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Leadership Lessons from a Poker Ride

Guest post by: Rebel Brown

Article Overview: What brings success is delivering a quality product or service.

Leadership Lessons from a Poker Ride

Last week I headed out to Lake San Antonio, California, for the Monterey Bay Equestrians annual charity Poker Ride. Each year, over 200 horses and their two-legged friends show up for a weekend of fabulous riding, poker, raffles, feasting and just plain fun! The money collected goes to support equestrian projects in the Bay Area. From Friday night through Sunday morning a small team feeds around 200 meals twice a day out of a remote camp kitchen. Another team packages and sets up a prize corral, with over 200 prizes for the two nights of Raffles and Poker. Another team handles registration and helps guests with their every need. The ride takes months to plan, and Wednesday afternoon found nine of us unloading two full trailers of food and supplies. It is a huge effort that makes me shake my head every year.

It's some of the best team work I've ever seen. There are no discussions of the variety of options available as to how dinner should proceed, there are no long drawn out meetings where everyone gets a chance to vote. There is simply a manager (two of them actually) and followers. Followers are assigned tasks and they act accordingly. Sure, there are discussions on what the ultimate goals are; what the meal will look like, how the prizes will be displayed. And there is a lot of fun along the way.

But the bottom line is everyone knows they're part of a bigger team working toward a common goal - raising money for our horse friends. There's no gnashing of teeth over who gets to do what, who gets to lead. There are no power plays, no infighting or politics.

There is simply old-fashioned team work. Everyone is focused on the same goal, everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get to that goal and everyone leaves their egos at the door. The result is a finely oiled machine that simply gets things done. A lot done. I have never seen so much accomplished in such a short period of time.

Guests go home happy, workers go home exhausted and everyone knows it was a weekend well-spent, all for the love and funding of our fabulous equine friends.

If a passion for horses can create such a powerful sense of team-work once a year, think what a passion for our businesses could do for our teams, every day of the year.

If we all focused solely on the goal of our business, with a passion that overwhelmed our professional agendas - just imagine how strong our teams could become. Better yet, imagine how much time we would save as we all focused on accomplishing our business goals rather than balancing the diversity of teams.

Sometimes I think we forget our goals. We get focused on who gets to do what, where we are in the team. As leaders we worry about how everyone feels about the team. A happy team becomes the goal. This weekend I remembered that a happy team is a great thing, but it won't make our businesses successful.

What brings success is delivering a quality product or service. That's ultimately what teamwork is all about and that's exactly what I saw demonstrated this weekend. People checked their egos at the door to focus on a common goal.

So - my question for leaders today is, " How can we bring that same sense of selfless teamwork to our businesses, so that we focus on the ultimate goal?"

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Article Tags: business strategy, Leadership lessons, quality product, service leadership



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