8 Business Lessons from Football, Courtesy of the NFL Pre-Season

With our headquarters based in Seattle, for most of our team, it’s been fun to be a football fan this year. Whether your business is coming off a big win or a disappointing loss, here are eight business lessons from football – lessons business leaders can learn from the NFL pre-season.

What Business Leaders Can Learn from Pre-Season Football

The pre-season is an exciting time for football fans, but it also provides for some interesting business analogies. We came up with eight business takeaways that can help your business get more wins in the months and years to come.

Since our office is in the greater Seattle, Washington area, it was an exciting year to be a football fan, even for those who are not necessarily fans of the World Champion Seattle Seahawks. The truth is, sometimes you learn just as much – if not more – coming off of a loss as you do a win.

Whether your team is riding high after a big win or a strong winning business season or recent losses have proven you have work to do, sports-loving business leaders looking for inspiration need look no further than NFL pre-season football for a few relevant business lessons. We came up with eight, but there are bound to be more!

8 Business Lessons Brought to You by NFL Pre-Season Football

Last year’s wins don’t mean anything.

One of the great things about football is that each year everyone gets to start all over. Sometimes in business it’s important to take a step back and clear the slate so that people know that what happens in the future – not the past – is what’s most important.

Everyone’s gunning for the leaders.

Whether it’s the teams that made it to the playoffs, won the Super Bowl or it’s the high-profile, highly-compensated greatest players in the game, if you are a leader, you can be sure that competitors will be gunning for you. As you gain ground compared to the industry or local competition, don’t let up. Staying on top requires the same commitment to excellence that it took to get there!

Predictions are just educated guesses; that’s why they play the games.

There are a lot of experts out there with a lot of different opinions as to how the season will turn out – and most don’t agree with one another. While it’s important to weigh strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats and evaluate risk, the truth is, sometimes you won’t know until you try. If you don’t take any risks and only pursue “sure things,” chances are you are missing out on a lot of big business wins you might have had.

“Nobody knows how things will turn out,
that’s why they go ahead and play the game.
You give it your all and sometimes amazing things happen –
but it’s hardly ever what you expect.”

— Gennifer Choldenko, Al Capone Does My Shirts

Take bigger risks on people now, while the stakes are lower.

The best time to give a rookie or newbie a shot at earning a bigger paycheck or more impactful position on the team is when the stakes are low. Take advantage of low-risk propositions to give people who want to move up in the organization (or want to come on board) a chance to prove their ability.

Excellence doesn’t occur by accident.

There are many very talented people who don’t succeed not because they didn’t have natural ability, but because they did not have the discipline to put in the time to become the best at what they do. The NFL pre-season gives leaders a chance to evaluate the work ethic of players and their performance in drills, scrimmages and pre-season games in addition to how much talent they have.

Talent isn’t everything in the NFL, and it isn’t everything in business, either. As you seek to better your business by strengthening your team, remember to look at the whole picture of what someone brings to the team, and understand that drive and discipline may turn someone with less natural ability into the real superstar.

You might need to move people around if you want to field the strongest team possible.

From the draft through the pre-season and on into the regular season itself, NFL coaches are constantly evaluating player performance and making adjustments, even moving people into new positions when necessary. Business leaders should also assess player performance on a regular basis and make adjustments when needed. This could mean asking someone to take on a role they haven’t filled before or asking teammates to cover for someone who is ill, injured or otherwise taken out of the game.

What happens off the field matters.

It would be great if there were a clearly defined line between what happens on the field and what happens off the field, so that nothing outside the game of football would impact the game. But whether we are talking about pre-season football or the workplace, no such line exists.

As human beings, what happens off the field can impact how we perform at work for better or worse. As a leader in your business, it’s important to learn to discern between off-field issues that may temporarily sideline a player vs. more serious problems which may need to be addressed.

The match-ups are only going to get tougher – and more important – from here on out.

Just as the NFL pre-season moves from matches that don’t matter to games that do, as a business grows, the challenges they face also grow in scope and complexity. If the head coach had to do everything themselves, the game would be poorly managed. Instead, alongside a successful head coach you will often find very successful assistants who are either preparing for leadership themselves or who specialize in certain areas.

It’s the same in business. Successful leaders don’t try to control everything themselves; instead, they surround themselves with good people and empower them to be successful. As your business grows and its challenges become more difficult to resolve, competition becomes tougher and there is more and more at stake, it’s important that you surround yourself with talented people and empower them to help you win!

You might also like: In Sales You Need a Good Closer, and 9 Other Business Lessons from the Game of Baseball