, I achieved more as a directly result of their efforts - it's good to say that I've never had any advertising campaign, and in 11 years I have already opened 3 branches in 3 major cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e Brasília), just the "mouth to mouth".

After all these years leading my team, I do know what works for companies, nonprofits, small organizations, ministries, and creative collectives looking to make a difference.

Let’s be clear about one thing up front: It’s not about being a hotshot. We’ve all been around people with tons of talent who were a liability to the group. Talent is never enough.

São Paulo Team

Here are seven tips for becoming the most valuable player on your team - even if you don’t think you’re the most talented member:

1- Play till the whistle blows - Don’t walk off the field in the game. Even if you’re behind - especially if you’re behind - you can make a winning contribution. But you’ll never do it if you quit early.

2- Practice good communication - For me that all comes down to clarity, responsiveness, and frequency. Be clear, don’t bottleneck information, and keep everyone who needs to know in the know as often as they need to know it.

3- Work hard - More accurately, work harder than you think you need to. Doing the minimum will win no points with people who are putting in extra effort. If you have more to give, do it.

4- Share your best - If you want to serve your team members, don’t hold back. Creativity, talent, learning, insight - they can make all the difference in the final outcome, so share your best stuff.

Rio de Janeiro Team

5- Own your mistakes - Responsibility is the mark of a strong team player. If there’s a problem and it’s yours, own it. Accountability frees people to work on the problem, not fester about the one who created it.

6- Affirm others - Team spirit is critical for victory, and everyone on the team is responsible to improve the mood if possible. Catch others doing good work and call them out.

7- Be positive - By its very nature, cynicism kills teamwork. Unlike constructive criticism, it’s defensive and self-indulgent. It’s designed to protect the cynic at the expense of everyone else. A positive attitude about problems is the best way to help the team get past them.

Michael Jordan said "talent might win games, but it takes teamwork to win championships". You may not have any control over the level of your talent, but you have a lot of control over your character and how you interact with your team.

To achieve its goals, a team needs members who give their all, give their best, and play to win.

Brasília Team

HOW TO REFRAME YOUR FEAR AND LET IT WORK FOR YOU

Do you ever get uneasy, or even afraid, when you’re close to achieving something big in your life? I do!

I began estimating the results for my latest campaign based on those early results and didn’t like where things were going. I started messaging members of the team, asking questions, reworking our strategy, and adjusting our tactics. Almost immediately, the results began to improve.

The truth is, I feel profound unease every time I do something important. But I don’t let that stop or slow me down. I recognize it for what it is - a normal part of the process. When I do that, I’m free to get past it. How?

1- When the feeling of fear first comes, I experience it down deep, like it’s actually part of me. But it’s not. And when I take the feeling from an internal, subjective experience to an external, objective fact, I can look at it, evaluate it, and put it into perspective.

2- Reframe the feeling. I’ve given hundreds of speeches, but whenever I prepare to go on stage, I experience some level of fear. After years of practice, however, I’ve trained myself to process that feeling differently. When I begin to feel anxious, I tell myself, "my body is just preparing itself for peak performance: I’m amped, alert, and ready for action".

By reframing my emotion, I can turn what’s otherwise debilitating into something motivating. If you ever freeze, seize, or cease to be your normally confident self in the midst of something major, I bet you’re wrestling the same enemy. The key is recognizing it for what it is and then using it to your advantage.

Whenever we have the potential to do something important or extraordinary, we’ll be tempted to stay inside our comfort zone. But the truth is we never do anything of real significance in our comfort zone. The base jumper who listens to his fears is just another hiker who walks down the mountain.

It’s when we’re stretched, face our fears, and reframe them that we can reach out and touch greatness.

What could happen in your life if you were brave in that one decisive moment when the fear made you want to quit? 

THE POWER OF THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

It’s easy for me to overdo things. I know, shocker. What can I say? I like getting things done. But the problem is that when I overdo, I underperform. We need to get to the bare essential of the bare essential.

For people driven to achieve, it’s a common trap. Even if we pare things down to the essentials, we can plow so deep into those that we’re just wasting our efforts, even while we think we’re making headway.

Instead of being satisfied with an effective level of engagement, we go over the top. It might be exciting at first, but it’s not sustainable and will actually set us back.

I’m all for playing full out, but if you play full out on everything at all times, you’ll just burn out. - or lose heart.

• We want to boost sales but wear out our audience.
• We want to lose weight but overdo it at the gym.
• We want to build our platforms but flame out from overposting.
• We want to improve our pace but get injured from overtraining.

So we quit, and I’m sure we can all think of other examples from our lives where we’ve done that. All our productivity was really counter productivity. We need to get to the bare essential of the bare essential.

In the book The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss uses the concept of the minimum effective dose, the MED. He defines it as “the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome.”

He applies the MED primarily to fitness, but it’s a useful concept in a lot of other areas. It’s a good way to fight back the temptation to overdo something. "Anything beyond the MED is wasteful,” he says, offering this example:

"To boil water, the MED is 212oF (100oC) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive".

It’s a good example because we’ve all boiled water. We know what the minimum effective dose looks like and how pointless it is to try for more.

The problem is that we also know at exactly what temperature water boils. Our work, fitness, and other areas of life don’t have set levels so we have to experiment to find them. But it’s worth it.

I used to recommend blogging five times a week. For some time now I’ve blogged once or twice a week and have seen the same level of reader growth. By cutting back the frequency I freed myself up to do other things.

Your MED is probably different than mine. But your MED might also be less than what you’re doing right now. Wouldn’t you like to save that time and energy for something else? To make progress on the things that matter most, we can’t afford losing ground by trying to do too much, even if we’re trying to do the right things.

What’s one activity you could reduce by half and still get the desired results?

FOUR REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP TACTICS

When we think of leaders from America’s revolutionary era, our minds jump to military commanders like George Washington, political organizers like Samuel Adams, and rousing orators like Patrick Henry. In the hierarchy of the Revolution, these men stand atop the loftiest rungs. For good reason!

These men accomplished amazing feats against incredible odds. But they could not have done it alone. Like executives in a successful company, they required the service and sacrifice of others to achieve their goals. They required effective lieutenants, like Paul Revere.

Everyone knows Revere for his famous ride. Most are, however, unaware of the vital “midlevel” leadership roles and functions that he played in the buildup to Independence. In researching his life for The Revolutionary Paul Revere, I found four tactics that made Revere indispensable to leaders revolutionary efforts - tactics that can also make you indispensable in your organization.

1. Take the Initiative

Revere was a blue collar guy, an artisan. Unlike other revolutionary leaders like John Adams or John Hancock, he received a minimal education and was entitled to none of life’s higher stations in colonial Boston, his hometown. That didn’t stop him from serving the cause. He led from where he was.

A goldsmith by trade, Revere led where he was able. One example: During the British military occupation of Boston following the Tea Party, who helped to organize a spy ring of workaday patriots to keep tabs on the redcoats and their commanders? None other than Revere - repairman of silverware by day, cloak-and-dagger coordinator by night.

Anyone can fill time and work a to-do list. Taking the initiative to lead is what sets apart someone truly valuable to an organization.

2. Leverage Your Strengths

Everyone brings unique talents to their situations, because everyone’s unique. The trick is in leveraging those strengths. Revere was a sociable fellow; he joined several different local clubs and associations and could regularly be found in the taproom of the Salutation or Green Dragon taverns. Connectedness was one of Revere’s strengths. So he used it.

Historian David Hackett Fischer sorted the membership lists of seven different Boston political groups and associations. He found 255 members in all, of whom 94.1 percent were in just one or two groups. And at the other end of the spectrum? Only Revere and his friend Joseph Warren belonged to more than four groups - in fact, each was a member of five different groups. Revere’s network made him useful as someone who could link disparate revolutionary parties, and his connectedness applied in other areas as well, including his role as an express rider.

Whatever your unique strengths, leveraging them in a leadership capacity increases your worth to your organization, especially if you excel at the third tactic.

3. Be Reliable

When Sam Adams needed someone to send word to New York that Boston patriots had just dumped several hundred crates of tea in Boston Harbor, he sent Revere, who was also one of the likely participants in the destruction of the tea.

That was 1773. He served as an express rider through start of the war in 1775. In one of countless messages Revere carried to New York during this period, Boston patriot Thomas Young referred to Revere as “Steady, vigorous, sensible, and persevering.” Whether it was riding express or printing money or casting cannons or even figuring out how to manufacture gunpowder, Revere was tapped time and again because patriot higher-ups could count on him to get the job done, whatever it was and even if he’d never done it before, which oftentimes he had not.

That last fact highlights Revere’s strength at creative problem solving, something he reliably leveraged every day. It’s also one area that every leader at any level in an organization should cultivate.

4. Cultivate Creativity

Human creativity is life’s only truly renewable resource. The more you use it, the more you get. In his business life, Revere was constantly creating and developing new methods, fresh approaches, and ingenious applications. He transferred that facility into the patriot movement. Whether it was unknotting technological problems for the patriots or coordinating communications, Revere reaffirmed his value at every turn.

Take the ride for which he’s famous. Revere realized that if the British were to seize the powder stores at Concord, they might try to lock down Boston to prevent any word about the assault from spreading. Revere’s job was to spread the news, so coming home through Charlestown several days before his fabled ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, he contrived the one-and-two lamp signal from North Church tower. That way if he were unable to get back to Charlestown, the patriots there could still get the news and spread the alarm.

Revere’s fears proved true. When the Brits did move, they seized almost every boat in town and placed sentries along the roads. Revere was able to get out by one of the few undiscovered boats, but the people in Charlestown already knew about the troops when Revere arrived because he’d charged someone with hanging the lights in the tower. The solution worked.

If it’s true that most of a leader’s job involves problem solving, then one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to follow Revere and cultivate creativity in the endeavor.

Does this approach to leadership inspire you as you think about your unique position and opportunities?