“Travis Kelce Shares Insights on Overcoming Setbacks and Leadership

What do you do when you and your team suffer a series of failures and it feels like nothing is going right? How do you keep that nagging feeling of doom from dragging you even further down?

By staying focused on small challenges‏ that you and they can overcome week by week and day by day. That insight comes from Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in a recent interview on the podcast Bussin’ With the Boys. Podcast co-host Will Compton, a retired linebacker who played with the Titans and Washington Redskins, among others, asked Kelce how he handles it “when the mojo has kind of slipped.” This might seem like an odd question–after all, the Chiefs are the Super Bowl champions for the second year in a row. But Kelce had noted that throughout the season, the team didn’t have the kind of consistent success it has had in the past.

The answer, Kelce explained, lay in the leadership skills of the team’s legendary head coach, Andy Reid. “I think Coach Reid does it the best,” he said. “He’s nonstop challenging the team week in, week out, not necessarily on getting better, but making sure you’re focusing on the things that are going to get you better.” In Kelce’s case that means making the most of each practice–getting in extra exercises between structured workouts and making sure to talk things through with the team’s coaches

Just think how powerful this simple tactic might make your team more resilient in the fact of failure. Having their own small, internal challenges to meet could change each team member’s reaction to a disappointing setback. “That mentality right there is, you’re just nonstop going step by step up the staircase and finding ways to have success,” Kelce explained. “And I think Coach Reid’s leadership and how he sets that program for everybody is just flawless.” Having those weekly
challenges makes it easier for team members to avoid having their emotions take over when things go wrong. “It’s like, we’re still working to get better, no matter if we’re having success or we’re not.”

Think about how that same approach could work in your own business. What if, in addition to overarching goals such as meeting revenue targets for the quarter, each team member also had their own personal set of weekly mini-goals, for example to send out a certain number of pitches, or to find three ways to improve your product. The key is to make the goals small enough to achieve in a week or a day, and something they can do regardless of external factors. For example, sending a certain number of pitches, as opposed to making a certain number of sales. Those goals could be upgraded from week to week, so that your employees, just like the Chiefs, could be “nonstop going step by step up the staircase and finding ways to have success.”