In the movie City Slickers, Jack Palance's character, Curly, holds up one finger portentously and tells Billy Crystal's character there is only one thing to know about the meaning of life.
"What's the one thing?" Crystal's character asks.
"That's what you've got to figure out," is the evasive answer.
In a world where coaches are overwhelmed by the many things they are expected to know, many wish there was just one thing they needed to achieve success -- and that, unlike City Slickers, somebody would supply the answer.
Researcher on coaching for succes, not only shares that enthusiasm for simplicity but believes that, beneath all complex phenomena lies a core concept that can be discovered.
The One Thing You Need To Know -- in fact, are tied into three interlinked concepts, one for managing players, one for leading and one for sustained individual success:
Management: To excel as a coach, you must never forget that each of your players is unique and that your chief responsibility is not to eradicate this uniqueness but rather to arrange roles, responsibilities, and expectations so that you can capitalize on their strengths.
"The more you perfect this skill, the more effectively you will turn talents into performance," he advises.
Leadership: To excel as a coach requires the opposite skill. You must rally people toward a better future, which means tapping into the things that followers share: Discover what is universal and capitalize on it.
Common needs include security, community, authority and respect. But the most powerful universal need, he stresses, is for clarity.
"To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future vividly and precisely," he says.
"As your skill grows, so will our confidence in you."
Sustained individual success: Discover what you don't like and stop doing it.
Your strengths -- be it your love of problem-solving, intuition, assertiveness or ability to deal with people --are your natural appetites.
When using them, you feel powerful, confident, authentic and challenged.
But inevitably after you have employed your strengths and achieved some initial success; you will be offered new opportunities, assignments or roles that may not use those strengths.
"The secret to sustained success lies in knowing which engage your strengths and which do not, and in having the self-discipline to reject the latter
The critical skill in each of these roles, is not balance but intentional imbalance.
As a coach, you bet that success will come from magnifying, emphasizing and then capitalizing on each player's uniqueness.
As a coach, you come to a conclusion about your team's core beliefs, the organization's strengths and the right strategy and then, in the service of clarity, banish from your thoughts and conversation almost everything else.
Similarly, in seeking personal effectiveness, you ignore all the calls for balance and to improve your weaknesses, and remain resolute on fulfilling your strengths.
"Every minute you invest in an activity that grates on you is a poorly invested minute. It is a minute in which you will learn little and that will leave you weaker and less resilient for the next minute.
And ignore those who tell you only people who are already successful can have the luxury of cutting their dislikes from their job.
People are successful precisely because they were unwilling to tolerate aspects of their team training they didn't like.
It's an enjoyable excursion, nonetheless, and, unlike City Slickers, does leave you with an answer, or, to be more accurate BSC; I give you these insights freely.
