Fifty-two weeks sounds like a lot. I know it does. And if you’re an owner, you might be thinking your managers are already buried. So how are they supposed to add a year-long program on top of that?
So let me show you what a week actually looks like. And then I’ll tell you why it’s a year.
What a week asks for
One, your leaders watch. It’s one video, ten to fifteen minutes, and it unlocks once a week.
Two, they read. It’s a quarter of a chapter from my book, The ELITE Leadership Blueprint. That works out to one chapter a month.
Three, they execute. Every video ends with an Execution Order. It’s one specific leadership assignment, and they run it with their actual people before the next video. It is not homework, and nobody comes off the job for it. They run it inside the work they were already doing, with the team they already have.
Four, they debrief. Every leader posts what happened in a shared thread. And once a month the leaders get in a room for thirty minutes and go through what they ran, where it worked and where it fell apart.
So the weekly ask is about fifteen minutes of watching and one real rep with real people.
Why I don’t do it in a weekend
I give keynotes, and I believe in them. A keynote can give a room the vision, and people need vision. But I’m on that stage for an hour, and the reps have to happen after I leave.
I learned that in the Teams. As a First Phase instructor, I helped put 15 classes through Hell Week. Hell Week is five and a half days, and it’s brutal. And when it’s over, those students still have months of training in front of them. Nobody becomes a SEAL in one hard week. The Navy builds that man one rep at a time, over a long time.
Leadership works the same way. It’s built through reps that compound, and compounding only works if you don’t skip.
Leadership is built through reps that compound, and compounding only works if you don't skip.
The debrief is where the learning happens
In the Teams, no operation ends without a debrief. That’s where the learning happens.
And the research agrees. In 2013, two researchers named Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli analyzed 46 samples from the research on debriefing. They found that teams and individuals who debrief perform about 25 percent better than those who don’t.
Now think about what a one-day training can’t give a leader. It can’t give them a rep with their own people the next week. And it can’t give them a debrief after that rep.
In a weekly rhythm, every leader runs it, posts it, and hears what the other leaders ran. And every leader has a swim buddy. That’s one other leader in the program who checks in with them every week and asks two questions. Did you run it? Did you post it?
What a year gives you
A year gives your leaders time to work on the skills that take time. They practice the hard conversation. They practice coaching somebody without losing them. They practice building trust, and they practice building a system and handing it off.
And they practice all of it in real seasons of your business. They do it in the busy month and in the slow month. They do it when the numbers are up and when the numbers are down.
I tell every group the same thing on day one. A year from today, there’s going to be a gap in this room. Some leaders will take fifteen minutes a week seriously, and they’ll barely recognize who they’ve become. And some will go through the motions. It’s the same program, the same videos, and the same fifteen minutes.
The year is what makes it stick. And fifteen minutes a week is what makes it possible for a busy manager to do it.
