Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Leadership Playbook – Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Teams - Nathan Jamail (Gotham Books)

In probably one of the most seminal, most utilized and often quoted business books of all time, Good To Great, author Jim Collins gave us the theory of the bus and the importance of having the right people in the right seats. Anybody who has ever run a business knows this analogy is right on; but the unanswered, truly hard part is how you go about getting those right people.

When it comes to building a truly great organization, a team, going the free agent route and hiring on proven, often high priced talent is not always an option and quite frankly doesn’t always work. Playing the revolving door game of hiring people that you think will be a good fit isn’t always a guarantee of success and talent roulette can be expensive and cause other issues. So rather than managing and massaging to build your team what’s a better choice? How about coaching that talent to become a winning team?


That is the theory bestselling author, business coach and motivational speaker Nathan Jamail’s latest, The Leadership Playbook – Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Teams. Jamail goes much deeper than just wrapping common sense business principles in a whole bunch of sports analogies and clichés; he offers up practical principles and backs them up with actionable steps that you can plug into your business today.

Jamail may ruffle a few feathers with his direct approach to handling personnel issues and attitudes that probably won’t win him many friends down in HR, but he’s right on when it comes to the assessing the damage that can be done both internally to your employees and externally to your customers if you don’t deal with these problem children issues head on.

Superstar talent is not born; Jamail preaches with the fervor of a Texas high school football coach that it’s nurtured, developed, honed through practice and heck yeah I’ll say it, its coached to greatness! He also reminds us that expectations are set, outcomes are measured and accountability has to be part of the mix.