It’s late spring.
NFL Teams have made their draft picks and are now in the early stages of mini-camps. Soon enough, training camp will be here. Information is flowing at a rapid pace to the new, young players—and maybe it’s too rapid.
Talent needs time to develop. While all teams are looking for the next pro bowler, they’re not going to find him if they don’t give their players a chance to assimilate everything they are learning.
We see the same principle in business. It’s important to understand the 3 people impacted by your information fire hose.
1. Your Client
If you tell your client everything about you, your company, and your products right away, they won’t know what to focus on. Your client needs to think clearly about how your products or services can serve their needs. Make that process unnecessarily difficult and you’ll lose the sale.
2. Your Employee
If you tell your employee about every project your company has, it’s entire history, and all your plans and possibilities for the business, all on the first day—how is your new hire supposed to make sense of that? Try to teach a person too much too fast, and they’ll get frustrated and actually learn slower.
3. Your Strategic Partners
This is a focused relationship. If you don’t stick with that narrowed focus, it will no longer be strategic.
You had a goal in place with your client, your employee, and your partner. Stick with that. If you turn on the fire hose and blast them with information, you’ll both forget what that original goal was.
Your promising new rookie doesn’t have to make the winning play of the Super Bowl yet. It’s still only spring.
Image of Redskins’ DeSean Jackson taken by Mobilus In Mobili with Creative Commons 2.0