Leadership and the Art of the Alley-Oop

This is a guest post by Blake Atwood. Blake is the Church Leadership Editor at FaithVillage.com, a new social network for faith experiences. He also blogs at BlakeAtwood.com

Leadership and the Art of the Alley-Oop

If leadership is helping someone else achieve a goal, there is no better metaphor than the alley-oop. In a few pulse-pounding seconds, the lessons fly at you like a blocked ball swatted five rows deep.

• Vision: The leader of a fast-break sees opportunities that lie ahead. With lessons learned over thousands of hours of preparation and actual game-time experience, the leader intuitively understands the flow of the game and the needs of their team. They see into the future. Constantly aware of their surroundings and what has worked in the past, they break past their opponents as quickly as possible, always with their eyes on the goal and confident of their team’s following pursuit.

• Trust: The leader earns the trust of a teammate through his example both on and off the court. As a result, a team member knows to look out for the leader’s direction, even to the point where they can intuit the leader’s intentions. This is how the teammate knows to work even harder than the leader in order to get down the court faster. The leader trusts his teammate to perform his job to the best of his ability at all times.

• Sacrifice: The leader sacrifices a small part of his ego in passing the ball, but understands that this small sacrifice leads to a much greater gain for his team. By allowing his teammate to be in the spotlight, the leader gives up notoriety in order to achieve success. The pass also allows the leader to truly test the team member’s abilities. Additionally, by being an example of selfless play, the leader provides a model worthy of emulation.

• Success/Failure: The leader lobs the ball just barely out of reach so that the teammate must aggressively pursue the ball. In other words, the leader does his best to set his team member up for success, but the results are up to the one catching the ball. The result can be an effective, rim-rattling alley-oop that reverses the tides of a game or delivers a death knell to an opponent. Or it can be a monumental failure, worthy of ESPN’s Not-the-Top-10 list. It doesn’t take much for an alley-oop to turn into an alley-oops.

• Unity: Regardless of the outcome, the leader and the teammate both learn something about themselves and each other. The leader becomes more attuned to the team member’s abilities, then works toward improving those abilities while helping to mitigate weaknesses. The leader learns whether or not he should have sought to make the goal himself. The team member learns to further trust the leader, knowing that the leader’s greatest desire is to see his teammate succeed. After all, a successful alley-oop results in meeting a team-wide goal. The team member may learn to trust his own instincts, or receive a hard lesson regarding his own weaknesses. In either instance, the leader and teammate grow closer together as they learn more about each other in the proverbial heat of battle.

Although the alley-oop is a fleeting moment in a game, it is these moments of exceptional playmaking that create tight bonds between a team—euphoric highs relived long after the game has ended, whether win or lose. They are the moments that, if slowed down enough, also contain lessons about the art of leadership.

So, the next time you have the opportunity to allow an employee to shine, pass the rock.

Question: How do you set your team up for success?