George Orwell’s The Sporting Sprit vividly stays on from my 6th grade onwards. The author’s point of view was that sports created animosity and does not actually create the so called sporting sprit. I quite do not agree with George Orwell on that. Sports has promoted mutual respect baring few sporadic incidence that we can clearly neglect. On the other hand sports has been a change agent, opportunity for young people across the globe to make a career out of it rather than drift into some unethical activities especially in war ravaged countries.
All those who have played a sport at a formidable level very well know that it is intense competition on the field and ends with a good shake-hand and mutual respect off it. Sports promotes sporting sprit or otherwise is a separate debate for some other day.
Sports has for sure caught some attention from Leader’s in corporate companies and the B-schools in charming their audience with sports analogies. Sports analogies have sure caught the interest levels of speeches and writings.
But most often than not, I always feel the wrong analogies are being promulgated in the name of inspiration or insights to the audience. In my point of view, it is abusing the term analogy.
2010-11 premier league season saw some good competitive matches and one of it was Manchester United’s home game against Manchester City. Wayne Rooney in his prime scored a stunner and subsequently went on to win the game. When one of my Leader, not sure where he picked this up from, but was drawing the goal scored by Wayne Rooney in comparison with team strategy. The explanation given was that, the Manchester City players were tall and difficult to beat them in the air and hence the cross from the flank was strategically planed to be away from the goal and Rooney was able to do a bicycle kick to score. That was quite ridiculous for someone who knew the game. That goal was pure instinctive and there cannot be an analogy drawn in comparison with team strategy.
Yes, there has been wrong analogies drawn now and then but we cannot ignore the fact that a team sport has many things to learn from. The success or failure of the strategies, spontaneity and plans from A to Z are all live for us to see and analyse, it is on a platter. Yet it was difficulty to draw parallel from a sporting team to corporate teams.
I have tried understanding this for few years now and I just could not get my head around it. One thing is for sure. The team that we are dealing with is team that competes in a game and the team completing a task in a big corporate office are completely in two different spectrum.
Let us make the subject clear
The comparison is between the team that is the corner stone for business in sports club and a big corporate office scenarios. The comparison is because sports teams have somehow mastered the art of high performance but the teams in these corporates are lagging way behind and also spends a fortune to get things right.
The Vision
The sports team has one and only one longterm vision, one short teams goal and constantly works towards it. Where as the team in a corporates, there are too many teams and too many fit cap arrangements, no empowerment on the vision or rather no vision at all and the goal post keeps shifting constantly. Too many in the hierarchies, too many stakeholders with vested interests and too may interventions from outside. There is no comparison as prioritisation is fairly straight forward in a sports team compared to a team in a corporate.
The Motivation
There is always a sense that the rewards, recognition and incentives do not have integrity it should have. A sense of disappointment looms large after every cycle of rewards and recognition. There are instances when the team members are made to feel like a liability when they are actually generating revenue. Whereas in a sports team, motivation can be from many sources, there are no integrity issues as it is for all to see. If integrity issues crops up, the performance is directly impacted.
Corporate big heads have tried hard to put a one size fits all rewards and recognition programs and then break this stereotype and claim they are moving away from one size fits all. But in reality it is the same as the difference they bring in is only at level or two below but by and large one size fits all.
Team Formation
The sports team has a well defined set of players to achieve the task in hand. So improvement, change and the creative ideas can be implemented with minimum fuss. Corporate teams just does not have an optimum team size. The team size is hypothetical based on the requirement and the resource availability. There is no comparison here as well. Too much hierarchy to take decisions and and less powers for the person working on it.
So analogies drawn from sports are never a fair one. But yet collaboration, camaraderie and any other team sprit related jargons are filled in corporate world than where it actually matters. But the problems will remain as far as corporates address their workforce as teams.
If the corporates really mean to solve this problem of return of investment on their teams especially the ones who are the cornerstone of their business then there has to be some serious decision making with respect to empowering on vision or goal, integrity in rewards and recognition process and optimal team structure by taking a leaf out of these sports teams. This also requires some serious unlearning which is a tough ask with ego and politics running high these ideas would be dismissed with classic comments like “we are not here to solve world hunger”.
My experience in the corporate world has always been that collaboration has been shunted by too much interference and wrong priority. The question to the leaders are what is that you promoting in your teams…”Improve the team’s performance to achieve the goal or encourage individual to achieve their goal?”. If the later is promoted employees are bound to work towards not being blamed versus taking accountability for the team task.
For now any sports analogy will continue to be a fancy line on the powerpoint.
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