Lead In 30 Podcast

The 12 Day Performance Test: Lessons from College Football

• Russ Hill

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You get only 12 days. That's it. We're going to evaluate whether you stay or get fired on how you perform in those 12 days. 

In this episode, Lone Rock Leadership co-founder Russ Hill compares college football coaches to modern day managers. Some organizations reflect winning universities and some look and operate like losers. 

Some of what Russ covers:

• performance as the true end, not engagement
• the twelve-games vs four-quarters mindset
• moving fast on underperformance with clear lifelines
• investing in systems before raising expectations
• customer proximity and market trend awareness
• building feedback loops that drive behavior change
• making metrics visible and acting on misses
• recruiting and retaining talent with a trophy standard

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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!



SPEAKER_01:

They're being fired left and right. The coaching carousel fully spinning right now. And the reality is that's what the modern competitive innovative growing organization looks like. Yeah, it can be brutal, but the reality is you gotta perform. Not last season, right now. Let's talk about it.

SPEAKER_02:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_00:

It's time to end the confusion. Get the new book by the founders of Lone Rock Leadership. See why executives at Lockheed Martin, Signa, Teva, Chili's, and so many other companies are praising Deliver. Why some leaders get results and most don't. You can download the first chapter right now and request two free copies shipped to you at LoneRock.io.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I hope you will take us up on that offer. Go to Lone Rock.io, into your name, email address, basic stuff. We're not going to spam you. That's not the kind of company we are. Can't stand organizations that do that. That's not us. But what we will do is give you the first chapter of the book to download for free, and we'll ship you two free physical copies. They're published now. The uh the publisher, it's busy time of the year at the time we're publishing the book and at the time of recording this episode. So all books are taking a little bit longer to get to you, but we'll get it to you as fast as we can. We've got, I think our initial order was for 300 copies for those of you that have already um asked for the uh the physical copy to be sent to you. And so they're coming your way. Get take advantage of that offer. Go to Lone Rock.io, get a physical copy of the book for free. We'll ship it to you. You get the first chapter, you can download it right now. The name of the book is Deliver, why some leaders get results, but and most don't. And it is um the proudest I've ever been of anything we've ever put out. That book, it's not perfect, nothing ever is. You get to a point where you gotta just ship. And so we got to that point, but I am I'm so proud of the impact that that book's gonna have in so many lives and in so many careers. I'm super, super proud of what our team put together. Okay, welcome into the Lead in 30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you a framework, an experience, a story, uh, a model, a best practice for you to consider implementing in the way that you lead others. I'm Russ Hill. I make my living coaching consulting senior executive teams. I'm one of the co-founders of Lone Rock Leadership, which is an executive consulting company. We work with the uh the the either the you know, like the business unit leadership team, the the C-suite leadership team, whatever it might be in your organization. We we do ongoing work. Typically that looks like a year-long contract, and uh we're on site multiple times. We're doing virtual meetings, all that stuff. Anyway, find out about the executive consulting work at lone rock.io, and then we've got the leadership training company, which uh has has off-the-shelf solutions. We've got this brand new masterclass we're introducing. The first one's gonna be held in January 2026. We're going on a 10 city tour, and um and and and we're also doing it virtually. You can sign up at Lone Rock.io. We're we're putting out tons of information. Like you can absolutely take advantage of all this stuff, like this podcast that we do, the videos, all the stuff, all the posts I make on LinkedIn, all this content we're getting you uh for free. And it's focused on these core four areas where most organizations struggle. And then if you want more help, if you want us to guide you, if you want part of our consulting team or our faculty on the training side to help you out, um, you certainly can uh can engage us that way. Okay, so here's what I want to talk about. It's that time of year. At the time I'm recording this, we're going into, we're about to be in the uh by the time you get this, it'll probably already be underway, the end of the uh the regular season in the college football world. It also applies to professional football, although that season's not quite there yet. But it it at the end of the football season, I'm gonna talk primarily about football. I know some of you aren't sports fans. That's okay, just hang with me. You'll see, you you'll see how this is all about actually your organization, about the way you lead, about the way that you promote or work with other leaders in your organization. That's what all this is about. But I'm gonna use sports and what's happening in the real world of sports to to make my case. And uh, so for those of you that um aren't football fans or aren't paying close attention, you get to the end of the season, happens every year, and there's the coaching carousel, right? So, and and one of the things that was so surprising to me back when I was in uh the media business, and and when we started buying, our company started buying um the uh sports play-by-play stations, broadcast stations, and I started having people on our teams that that did play by play and hosted sports talk shows. One of the things that things that was most surprising to me was how short the football season was. Like compared to basketball or holy cow, baseball? You know, which those seasons go on forever. There's tons of games. Football, it's like only 11 or 12 games. Like that's it. That's the season. So for the entire year, your the team has like 12 occasions that they either perform or they don't perform. And everybody's judged off that. You either go pro, you either get NIL money, for those of you who don't know what that is, that's the money that now we pay to college athletes, legally at least. Um, then you anyway, that's a whole other episode. And and so that's it. Like if you want a big contract next year, if you want to go into the transfer portal and go play for a different, bigger school or whatever, you want to be on a starting lineup, you want to go to the NFL, whatever it is, you've got like 11 or 12 games. Just think about that for a minute. Think about in your like what you do for a living. If in an entire calendar year it all came down to you being judged by 11 days. 12 days. That's all you got. Everything the rest of the year, day in and day out. What how how you lived, your habits, your routines, everything was judged by just let's call it 12 days. That's insane. It's crazy, it's intense. And then you get all these coaches, and it happens for athletes too, who are evaluated by that, and they're either benched or fired, and there's this whole and and it's because, well, you didn't win as many as we we expected you to win. And so, and and and now these days, it happens right in the middle of the season. A bunch of colleges fired their coaches five, six, seven games into the season. The season's not even over. They've already fired the coach because we've seen enough in six days. Again, now think about that. It's crazy. We've seen enough in six days, five days, eight days where we we we're good. You're done. Thank you very much. And then and these contracts are crazy how they're they're uh structured right to where you just there's a huge financial penalty for the university in firing these coaches, but it the the the upside is bigger than the downside. You tracking with me? Because if they get the winning coach in here and the team turns it around, the amount of revenue and the amount of that's gonna come from that is way bigger than the contract that we owe the previous coach, because you're double dipping, right? You're paying off the coach that you fired three seasons early and he's still got three seasons left on his contract, and you're paying the new one, which you've got to pay more because of inflation and how much you know the salaries go up. So why am I talking about this? Why why why am I bringing this up in a podcast episode about leadership? And the reason I am is because it's all like we we just got to end, we we talk about in in our new book, Deliver. Um, in fact, if you when you get the physical copy, you open it up on the front cover. I think they call it the flap, right? The first inside flap of the cover to the book. Um it talks about that we wrote this book to end the confusion. The managers are confused. That the way we've trained them and developed them and put them through school and all these sorts of things, the these managers in so many organizations think that what matters most is the employee engagement survey. What matters most is whether they are inclusive, what matters most is whether they build trust, what matters most is that whether they create purpose, what matters most is whether they're a good coach. You get the idea, right? And it's not that those things aren't important, but they are a means to the end. And the end is performance. What happens on the field? And so let's end the confusion. I mean, we talk about this. I'm a broken record on this. Like all the any any organization that's a potential client that our team gets me on a Zoom meeting with, or we're doing a Teams meeting, or that we fly out in person, or they come to one of our executive summits, which by the way, we've got the next one coming up in February. If you didn't get to the last one, oh my gosh. Um, anyway, uh go to LoneRock.io and and find fill out the contact form. And if you're especially if you're an HR or L and D and you're an executive of a company with more than 500 or 1,000 employees, like at least that big. Typically, we're working with organizations quite bigger than that, but we still work with organizations that are that are smaller. And and if you're HR or L and D, you need to fill out that contact form and say, get me to the next summit. Like I want to be there. It's unbelievable. We're finalizing the details. Anyway, I've talked about that in previous episodes. But so you if you're in any of these organizations, especially if you're an HR and L and D, but an executive, whatever, we've got to end the confusion. And when I'm on these calls or in these meetings or on stage in front, I'm just a broken record saying you've got to be honest with your managers. And the reality is what they're evaluated on, whether or not they're promoted, whether or not we pay them more money next year, whether or not their market value goes up is all dependent 100% on the 12 days on game day. Now, in business, it doesn't look that way. It's four quarters. You've got four quarters. That's it. That's what you've got right now. And some of you are operating on your past performance. You're like that coach that goes in and the university calls him in, or in women's sports, you know, they call the the women's coach in or whomever, and they say, um, look, um, it's been a great run. We totally appreciate you, and but we're going a different direction. Thanks so much. And if that coach were to say, but but I've got a winning record. Like, just look back two years, like three seasons ago. Look what I did last year. How well is that gonna go over? Like, nobody's like, there is a sense of some loyalty to that. A lot of universities, especially those that, you know, they're they're they're not gonna typically fire the coach just off a little bit of a struggle. It it they're gonna look at past performance and say, well, you've been with us for seven years or 10 or 15 or whatever it's been, and you've had winning records most of those. So we're gonna, we we know you might be going through kind of a slump, or you might be having a little bit of a challenge here, there. And now I know some of your team members are injured, and you've got some challenges here, there, or you lost that recruit or that offensive uh coordinator, or that I I know we've had some issues, so I'm gonna give you a little bit of leeway, but not much. Like that doesn't last long. That's the way it needs to be in all of our organizations. You cannot lean on past performance. You cannot think, well, I'm trying. You cannot think, okay, well, it's the market. Like all the teams in our conference are a little bit. Well, I don't care. We want a winning record here. And so, yeah, we're sympathetic and empathetic and we listen and we're real world and all of that. But too many organizations, we don't move fast enough when there are performance issues. How bad do you want the trophy? So I'm speaking to you who are senior executives of some of these organizations or those of you who lead leaders. Like, why would we tolerate bad performance for an extended period of time? Now, let me explain something. I want to talk about a possible contradiction that might be going through some of your minds because I tell the story all the time about how, you know, when I was first put into management and we did an employee engagement survey. Well, we didn't. The company did an employee engagement survey. That's when they first came out and um when they first started, it wasn't a thing before that. And I was rated the lowest comp the lowest manager in our entire company, right? I've told that story. Absolutely humiliating, a horrific experience I wouldn't wish on anybody, except for the fact that it absolutely transformed me. It changed me, it motivates me to this day. And so, yeah, my performance as measured. Now, if you were to look about the business outcomes, that team was crushing it, right? So if you're measuring me by performance, game day, I was crushing it. But what the employee engagement survey revealed was, yeah, but you're you're doing it in a way that can't be sustained, which I totally agree with. That was that was true. That was and and so what the organization didn't do was fire me in that moment. I'll forever be grateful for that. It was it if you talk about decisions and moments that profoundly affected me, would I have been okay with something else? Yeah, I'm sure I would have found a way. But but that path um was was made clear, if you will, made possible by an executive that instead of firing in the moment, chose to invest in me, develop me, help mentor me. But what they saw in me, to give myself some credit in this situation, I don't deserve a ton, but I deserve a little bit. I was willing to acknowledge, okay, I've got some things I got to do differently. Okay, I'm not showing up in an effective way. I get it. You're right. And so I pushed out all those defensive thoughts that came to me for all the people I wanted to blame for why my employee engagement survey sucked, why I wasn't showing up, at least in some metrics, as that effective as a leader. I pushed those aside because they were powerless. They were excuses that didn't get me anywhere. I could, okay, so I could sit around all day and justify, you know, that, hey, this is the way I, you know, whatever. You made me into this or you haven't developed me or whatever. But I had to push those away, and then what the organization saw was somebody who was digging in to change to change that. So that's what we're looking for, right? But when you've got a leader who this year has performance issues, you look at game day, so to speak, and however you measure that in your organization. For most of us, it's in quarterly results, whatever you're looking at, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, on-time delivery, patient satisfaction, new product releases, um revenue increase, profit margin, uh uh safety, whatever the metrics are that define performance, getting the products out, whatever it is. You look at that, and if the performance isn't there, then we need to have that conversation with that leader, be super honest with them, give them a lifeline, tell them we're here to help develop them, to invest in them and to help them out, and then like they've got a few more game days. That might be one more quarter, that might be another year, I don't know what it is. It depends on the situation, right? But too many, too many leaders and too many organizations that we interact with, over I'm talking about not right now, I'm talking about over the extended period of been doing this for a long time. Too many just go, uh I know we lost the game on game day, but you know, there's this, that, and the other. So we're just gonna kind of overlook that. Man, you need to be more like the university that wants the title, that is hungry for the championship, or a very, you know, that that's gonna compete. Do you want to compete? It's so interesting to be in the room with an organization for the first time, and you're in the room with a senior leader. Maybe they've got hundreds of, you know, mid-level managers, or maybe they've just got their direct reports, ten folks on the senior leadership team, whatever the setting is. It's so interesting to listen and observe, virtually or in person. And you you find out really fast as you observe and listen. You can just pop into any meeting. It doesn't have to be the the you know, the beginning of the year kickoff or the end of the year wrap-up or whatever. It doesn't have to be that. It can be any meeting. And you immediately get a sense of how bad that leader wants it. How driven are they? How committed to performance is that leader and that organization. Now they have to be real, they have to acknowledge reality, they have to understand the limitations and the challenges externally and internally and all of that. But they but and their job as the leader, your job, if you're one of those leaders, is to remove obstacles, fix what's broken, solve the issues. That's your job. Because you can't demand performance, you can't demand that I show up and deliver this if we got all this stuff over here broken. Like you got to fix that. You've got to address it. There's got to be, you know, we haven't released a new product in four years, or we got supply chain issues over here, or we've got a factory that's got these certain issues, or we've got a policy, or our compensation's not competitive at all, or whatever it might be. Like, we got to fix that. Otherwise, we've got unrealistic expectations. I mean, there's a reason Chick-fil-A pays their employees more than McDonald's does. They demand more out of them, but they pay more and they train them better. They do more, they invest more on the front end, so they have higher expectations on the back end. We expect this kind of customer service score. We expect this kind of performance in the drive-thru. We expect this kind of quality, all those sorts of things. You can't expect that if you're not putting in the training and you're not paying people competitive wage, right? That wouldn't work at Chick-fil-A. We could use tons of different examples here, right? So, I mean, the same thing with Amazon. Like, well, how are we supposed to get it on time if the shipping company doesn't get it? Okay, well, we're gonna invest in our own shipping company. We're gonna buy over a hundred thousand delivery trucks, and we're gonna buy a bunch of airplanes so that that's not an excuse that that that that justifies us not getting stuff to people when they expect it. We're gonna solve that for you, right? That's what the Amazon executive team did. Same thing. I mean, just go through retailers, go through so many different. That's your job. So, but you can tell. You can tell. And so what I would what I would say to you is does your organization reflect a competitive, hungry university right now that is out for the title? They want to go, I mean, to basketball, they're they're planning to go to March Madness. They're gonna be competitive in the postseason or in football. They are going to go to their conference championship game, they are going to go to one of the premier bowl games. They are going to punch their ticket into the college football playoffs. Or does your organization more reflect a six and six team right now? And we're okay with it. We're gonna keep the coach around. We're gonna the team's gonna look pretty similar next year. We're gonna hope we can get seven wins rather than six this year. I can make you one promise. If you are that type of organization, well, we we got six wins this year. We're gonna try to get to seven next year. The you the talent that you're able to recruit will reflect that. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might get to seven wins next year, and maybe that's okay. Maybe you'll celebrate it. But there's an organization across town or over there in another area that's in your industry, and they aren't talking that way, and that's not the expectation at the highest level and down a level and down another level and down another level. No, they want the trophy, and that's the expectation, and you gotta perform, and you got four quarters to do it. That's what's on my mind. That's what I want you thinking about. And and the last thing that I would share with you, because some of you might be going, well, but how do you do that? Like, I'm okay, I'm the manager who wants to perform. Well, there's there's lots of things, right, that I could say about that, but maybe I'll give you a couple before we wrap up the episode. Number one is you've got to get close to the customer. You've got to see where the industry is going, what the what the customer trends are. You've got to look at the broader picture, get out of the micro and look at the macro. So, what does the customer need? Are we meeting their needs? What do they got, what what are the what do the needs look like? One of the things I love, he's so flawed, he got so many challenges, and yet his performance, you can't, his organization's performance you cannot argue with Elon Musk. So I'm not judging the the the man or the individual. I I have been listening to the audiobook again, um, Walter Isaacson's biography of him, because I'm just so fascinated by successful people at all levels, and I want to know their stories. And so I was doing some yard work in the last few weeks, and I was listening to the first few chapters of the book about Elon Musk again. And, you know, one of the things that's so interesting, and and then uh he did an interview with Jill Rogan. He typically does an interview every year or six months or every two years with Joe Rogan, and they sit around, they talk for like two or three hours. I I told all my kids to listen to it. I'm like, you need to listen to it. Our 16-year-old uh texted me uh a few weeks ago and said, okay, dad, I finished it up two and a half hours or three hours, wherever he's like, yeah, the last hour wasn't that great. But I just I I wanted them to listen to it, and I give them other stuff to listen to or different ideas too, but because it is one of the most successful people in in modern business in our lifetime, right? Again, flawed, got all kinds of issues. We're not getting into that. Uh, I'm just talking about performance and and some of these organizations. Again, you you can you can you can say lots of negative things about how they get there or whatever. That's fine. You'd be justified in a lot of that. I'm not, I'm not, that this isn't about that. But one of the things I love about the interviews with with um Elon Musk is if you listen to any of those, is he's he he he paints a picture constantly of the future. You can tell he is obsessed thinking constantly, not about what the world will look like in a year, but in 20 or 30 or 40 years. I need you. We need you. Not thinking about 30 years necessarily. I got on the media business, not because of what was happening that year in the media business, but what the next 10 to 15 years looked like. So I looked at myself at 55 or 60 in that industry and went, oh yeah, okay, I'm out. Not now, because we were crushing it. I was crushing it at the time I exited. But I was looking at the macro view, the trends, and going, oh, yeah, I need to exit. And I need, we need you looking that way. So how do you get be successful? How do you have great performance in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 next year? Like, how do you affect what it looks like, whether or not you're winning on game day or not? You gotta get to the customer, you gotta look at trend lines, you gotta zoom out and and and really look at what's going on, study it, consume it. You cannot be showing up here and just working, putting in time, doing the minimum, doing what you did last year. Like that's not valuable. So I need you close to the customer. I need you zooming out, looking at trends. I need you listening, very, very curious. The other thing I need you doing is I need you seeking feedback. You need to be listening to people. If they're telling you everything's good, keep doing it how you would do it. I don't know anything to offer you. That's not valuable. Like that's nice, makes you feel good in the moment. That doesn't make you, I mean, you can imagine going to the trainer at the gym. Hey, uh, yeah, I want you to help me be more in shape. Well, I actually I I think you're like, you look great on the treadmill. I really wouldn't adjust the speed or the incline at all. And yeah, I think I'd stick with the same dumbbells and the same, yeah. I really actually don't have anything. Like I don't see anything here. Or the golf coach. Can you imagine? You go to the golf coach or you send your kid to the piano teacher. Yeah, Johnny's actually, I was really impressed. Well, what tips did you give him? Not really anything. Like, I, you know what I mean? How ridiculous does that sound? Golf coach, you go to the driving range. Yeah, you know what? I I thought you made contact with a few of those balls pretty well. You hit them off the mat, and you know, I I really, yeah, I don't really. I'd fire that golf coach immediately. The piano teacher be out the wind. Like, no. What I want around me are people who see things and identify things. Hey, Russ, hear a couple of things. And if I'm working for somebody who can't do that, then they're not gonna lift me. They're not gonna lift this organization. If I'm not doing that for others, hey, yeah, here are a couple of things you might want to work on, adjust, do differently. If they don't have high expectations, if they're not coaching you through that, oh my gosh, you're yeah, you're gonna lay an egg in Q1. You're gonna show up and lose the game on game day. And so I've given you a few things to think about. Um, and and the fact that you're even listening to this podcast is awesome. It means you're hungry, you're thirsty to improve, to figure out ways that you can you can get better. But if you if you if this year on game day, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, maybe in one of those, you know, was kind of a struggle or whatever, well, that's a loss on game day. Like you lost that. And if there were two quarters where you're kind of behind, you just put up a losing record. Like, are you motivated to change that? Do you have urgency around it? Do you have a game plan for how you're gonna address that? And if you're and if that you sustain that over time, it's time to move on. You either you or the organization really don't have the game plan to be able to win next season. So let's get a new coach in. Let's change out the leadership, let's change out the coordinators, you know what I mean? Let's get a different team on the field and see how it goes. I think there's so much to learn. So much for us to think about as we watch this world of sports, especially college sports, and what's happening at the end of a season in in uh in the in the coaching ranks. That's what I wanted to share with you in this episode of the Lead in Thirty Podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

Share this episode with a colleague, your team, or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell.