The Sporting Team Analogy

Sporting teams have strong coaching staffs. Coaching staffs that work with their athletes/players to develop their knowledge of the sport, to train them both physically and mentality so that they can perform at the peak of their ability. They use training drills, videos of their performances, one on one reviews, physiotherapists, and sports psychologists. They have performance metrics, completed passes, intercepts, tackles, forced errors, unforced errors, backhands, forehands, volleys, first serves in, shots on goal, percentage of fairways hit, greens made in regulation, putts taken, oxygen intake rates, heart rates, etc. The coaching staffs decide who is on the team, who is not, who they need to let go and where they need to recruit.

The reason why sporting teams spend so much time and money on coaching, training and developing is because on game day the coaching staff can’t run out on to the field. There is also an easily seen direct link between all this work off the field and the results on the field.

Translate this sporting team analogy into modern day management practices. In many organizations the management team sits around a conference room table looking at last month’s results. “We lost more than we won”, says a surprised manager, “how come?” “It was probably because our team didn’t work hard enough” replies another. “I think you’re right, let’s tell them to work harder on the field”. This may sound over-simplified but how many senior managers actually go to the shop floor, the place where the real activity takes place. Instead they rely on the results being reported back to them usually in the form of financial numbers. It is a bit like a coach never going to a game and waiting to see the final scores to decide how to improve the team’s performance.

You see this all the time in organizations where the senior managers gather together in a conference room or offsite and discuss the results and how to improve them. What is missing is any information on what is happening at the shop floor. There seems to be this lack of understanding that if you can improve the day to day activities the end results will improve.
We think that it would be ridiculous for a coach not to go to the game. Yet in our professional organizations we don’t go to the game. We don’t work out the right performance metrics; we don’t measure them nor coach our people on how they can improve their performance.

Does your senior management team operate by reading the scores in Monday’s paper and wonder why they are not on target? Does your child’s little league team get more coaching than your employees?