By Fahey "Dino" McCann, Manager, Graphics Production

Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc., Virginia Beach, VA

Upon becoming Manager of Graphics Production at the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) 10 years ago, I was elated to have the opportunity to lead a talented team of 20. I immediately began asking myself and the entire department, should we be satisfied maintaining status quo? After all, things were going pretty well. Or should we strive to be better? My Vice President introduced to me and others some management principles from the book, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins that proved transformational in leading our team.

Here are just a few of the key concepts (there are many more) that I have embraced.

1.  Good is Not Great

It sounds simple; but there are many who settle for "ok" or "good enough."  Listen to your staff after finishing projects, especially rush ones. You will hear those phrases echoed again and again. I conveyed first to my supervisors and ultimately to staff that doing good work wasn't good enough. I wanted our team to shoot for great. Creating a culture of excellence takes work and is a work in progress. This has become an essential characteristic of our team. Our clients need to know that we strive for nothing short of the best for them.

2.  Understand Your Role as Leader

As soon as I realized it wasn't about me, but the team, we began to head in the right direction. I continue to strive toward what the author Collins calls the Level 5 Executive Leader. Currently I would rank myself as a high 3 to mid 4 level leader. In a nutshell, take the focus off of you and feeding your ego (many leaders are good at that) and put that energy into a much broader goal of building a great team. We as team, and individually all benefit from that philosophy and do great things.

3.  It's the "Who" Rather than the "What"

Translation ... get the right people not only on the bus, but in the right seat! Consequently, get the wrong people off the bus. People are your greatest asset. I quickly found out that when you have the right people, there's no need to micro manage or give a daily pep talk. Even more importantly, you won't find yourself working around the wrong people. If honest, we've all had employees at some time for whom we created work-arounds to avoid rocking the boat. When your team sees you making these accommodations, they evaluate your degree of commitment to the team and your real ability to lead. Often, your entire team will conclude that you are not up to the task of really leading if you are not dealing with a problem employee. That often results in a lack of team moral and a lost desire to strive for greatness.

If there are some on your team who don't want to ride on the new bus, kindly drop them off and get some new people in the right seats. If someone isn't willing to change direction when it needed, maybe there is something better out there for them. I've had to do it a couple of times and in both cases there was almost an immediate change in the atmosphere and productivity of the team.

4.  Facts Are Better than Dreams

Be honest, completely honest in evaluating where you are as a team.

5.  Define at What You Are Going to be Great

Understand what your client/customer needs, not what you want. There's that ego thing again. Find out what your company needs. Then identify how you can be better than good, how you can be GREAT at fulfilling that need.

6.  The "Flywheel" Effect

Build on the momentum gained by focusing on what you do really well and become great at it. For us, it is printing, lasering, folding and inserting 500M - 800M very high quality, personalized mailed pieces per month. Understanding what we do well helps us focus the majority of our resources on equipment and processes that help to accomplish those goals. For other companies it could be something completely different.

If you would like to reach Dino to learn more, he can be reached at Dino.McCann@cbn.org