The Keys to Prepping for the Big Game

Cross the ‘blue line’ to boost team culture and performance 

Feb. 20 is National Leadership Day, a day set aside to recognize the impact that leaders make in people’s lives as they seek to develop themselves and others. How can you as a business leader keep your team focused and motivated at a time when distractions — from workplace notifications to social media — disrupt attention and group dynamics?

Some of the latest research shows that nearly half of all employees are distracted at least once every 30 minutes, and almost a third report being distracted at least once every 15 minutes by a workplace notification. That means employees working 8-hour days could be experiencing over 160 distractions from their workplace digital tools each week — before counting personal texts, social media, and emails.

Few of us are immune to the distractions. In the first 20 minutes of the time I set aside to write this, I checked texts on my phone three times. Then I left my phone in another room, walked back into my office and focused.

Across 21 years as a player and coach at Penn State, there was a constant lesson we got from Coach Joe Paterno — a way to focus in high-pressure situations. It was rooted in preparation. The old saying is practice makes perfect, as though just punching the clock on practice time will make you better.

It’s a lot more complex than that. Joe Paterno used to say “perfect practice makes perfect.” And yet he allowed that while perfection may always be elusive, the pursuit of it must not be. The great Vince Lombardi said it this way: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

When the moment arrives to compete on the biggest stage, when the glare of the lights is brightest, how do you get ready? In the biggest contests or moments in any business, most of the time the games are lost by critical mistakes, rather than won by a play or two.

There is one sure way that we learned about practice preparation and it carried our teams through big wins to secure undefeated seasons, national championships, and Big Ten Championships.

It was symbolized by THE BLUE LINE painted on the grass where we stepped onto the practice field.

The Blue Line was a physical reminder to focus on our best preparation every time we practiced. Some may call it compartmentalization, or being in the moment, or a similar Zen concept. While attending Teleos Leadership Institute in Philadelphia, we spent a lot of time learning to be present.

And in those times, I kept finding myself resorting to focusing on that Blue Line.

The Blue Line we crossed on the practice field was there to trigger our focus individually and in the collective. Everyone, coaches and players alike, came to practice with a set of off-the-field baggage. But we had to leave it behind for those two hours or so. We’d tell our team: “On this field you can’t do anything about the test you have coming up, or a relative who may be ill, or problems in a relationship. On this field and in this moment the only thing you can do is become a better football player, or do the best job you can as a coach.”

In a team endeavor the results are rooted in a number of people being in the right place at the right time doing the right things and reacting to kinetic challenges. Focusing on details in practice is vital. That is the only way to form the habits that become instinctive in pressure-packed times.

On a team, this kind of focus starts with the coach; in business, it starts with the CEO and every leader in the organization.

And when the stakes get higher you know it. In a press conference where you are used to seeing 40 reporters, now it’s 100. Instead of friendly banter with the familiar local media, you are fielding questions from national media that may have a different agenda. I’ve been in a taped interview with a national CBS reporter who pressed repeatedly looking for the answer he wanted.

He was doing his job, and it required me to do my job.

In a taped interview if you get asked 10 questions they may only use the answers from three. If you nail seven of ten answers it’s like going 0 for 3, if you have eight great answers it will look like you went 1 for 3. You get the point — one bad answer can destroy nine great answers. It takes preparation in every aspect of being a leader.

Meanwhile, you’re trying to coach your team to get ready on and off the field for the biggest game of their careers. You have to sit them down before they go into those media environments and prep like you would before a big game.

And then comes game time. As a coach, you face the continual ebb and flow of momentum, emotion, and different situations. Each play’s result sets up a new reality before the next play call. And you have roughly 15 to 20 seconds to make the decision, communicate it to your players and have them understand it, see what the opponent is doing, execute a play, and react at full speed.

Whether you’re a coach before a big game or a CEO doing an earnings report before your board of directors, you have to prepare at every phase.

As those pressures on and off the field magnify, the way to deal with that as a coach is to be able to compartmentalize. It’s imperative not only for your mental health, but also when it comes to building a supportive environment — one that supports well-being and guards against burnout. The lesson was to construct mental blue lines everywhere. When a player stepped into a classroom we wanted them to imagine a blue line — to be mentally immersed in that moment of learning. When we went home as coaches, the challenge was to cross a blue line and be there physically and mentally for our families.

It all circled back to that painted blue line: a physical manifestation of the boundary between focus and everything else. Those moments across that blue line are where preparation as individuals dependent on one another fuels the performance level needed for championship success.

Written by Jay Paterno.
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