7 Things Businesses Can Learn From Professional Sports
The corporate world slowly but surely continues to elevate the importance of People as a stakeholder (as set against Shareholders, darlings of 1980s style business, and Customers).
This follows both sound logic and proven data: happy, aligned, motivated teams are (no surprise?) the secret to successful results for customers and shareholders alike.
But this people-focus can’t yet compare with that in, say, the sporting world, which has always placed talent number 1. Indeed, when writing my book “A Hidden Force – Unlocking the Potential of Neurodiversity at Work”, I found myself drawing multiple comparisons between how sports teams think about and optimize talent and the approach here of the corporate world.
Notably, given our work at Uptimize, the sporting world’s appreciation of individual strengths, personal development, and the importance of BOTH technical skills and intrinsic traits relate significantly to corporate efforts (or not) to embrace neurodiversity and the varied thinkers in their teams.
There are important differences, of course, when it comes to these contexts. A sports team’s product IS the team (similar to consultancy, perhaps, but very different from tech teams). Sports teams enjoy a far tighter and easier to measure performance feedback loop than corporate teams working on multiple, often long-term projects. Sports teams are also able to measure themselves against their competition in a far more direct fashion than corporate workforces, whose relative performance will show up only over time in relative revenues and share price movement.
But human collaboration is at the core of any organization, and as such the similarities here outweigh the differences.
All teams must understand how to both place individual contributors in a position to optimize their output, while simultaneously encouraging and fostering productive team collaboration. All teams, sporting or corporate alike, must strive for continuous success in changing landscape – whether changing market conditions, changing rules, or new competitors changing the game with new approaches. And all teams, today, must figure out how their human capital best adapts to and leverages technology (look at, for example, debates in sports scouting between the “old school” scouts who prioritize seeing college prospects with their own eyes, and those embracing and further developing analytics tools).
Given the overlap, then, there’s an obvious potential to learn from each other - and in particular for corporate teams to learn from the pursuit of elite performance of their sporting counterparts:
1. Appreciating the Primary Importance of Talent
People are key, and culture is king. Getting the right people “in the room”, and putting them in a position to succeed, is really then THE key task of a CEO, C suite, or individual manager. This means appropriately funding People initiatives across the board, and seeing People as the key organizational investment over the long term: not simply a necessary cost.
Part of this, of course, relevant to our focus at Uptimize, is in making a suitable effort to appreciate the universal but infinitely varied tool that each employee brings to work every day: their brain.
2. Leaning into Strengths
Sports teams, unlike corporate organizations, rarely prioritize generalists (whether consciously or sub-consciously). They recognize that what matters are strengths, and making the most of these strengths. They also recognize that individual contributors don’t need to be good at everything: instead, what matters is that the team as a whole is able to draw on and deploy the different skills needed at the highest possible level.
In the corporate world, by contrast, there is some way to go in moving from a mindset of fixing the things one is weaker at to truly letting people lean into their strengths and interests – and finding ways instead to support each other and combine talents in a way that those with ‘spikier’ skills profile can thrive.
3. The Importance of Coaching
Flowing from a sports team’s recognition of Talent as the organization’s core asset comes a related focus on coaching: how do we consistently invest in finding ways to improve the talent we have? While corporate employees may benefit from well-stocked learning libraries, individual and team coaching is often less structured, and less accessible. Meanwhile, internal corporate ‘coaches’ themselves also often lack training and support to build skills in this area.
4. Bringing Team Values to Life
Stated values are common across different types of organizations, but corporate teams could learn from sports teams in terms of the extent to which such values are prioritized, communicated – and lived. NFL General Manager John Lynch, for example, upon taking over the storied but down-on-its-luck San Francisco 49ers franchise, prioritized defining the physical and mental (think in the corporate world, both hard and soft skills as something of a comparative here) traits for what a Niner of the future really should be. Hiring against this profile, and widely circulating it as a set of values, has helped Lynch’s players coalesce and achieve significant success in the past 5 years.
Related to this is another sporting phenomenon, far more prevalent there in the corporate world, of really championing both devolved decision-making and devolved authority when it comes to values and team ethos: many of the best sports coaches look not just to set a strong culture and ethos but to actively encourage their players to police and maintain this themselves, and take on and enjoy the responsibility for doing so.
5. Truly Embracing Teamwork and Interdependence
Sports teams differ from their corporate counterparts in that they are often more clearly defined, less matrixed and less complex. Nevertheless, the corporate world can also take some valuable approaches from the sporting one when it comes to collaboration. For instance, in taking more time and effort to ask questions like “how can I make my teammates better?”, and in prioritizing such aptitude (and attitudes) in hiring processes.
With such an approach, corporate team members can and should leverage empathy to a new degree, with the clear goal of appreciating that their colleagues do not think in the same way as they do – and in finding more adaptable and productive ways to communicate and problem-solve.
6. Aligned Performance Metrics
Corporate teams, as discussed, face the challenge that their performance is often harder to timebox and quantify than that of a sports team. The latter, for example, can immediately see its runs and other stats in a baseball game, its time in motorsports. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that similar performance data shouldn’t at least be aspired to in the corporate world, and too often ‘performance’ is vague… resting the subjective perceptions of managers, rather than hard data. Where and how else then, as a corporate team, could you build tighter measures that lead to fairer and faster appraisal of individual and team output?
7. Embracing Rather than Fearing Risk
For too long, Risk in the corporate world has been a near dirty word… an unfortunate ingredient of investment decisions, one to be avoided or at least minimized at all costs. Sports teams in the elite performance sphere, by contrast, must and do often take a different attitude. Risks may not pay off, but are very much part of both individual performance (“swinging for the fences”) and team construction (taking a gamble on a recently injured, but previously high performing player, or as in the case of the Super Bowl winning Los Angeles Rams, taking a bold approach to trading for star players with typically tightly-held high draft picks). It’s a field where sensible risks are seen as worth taking, championed, and something to learn from, in a way that perhaps the corporate world could (appropriately) learn from too.
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