For anyone who hasn't been living under a rock, or isn't living in America, you know that we're in the early part of the NCAA
Basketball Championships. I'm happy this year because my local team, the Syracuse Orange, is not only in the tournament, but is
doing well thus far.
Group sports always offer us a unique look into relationships between employees, managers, and teams. In most businesses, it's
hard to look at how the team, or department, is working together because you have to get around desks, cubicles, phones, offices,
and the interaction with customers, both from the outside and from within. But with team sports, you see it all. If I may, I'd
like to highlight some things using the analogy of sports teams, kind of like how I looked at our early engagement in a newsletter titled
Iraq from a management
perspective some years ago. In my opinion, if more managers and leaders watched sports and learned the correct lessons
from them, they would have more efficient workers and create better working environments. They're not perfect, though, as we'll see.
Obviously the coach is the director of the department. The coach's word is law, and everyone else defers to the coach for
instructions. Assistant coaches are supervisors; some are senior level supervisors, which gives them more power than others,
but they're supervisors nonetheless. None of these supervisors have the right to "hire or fire" the employees, but they do get
to make recommendations which could get the employee fired. The players are the employees, which also means that, collectively,
they're the team.
From the beginning, the director and the supervisors meet, and they meet often. The director needs to know that everyone is
on the same page, and that everyone knows what their responsibility is. In sports, the director takes no chances with
supervisors that don't know their job. Luckily, quite often, they end up hiring supervisors who were previously employees for
them, which gives the supervisors a nice jump on how things work. The one thing in sports that doesn't happen as often is for
supervisors to be hired to have current employees that now report to them as former co-workers. Other than that, the structure
is the same.
In business, directors and supervisors don't always meet all that often, and aren't always on the same page. In business, sometimes
directors don't have full confidence in the abilities of their supervisors, which means they're not in full control of the team.
Without full control of the team, any success is probably built on luck, and any failures directly reside with them.
In sports, once the director and the supervisors are on the same page, they engage the employees together. The director takes the
lead and sets the tone, then each supervisor goes off with their individual groups to handle the more detailed part of both
instruction and work. Supervisors are hands on with their employees, and they build up a rapport that brings about a sense of trust
between both parties. These supervisors never undermine the wishes of the director, and always makes sure everyone has their eyes
on the ultimate prize.
In business, supervisors often take on the negative side of their directors. They have their own work to attend to, and only work
with the employees when things aren't running well. They're not as proactive, and they never really know the type of work their
employees are doing, or are capable of. Also, sometimes they expect more loyalty to them than to the director, and will sometimes
undermine the wishes of the director to achieve their own goals, even if their only goal is to make the director look bad. Of course,
the directors have allowed this to happen, because they haven't taken upon themselves the next step that, in sports, the directors do.
That next step is bringing the entire team back together and going through the paces, with the director in charge overseeing the
entire process, making changes and comments along the way, taking the education process on because, after all, that's the director's
role. The director spends a lot of time doing this, then steps back once again as the supervisors take the employees they're responsible
for aside again to work with them. This time, though, the director visits each smaller group to see if progress is being made, if
everyone is on the same page, and is ready to offer suggestions and assistance as necessary.
In business, most directors spend their time with other directors in the business instead of with their own supervisors and employees.
Sure, there can be a lot of meetings, but even if fifty percent of the time for a director is spent in meetings, that other fifty
percent must have a piece allocated for interacting with each individual group while also making sure the supervisors are staying on
the course that was agreed upon.
Finally, it's time for the performance of the entire team, and, lo and behold, even with all the work and training the team isn't
perfect. Teams aren't perfect for many reasons, the first of which being that no person is perfect, and therefore teams can't be
perfect. Another reason is that teams are made up of people of varying talents and abilities; sports is the perfect analogy for
what makes up diversity, even though many people don't see it. In sports, people not only come from different states and cities
and countries, but different socio-economic backgrounds. The director treats them all "fairly", though some fairness is easier or
harder on some of the employees. In sports, the directors best talent is figuring out who to handle with kid gloves and who to put
more pressure on to perform. Most of the time they get it right, but even they realize that, sometimes, they get it wrong.
In business, directors and supervisors figure if they haven't heard about any problems, everything is running perfect, but because
they're not proactive, when things start going wrong often it's going to take a long time to correct those issues. Also, because in
business many supervisors and directors haven't had a lot of training as it pertains to working with others, they haven't developed
the skills needed to work with people from varied backgrounds and with different talents and skills, so tensions can arise without
their knowing it and, thus, the team is flawed, the office is flawed, and there's no possibility of anything running at even peak
efficiency, let alone perfection. Directors need to be willing to learn the skills they need to work with a team, and they need to
be willing to spend the money for their supervisors to attain these skills also. Or, if they can't do that, then directors need to
find other ways to help their supervisors learn these skills. In many cases, not teaching these skills can lead to claims of harassment
and discrimination; which option is more cost effective in the end?
Finally, there are some negative behaviors that we see that we need to make sure we avoid as managers and leaders in business. One,
we can't yell at our employees the way directors do in sports. We can't berate employees in front of others. We can't allow
ourselves to lose control in public; we must always maintain our decorum. We don't have the luxury of pulling an employee and putting
another employee into that position in short bursts; the cost and time of replacing employees can be enormous. As it is, in sports,
the reason teams often don't win more than one year in a row is because personnel is always changing for one reason or another, whereas
in business, your secondary goal is to keep the number of employees you're always having to replace down to a minimum. We also have to
be cautious not to consistently talk up one employee over the others, even when that employee exhibits skills the other employees can't
attain. That is, unless we can find ways to promote that employee so that they either end up in a leadership position or an independent
position where they can shine because they're responsible for themselves and not the team as much.
As with many other things, sports has its place in the pantheon of every society. And, if viewed with a discriminating eye,
managers and leaders can learn a lot from how the teams in these sports structure themselves, and can apply some of the principles,
at least the positive ones, to their own businesses. As with sports, the ultimate goal should always be to win. Unlike sports, in
business, often the employees don't know what "win" means for them.
Leaders, you have a lot of work to do. Let's get going, and become consistent winners in your field.