Stick The Landing
I love going to Broncos games. Yes, I go for the football, but I also appreciate all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the event. One of my favorite traditions is watching the skydivers parachute into the stadium before the game. At a game a couple of weeks ago, they even made a special appearance during halftime, landing on the field in the dark!
The team is called Thunderstorm, and they're the only skydiving team in the NFL. They jump from thousands of feet above the stadium, navigating their way down to the field and landing with incredible precision. It's amazing to watch, especially when you consider the number of variables they have to account for along the way.
What fascinates me is that they know exactly where they want to land before they ever jump out of the plane. But they can't simply point themselves toward that spot and hope for the best. They have to continually assess their position, account for changing conditions, and make small adjustments throughout the descent. I think there's an important leadership lesson in that.
Watching the Denver Broncos Parachute Team Thunderstorm in action!
We spend a lot of time establishing goals, creating strategic plans, and identifying where we want our organizations to go. But how clearly have we defined what success actually looks like? And how often are we evaluating whether we're headed in the right direction?
Years ago at Footers, we set out to create a great place to work. It was something we genuinely believed in, but what did that actually mean? How would we know if we were succeeding?
We floundered a little bit until we started getting more specific about what we wanted to accomplish and how we would measure our progress. We looked at employee turnover, productivity, and how happy our team members were at work. We also became more intentional about the things we believed would influence those results: creating opportunities to have fun, helping people find purpose in their work, and building stronger relationships among our team.
Having a clearer target helped us focus our efforts and make adjustments along the way. We could better understand what was working, where we were falling short, and what we needed to do differently.
As leaders, it's easy to get caught up in all the things we're doing and lose sight of whether they're actually moving us closer to where we want to go. And sometimes we become so focused on executing the original plan that we forget to look up and see if we're still on course.
Watching those skydivers reminds me that the clearer we are about where we want to land, the better we can make the adjustments necessary to get there.
So this week, I encourage you to ask yourself:
Do I have a clear picture of where I'm trying to land?
And am I paying enough attention to my progress to know if I'm headed in the right direction?
