Your customers will judge your team.
They are making mental notes, whether they want to or not. The points will come off if you don’t do everything perfectly.
You know what you’re doing. You expect value when you spend money. The company expects its employees to see the value and be able to provide their own personal pieces.
If someone is out of tune, your eye will immediately go to them.
In the past five days, I have spent approximately 24 hours in a dark theatre watching dance teams perform. I was able to reflect on how dances are judged.
The team dancers are well-versed in all aspects of business and teamwork. I would even say that I would hire a dancer prior to being a swimmer or wrestler. Here are the reasons.
Every girl is important to dancers. Each person is only one part of the dance. Dancers must be aware of the unique contributions of each member of a team to create a great team.
They are able to perceive what the audience is looking for and know exactly which parts of the dance must be performed with intensity in order to create the desired effect.
The top dance teams, the ones that win competitions, also know that they perform the same dance to all their audience members: their parents, the judges, their choreographers, their fellow dancers, and their director.
Performance is the key to winning teams.
Excellent teams realize that their hard work will be wasted if they don’t perform in front of their audience.
True confessions: I am a real-life dance mom… Because my daughter has been dancing for more than two years, I have a deep understanding of the amateur dance scene.
As a dance mom to a high-performing, active dance team member, I can’t imagine how many hours (including the parents) were spent on creating hundreds of dances that are nearly flawlessly performed on stage. Below is a list of resources that dance requires (from my head).
Each girl gets over twenty hours of dance training per week
The teachers’ time and education
The cost and effort involved in running a studio
The choreography includes guest choreography
The costumes, shoes, and clothing for dancing, as well as the makeup, hair products, and accessories (in some cases, manicures and spray tanning).
Transporting dancers from rehearsal to practice takes time and gas.
The annual recital
The team meetings with parents and kids
team-building fun days
Mind and Body classes are for dancers who regularly dance 20+ hours per week. They learn how to stay healthy and organized so that they can succeed in school, church, and family life.
non-studio dance camps
Exceptional audition opportunities available for various national and local events
Community performances such as tree lighting ceremonies at Christmas or school fundraisers.
You could power a small village if you had all that energy! It doesn’t matter what you do when the music starts.
The year ends with a bang at National Dance Competition, for better or worse. There are teams that win. It’s the Olympics of dance.
It’s great fun, and the girls love to travel with their friends doing what they love.
It’s all about technique and showmanship when the dancers take to the stage for three minutes. It’s “balls-to-the-wall” dancing.
During those three minutes, all eyes are on the performance.
Nobody cares about how much it costs to bring a team up to this level. It doesn’t matter how much the girls enjoy dancing, how their moms feel about them, how expensive it is, how their work ethic is, how they treat other competitors, or if they ate a heart-stopping cheeseburger at lunch.
Only the performance is essential. The judges will see the version. Those three crucial minutes… The Performance
All eyes are on sports during the Olympics. Jokes that aren’t their favorite suddenly grab the attention of people all over the world. Why? It’s all about performance. Everybody wants to see the best at all times.
A team that takes care of how they are perceived by others is the one that wins every time. Everything else: Their intentions, passion, intelligence, hard work… everything secondary.
