From Pitch to Office
30/06/10
As a National Rugby Union coach and having worked with many elite players over the past seven years of all ages, both male and female, it has been increasingly apparent that team sports, of any kind, have such a huge resemblance to our working practices. All teams will have an array of skill sets, different characters that need to be managed in different ways and a whole range of personal drivers and motivational needs. So why coach them differently??
Let us review the similarities and then give consideration to using good, sound sports coaching techniques to maximise our business performance.
Our business has a strategy, whether that be to increase turnover, profit, expand our market share, venture into new business areas, reinforce our barriers to entry from competitors or merely try to remain trading! To execute this we create a plan to which we link our resources, recruiting or downsizing accordingly and allocate an element of risk to various options for delivery and then manage our team to succeed. Are we now talking about our business or our sports team? Already the similarities make it too close to call.
So do we create our plan, our strategy, based on our resources (our players) or do we decide what we want and then recruit / re-skill to match the need? The reality is that if we want something different we need to coach our team differently, the same methods of coaching will create the same route for delivery. You can ‘buy in’ to create an immediate change in terms of skill sets though how would that negatively affect your ‘full back’ who has been training and playing for you for the last 5 years with good results? You must understand your team, continuously review their skills and seek to develop and shape those with corporate strategy / team plans very much in mind. Taking an interest in every player, understanding their motivational drivers and executing a range of different coaching tools and techniques is imperative for success. Each and every team member has a very important role to play and as such inclusivity and empowerment are essential in leading your players to achieving corporate goals or ‘lifting that cup’.
Notwithstanding our Nations current world cup efforts, why is it that we treat and coach our sports teams with far more passion and desire to achieve than we do the people in our businesses? Simply, we engage in a mode illustrated by the wording in the second paragraph of this brief article. People, team, colleagues with their own needs and drivers are not considered. They are now resources to ensure the business achieves what the business wants and if the resource doesn’t match we change it, people don’t matter – the corporate goal has taken priority! This is where we must take the lead from our sporting heritage and utilise the array of sports coaching tools to engage with our people, maximise their learning and development and gear the business around what is achievable in both the short and long term. Your team is only as good as the weakest player, let us make sure we spend our management time effectively to maximise performance.
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