Winning the pregame is a necessary step in positioning a team to win the actual game. Pregames are won through routines. Behind every great coach, there is a pregame routine. The same goes for our leadership world. “Straight line, look straight ahead, helmets in your right hand, not a word.” That was how our pregame routine started when I coached football. That is when the switch flipped from unstructured to structured, from a regular day to game day. We headed over to the pregame certification sixty-five minutes before game time. Once we completed the process, we walked over to our warmup area. Upon arrival, we stretched the same

Have a dream, plant the flag, go! Planting the flag is a necessary step in making a dream a reality. Too often we have dreams, but never get traction. We spin our wheels in a mud pit of excuses. Then we get stuck, and go nowhere. My writing time is on Sunday evenings. When I positioned myself at the laptop, fully prepared to go in a completely different direction, it hit me. Exactly one year ago today I sat down to write the very first Leadership and Main post. It is easy to look back fifty-two posts later and forget the spinning of my own wheels that almost

If I disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?  Pretty deep question, right? This is the most important question you can ask yourself to measure your essentialness as a leader.  Actually, probably as a human being.  It may seem like oversimplification, but it is such a critically important one. This is a question that should burden us and stir our emotions daily. I first heard this in the context of how it applies to a civic club.  If the club disappeared tomorrow would the community know?  In this particular case, the answer was no.  The community would not have noticed, the organization was not making an impact in the lives

You may have to look closely, but even a superhero’s cape gets tattered. A quick Google search of the word tattered produces the result, “old and torn; in poor condition.” Synonyms include worn, ragged, run down, and frayed. In the movies, a cape can be an identifying mark of a superhero. It can represent one of many superpowers such as the ability to fly. Some of the most legendary superheroes of all time wore capes. Batman, Super Man, and Wonder Woman just to name a few (look…I found a couple of pictures of Wonder Woman wearing a cape, plus she can fly, just run with it). Great leaders

We can easily underestimate the power of stories in leadership.  We all have a story, they just read differently. Our stories are written in different fonts, sentence structures, and lengths. Some are written in blogs, told in front of audiences, or shared over a campfire. Our stories are one of the most powerful tools we have in connecting with another human being. My first job was at Media Play. Media Play was a retail store with a computer section, CD section (compact disk for the younger readers), toy section, and a book section. They no longer exist, and I think I know why.  Their hiring practices were highly