Welcome to The Competitive Edge. This letter comes out on Wednesdays, and the whole aim is to hand you one thing worth trying with your own team before the week is out, drawn from a career spent leading people and from the work I do with coaches now. If it is useful to you, the best thing you can do is pass it to another coach and point them at the sign-up link below.

Friends,

A quick word before we start. A good number of you are reading this for the first time this week, and I am glad you came. The last twenty editions live in the newsletter archive if you want to see what you have walked into. For everyone, new and otherwise, this letter works best when it turns into a conversation, so if something here lands or misses, hit reply and tell me, because I read every one of them.

Now to this week, which started with a conversation I had with a coach recently, and one I have had in some form with nearly everyone I work with. We were talking about communication, and it surfaced a failure I have watched many times and committed myself more than once.

You say something one time, and then you make two assumptions about it, the first being that it was understood and the second being that it will be remembered. Both of those are usually wrong, and the cost of being wrong about them stays invisible for a long while.

It shows up most often around the things we care about most, which are vision, intent, values and standards. You bring in a new player or a new assistant, or you stand up in front of the group at the start of a season, and you spend real time laying out what matters here and what is expected. Then everybody leaves the room, and any number of things have happened in there that you cannot see from the front. Some did not hear you, some heard you without understanding you, some understood you and did not take you seriously, and some took you seriously but have not yet decided whether they believe it. Telling a team something is not the same as a team sharing an understanding of it.

Then time finishes the job, because you get comfortable in your messaging once you know what you believe, and the message goes quietly dormant with nobody renewing it. Meanwhile the roster turns over, an assistant leaves, two more arrive, and one day you look up and the team you gave that intent to is not the team in front of you. The people still in the building may or may not remember what you said the first time.

Here is what I want to be precise about, because it explains why repetition is not just nagging.

A single telling, even a good one, generally buys you compliance. People do the thing because you are the one who said it and because you are the one who is watching, and the moment your attention moves somewhere else, so does the behavior. What you are after is different, which is them doing it when you are not in the room, because they believe in it rather than because they are complying with you. That shift does not come from a better speech, it comes from hearing the same thing, from the same person, in enough different situations that it stops being your rule and starts being how things are done here.

Which means the repetition is not what you fall back on because the first attempt failed, it is the mechanism itself, and it is what turns a message into a standard.

Start by knowing what the message is. This is where it fails before anything else gets a chance to. If you cannot say what your values are, what your priorities are, where your red lines sit and what your team standards are supposed to be, nobody can follow them, and the fault is not theirs. Make the list finite. Everything cannot be important, and a list of fifteen is a list of none.

Say it at the beginning, on purpose. At the start of the season, at the start of a term, as part of how you bring somebody new into the building. That first telling is not the whole job, but it is the foundation the rest of it stands on, and skipping it means every later reminder is a reminder of something that was never established.

Put the next one on the calendar. Monthly, quarterly, twice a year, the interval matters less than the fact that it exists. Left to chance, reinforcement happens when something goes wrong, which teaches your team that the standard is a stick rather than a belief.

Then take the unscheduled ones, which are worth more. The ones that count come at practice, at halftime, in a timeout in the fourth quarter, or when you get the group back together after a break. Scheduled reinforcement tells people the thing is on your list, while reinforcement in a moment that called for it tells them the thing is real.

And watch how your staff carries it. When an assistant communicates something out of step with what you have said, that is usually not defiance. More often it is an awareness problem, and they have no idea they are coloring outside the lines, so go at it with curiosity before anything else. Ask why they approached it that way, and then tell them plainly where it sits relative to what you have been saying. You have to be the centralizing figure in what the staff communicates, and that starts with you before it extends to anybody else.

The best communicators I served with had one thing in common. They knew the short list of what mattered to them, they were clear about it, and then they never shut up about it. They said it until it became a running joke.

That is the benchmark, and I mean it seriously. When your team starts making fun of you for how much you talk about something, you have your answer, because they heard you, they remember it, and they can repeat it without you in the room. Most leaders take that as the signal to ease off, when the right move is to keep going.

One thing to do this week. Pick the single thing you most need your team to believe. Say it out loud in a setting where nobody expected it, a water break or a film session rather than a team meeting. Then put a date on the calendar for when you will say it again.

If you have a team pursuing different goals, you do not have a team. You have a group of people in the same building, and the only thing standing between those two is whether you said it enough times for it to stick.

Let me know what you are repeating this season. I would like to know what made your short list.

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