by Mandy Green, Coaching Productivity Strategies
John Maxwell, author of many great books on leadership, talks about the Pareto Principle. The Pareto principle states that 20% of a person’s effort generates 80% of the person’s results, if you spend your time, energy, money, and personnel on the top 20 percent of your priorities.
Did you get that? Spend your time on the right projects, and your time will give you a much better investment. By identifying your top priorities and concentrating on these few things that do matter, you can unlock the enormous potential of the critical 20 percent and multiply your productivity and effectiveness as a coach. The coach’s challenge is to distinguish the right 20% from the trivial 80%.
20% of your time produces 80% of the results. Of all of the things you have to do in a day, identify which 20% of your coaching responsibilities will give you 80% of your returns. These activities could be building relationships with recruits, making phone calls to parents, sending emails to recruits, managing your current team, etc.
20% of the leaders/players on your team will be responsible for 80% of your programs success. Make a list of everybody on your team. Decide who is in your top 20%. Are you devoting enough quality time to the key 20% of your roster who determine roughly 80% of your success? Put another way, how much time are you investing in the top 20% of the athletes on your team who seem to have 80% of the influence on your team’s work ethic, commitment, confidence, chemistry, etc.?
Dan Tudor talks a lot about needing to be asked 5 times before we will buy something. The 20% of college coaches who are persistent enough to ask for the sale (commitment) at least 5 times, have an 80% close rate with recruits.
First, if you can upgrade your recruiting to get the top 20% of available physical and mental talent, you obviously vastly increase your program’s chances of success.
Second, since effective recruiting and player selection determines 80% of your success, be sure you are investing enough time in assessing talent, writing letters, making phone calls, cultivating relationships with coaches, etc.
Sit down and spend the time to find out how this principle applies to every aspect of your program. From there, you have the power to set the vital priorities and get them scheduled into your day which will mean the difference between failure, survival, and success.
The more time you spend doing the high-payoff activities, the more value you will bring to your team, program, and staff. By disciplining yourself to clearly identify your high-payoff activities, and then by filling your calendar with those things and appropriately delegating, delaying, or dropping the low-payoff activities, you can and will get more high-payoff activities done every day, reduce your stress, and increase your happiness.