Leadership Pivots

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with an encore presentation of Digging Deeper. Thanks for tuning in.

The Super Bowl, I don't know exactly when you'll see this, but the Super Bowl was this last weekend, and with it came
what I thought were some very good lessons for all leaders. And the big picture lesson here today is that leadership pivots.
And what do I mean by that? Well, the plan you lay out sometimes isn't the right plan or you find flaws, or the environment
changes and you have to do different things in order to have a winning strategy and a winning game. And so why does
leadership need to pivot? Well, because we don't always have the best plan number one, when we start out. Number two,
the environment is not static out there. Our competition, just like in football, our competition adjusts. So, we come out
with a game plan, they see that plan, and then they adjust.

Then all of a sudden, our game plan no longer works and then we have to adjust to their adjustments. And in business, it's
very much the same way. Things change. What worked for us yesterday may not work for us today, whether it's business
development pursuits or whether it's in the actual execution. One of the other things that happens is people change, and
that could be somebody leaves your organization. We saw in the Super Bowl various people get hurt, and now we have a
substitute in there. We saw at the end of the first half that the MVP quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs got tackled
again and re-injured his ankle, which was limiting him already. So, things changed. The competition adjusts, the
environment adjusts. The other thing we saw in the Super Bowl was the turf was problematic and people were losing their
footing.

So, we saw Philadelphia's players, they've showed us on TV, this pile of cleats that people had turned in, in order to put
on a longer cleat because the field was problematic. Again, leadership was pivoting. So, what did we see there in the
second half? First of all, Kansas City was down by 10 at the half. They probably could have been down by 17, but they
actually got lucky in a sense as there was a fumble and they were able to run it back for a touchdown, which even only
that really allowed that first half to be reasonably close. I mean, Philadelphia was just dominating. They just went down
the field. In fact, Kansas City only had three opportunities to have the ball in the entire first half, and they're down by 10.
And they hadn't stopped Philadelphia yet. So going into the second half, leadership had to pivot. They needed to make
some changes, and they did, particularly on offense.

Patrick Mahomes averaged only 2.3 seconds before he released the ball on each pass play in the second half. That was
the fastest release time that he had had the entire season. So, they knew they had to score every time, so they did
something different. Again, I already told you the field was bad. Right. And you saw that demonstrated if you watched the
game. Well, when a field's bad like that, people who are acting have a better chance than people who are reacting to
something. So, what you saw in the second half with Kansas City is you saw a lot of cutbacks. You may remember the little,
short touchdown pass where the flanker on one end started running around, they hiked the ball, he immediately stopped
and just turned and went the other way, and he was acting and the defense was reacting, and he ended up wide open for
an easy touchdown.

And Kansas City ran a lot of those misdirection plays. On the last touchdown pass, they had kind of the same thing. The
guy went to the middle, then went to the outside. I'm sorry, that wasn't touchdown pass. That's when they called the
holding call on the defender because he had nothing left but to grab onto his jersey, and unfortunately got caught and
called for it. So, another interesting thing, talking about leadership pivoting. So, we got to the very end of the game and
Kansas City's about to score a touchdown with about a minute and a half left. And what happens? They don't want to
score a touchdown. Right. They wanted the time to run out. So, you had a guy running for a touchdown and went down
at the one yard line uncontested in order to run the clock out. So again, where it's just natural in a team sport like that,
we got to score, score, score.

Well, leadership pivoted. They thought rather than score a touchdown there and get an extra point or maybe a two-point
conversion, they were better off getting a field goal and using up all the time. So that's what they did. Leadership pivoted
again. So, in order for leadership to pivot, coming back to your business and excellent leadership always pivots when
needed. A couple of things have to happen. First of all, for you to pivot as a leader, you have to have some humility. You
have to understand that your original thought or your original way of doing things may not work.

If you're so hardheaded that you think I'm never wrong, well, maybe you don't have the humility to pivot. Oftentimes the
pivot requires some sort of adversity against which you have to respond, and that's when leadership has to pivot because
you hit some adversity for some reason as you go there. And then I think just in a general sense, strategy is always fluid
because the environment does change. So as a leader, have enough humility to change course when you need to, always
be looking for the adversity out there because it probably requires a response. And then always be ready to be fluid.
There's always a better way of doing something and sometimes due to people, environment, everything else, things need
to change. So, keep that in mind. Excellent leadership pivots. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.