Horse Show At The Ohio State Fair
Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.
One of my favorites, that falls near my birthday, the teams are spectacular. Whether working teams, great Clydedales or Percherons, or show teams pulling decorative but pretty much useless wagons, preparation is of the essence.
This combing, brushing, and washing is all some form of grooming (a now defunct English job left over from the downfall of great estates).
And, so it is in business. Show teams, working teams, leadership teams - all require grooming to both look and perform at their best and highest levels.
Amex's OPEN Forum, a few months ago, featured the practices of team grooming by business owners. Not that they all groom alike, but they all groom teams.
One builds rock-solid succession plans, with mentorship, functional training, and managerial training. Leaders, it turns out, have lasting impact for good; managers have lasting impact with negative consequences. Managers are not necessarily leaders, but they have, if good, choices to make about leadership and its attributes.
Leaders are appropriately trained and conditioned to put teams first, the enterprise second, and themselves last.
Building high-performing teams begins with hiring the best and the brightest. They succeed or fail as team members, and avoid the "manager" trap.
Developing leaders and teams is born out of a commitment to see group and individual growth and achievement. Karma remains karma, and will come back, for good or ill, to reward or punish you.
Win, lose, or tie; developing the rising generation, which may have a short-term imperative, will come back with lifelong colleagues, high trust, obvious self-sacrifice - and exponential growth and success.