Create Success With 5 Simple Codes – How To Make Yours!

At this mornings, leadership and Entrepreneurs breakfast we listened to the experienced Ern Prentice - Australian Sports Leadership Network, who has spent over 15 years perfecting positive behaviour in sporting teams. Ern has worked with AFL (Australian Football League) teams, Soccer and Netball sporting teams on monitoring success and successful performance.

Well in Ern’s program anywhere from 6 to 9 observers are following the players and recording specific behaviour. What Ern has been able to recognize and prove is that when the majority of players follow the 5 positive and supportive states of behavior or Codes they win the game! Yes that’s right, it’s so simple but true!

Also when the players start to mirror the 5 negative and unsupportive states they don’t win the game. He has also used a scoring technique that gives each behaviour a score value, and each player gets a total score at the end of the game, to review and provide feedback.

Humm….., interesting I think, this can definitely be applied to business, and to individuals in terms of success. Here is an example of the codes players are measured by in AFL (Australian Football league):

Unsupportive leadership Codes during the game

• Undisciplined or unruly play
• Not conferring or supporting team members
• Putting self ahead of the team/failure to man/person up
• Incorrect decision making leading to errors and turnovers
• Poor body language in the field

I asked Ern why there were no minus points for the negative codes, and he said that they did not need them. He said that just by tracking the positive codes, they were able to find that any football team with over 350 points won the game. So just by monitoring the positive behaviour and tracking it for players brought about behavioural change and success with game wins!

Well l can immediately see effective leadership teams able to work with this technique and principle. Rewarding and feeding back this behaviour is up to the team. Plotting the behaviours that are appropriate for that particular team would be easy.

Often when forming project teams and regular organisational teams, we have plotted team agreements or codes of conduct. Most of these are values we suggest we subscribe to, such as … Allowing people to have talk time in meetings, or reviewing the meeting, or similar.

What would be interesting if we allowed points for this type of behaviour and ranked the whole team in effectiveness? A leader who was open to this system or a team who was self facilitating would definitely get benefits from this type of assessment and monitoring.

As a business person, and HR Executive, over many years, l have often been given Sporting analogies of success to apply to business. They don’t always fit so well with business in so much as we are not one game, but about a long term strategy, and our results are not really so immediate.  However l feel that Ern is on to something in a big way.

If we can learn from his simple 5 Codes of Behaviour and make them fit our teams or our own performance, I believe we could really shift performance.

Let’s take a leaf out of the sports book, and look at performance and success in this simplicity and perhaps summarise the 5 key Codes for our own success today. We then need to set the score value, and measure some of the appropriate codes for ourselves. We will then be able to find our own 350 benchmark when we achieve success.

All we need to do then, is have some self monitoring, or feedback mechanism. I just love it!

Thanks Ern for this simplicity and inspiration.

Here’s to your game in life and your codes of success!

Helena Steel  - Careerguru.com.au