Practice Day

Questions of the week:  Why do I decide to change the name of Scorecard Day to Practice Day?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is to share this week's question and our working method. You can subscribe to the Building Our Team newsletter (2900+ subscribers)

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Why do I decide to change the name of Scorecard Day to Practice Day?

Recently, we faced a roadblock in our Scorecard Day automation.

I asked a few leaders to jump in to help the team. I experienced the saying in Mythical Man-Month: "When you throw people at a problem, you only increase the problem in the situation."

I saw:

- Poor Leadership

- Bad communication

- Unnecessary deadlines

- More Micromanagement

- Increased Meetings/Calls

- High friction among the team

- Cracks in the System was wide open

This happens when you let a bad, harmless decision be executed. OR what I say is an unnecessary misfired strategy that doesn't produce a 5X outcome but bleeds the company with an internal injury not seen by the leadership.

The achievers of the team start complaining about the pressure and the objectiveless decisions. They started worrying about people who were not contributing to the System.

Earlier achievers were not bothered about what others were doing and produced the 24X outcome of something that took 240 minutes to do in 10 minutes.

The laggards had their own story. They contributed only to the execution piece and not to the creation or automation of the building system.

They started complaining about why we do things manually when we will eventually do everything automatically (Which is not entirely wrong). They struggled to execute things manually because they already tasted success in automation.

Another complaint was that I never fought in the scorecard day call earlier, and there was a sense of rush and time pressure. I got confused and made mistakes, which later became a cheating story.

To his credit, he accepted the mistake. I congratulated him because it takes courage to accept a mistake from anyone.

Accepting the mistake is conquering half the mountain.

He asked me, "How should I have dealt with the situation because on the day before, we had to attend calls (for ME day), and it was late, and I had an ugly fight with my manager?"

I replied with a smile. The system already had provisions for this type of situation.

A) If you were not confident that you were ready for the scorecard day or about your participation on the scorecard day, you can always pull it out with prior notice. The worst case is your participation drops, which means you may not get a good hike on your next appraisal, and it's not the end of the world.

You can always think of a magical automation that would allow the company to make 10X revenue, and you could have taken an excellent fat bonus for it.

B) Let's say the rushing idea or the pressure to complete the task kicks in, and you understand you made a mistake in 30 minutes (which he confessed during the call). You could have started again and completed the task. The day is called Scorecard Day and not Scorecard Hour. You had the rest of the day to do it and fix your mistake. No one can help you if you are not ready to follow the rules of the system.

I believe in using good language to create high-quality, valuable work.

That's why I will rename "Scorecard Day" to "Practice Day"        

So that people don't feel pressure to do things but enjoy the pleasure of learning, which will make us all earn.

I always prefer to rock the boat when things are going well or when getting into little trouble water because those are the best times. If there are too many holes in the boat anywhere, it will sink. I could shake it to check it before the storm hit.

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