Better at What?

There is a story from Chick-fil-A’s history that has stayed with me.

During a period when Boston Market was expanding rapidly across the country, Chick-fil-A’s leadership team was discussing growth.

How could they get bigger? How could they expand faster? What would it take to keep pace?

As the story is told, founder Truett Cathy sat quietly listening to the conversation. Eventually, he leaned forward and interrupted with a different question.

Why was everyone talking about getting bigger when they should be talking about getting better?

His conclusion was simple:

“If we get better, our customers will demand that we get bigger.”

Yes, it is a great leadership story.

But I think there is an even more important question buried inside it.

Better at what?

Because “get better” sounds like a strategy until you realize your organization could get better at a hundred different things.

A youth sports club could improve its coaching.

Its facilities.

Its technology.

Its communication.

Its tryout process.

Its apparel.

Its tournaments.

Its marketing.

Its strength and conditioning.

Its parent education.

Its recruiting.

Its player development.

Most club leaders do not suffer from a shortage of things they could improve.

They suffer from an abundance of them.

And leadership attention, money and time are all finite.

So the strategic question is not simply:

How do we get better?

It is:

Where would getting better create the greatest gain?

That is a much harder question.

Richard Rumelt writes in The Crux that people and organizations can spend enormous amounts of effort continuing to invest in what they have historically been good at, what others believe they are good at, or simply what they have become accustomed to doing.

Success creates habits too.

And those habits can make it difficult to recognize when the greatest opportunity has moved somewhere else.

You can see how easily this happens in a sports club.

Imagine a club that built its reputation on great coaching and player development.

It grows from 10 teams to 20, then 30.

As it grows, delivering a consistent experience across all those teams becomes harder.

New coaches interpret the club’s philosophy differently, and the experience begins to vary from team to team. Problems that once could be solved through personal relationships now require systems. The number of conversations with frustrated parents increases.

Growth begins to slow.

What does the club do?

Often, it doubles down on what made it successful.

Find better coaches.

Offer more specialized training programs.

Add another high-level program.

Recruit harder.

None of those are necessarily bad ideas.

But what if the coaches themselves aren’t the root problem?

What if the answer isn’t simply to recruit more and better coaches?

What if the real constraint is the organization’s ability to help a growing number of coaches consistently deliver the experience families valued in the first place?

The highest-return investment might no longer be better coach recruiting.

It might be clearer standards.

Better leadership structure.

A stronger coach development system.

Better alignment between coaches and families.

Or an operating model that no longer requires the director to personally hold everything together.

That is why strategy is harder than improvement.

Improvement asks how to do something better.

Strategy asks which thing deserves to get better first.

The answer often looks obvious afterward.

Rumelt makes that point too. In retrospect, good strategy can look like ordinary good management. The difficult work happened earlier, in recognizing which issue mattered most and deciding to concentrate resources against it.

That is the part I think youth sports organizations often miss.

Another club opens a second location.

Maybe we should open another location.

A competitor adds national teams.

Maybe we need national teams.

Someone launches an academy for younger athletes.

We should probably have an academy.

Another organization buys a facility.

We need a facility.

Everyone starts using a new technology platform.

Maybe that’s what we are missing.

Any one of those decisions could be exactly right.

But doing something because successful organizations around you are doing it is not strategy.

Your strategy should be driven by what your organization is uniquely trying to accomplish and what is currently constraining it, not whatever everyone else is currently doing.

Chick-fil-A is interesting because its choices reinforce one another.

It isn’t trying to be everything to everyone.

Its operating model, service expectations, menu and approach to owner-operators all reinforce choices about what kind of company it intends to be.

Some of those choices require saying no to opportunities competitors readily pursue.

That may be the most overlooked part of strategy.

Choosing what deserves your attention also means deciding what does not.

For club leaders, the hard part isn’t deciding that you want to get better.

It’s determining what getting better means now.

Better for whom?

Better at what?

What is preventing you from delivering that consistently?

And what are you willing to stop doing so you can concentrate your resources there?

Your club doesn’t need to win at everything.

It needs clarity about whom it exists to serve, what those athletes and families most need from it, and what it must become exceptionally good at delivering.

Then it needs the discipline to design the organization around those choices rather than around whatever the club down the road does next.

Maybe that is the lesson hidden inside Truett Cathy’s question.

Getting bigger isn’t necessarily the goal.

Getting better isn’t specific enough either.

The real work of strategy is figuring out where getting better matters most.

Questions for Leaders

• If you could improve only one thing in your organization right now, where would getting better create the greatest gain?

• What are you continuing to invest in mainly because it’s what you’ve always done?

• What would you benefit from stop doing, or stop chasing, to concentrate on what is biggest opportunity ?