Sports vs. Business Leadership: Parallels and Differences

On January 14 the board of the Hellenic Business Association of Serbia, invited the famous basketball coach Mr. Dusan “Duda” Ivkovic to speak to its members and friends about leadership, focusing on how he managed to lead the Olympiakos basketball team in winning the 2011-2012 Euroleague, despite working with a relatively low budget and a roster including many young players. They also invited Mr. Spiros Paolinelis to draw parallels and identify differences between leadership in sports and leadership in business.

Here is Mr. Paolinelis’ presentation.

Thank you for inviting me to share the podium with such a great coach as Mr. Ivkovich.

I will submit to you some parallels and some differences between sports and business. Along the way I will mention some key elements of performance and if you wish, you can make a mental note of how you rate your own organization against them.

(Winning)

It’s all about winning.

In sports “Winning” is clearly defined and explained. So are the contributions to the “win” of every player or team member.

In Business, what is a “win” is not always so clear. Typically, it is expressed in financial terms: profits, market share etc. Is it always the right or the most important “mountain to conquer?”

When I ask my clients “what are the fights you have to win in order to achieve your company’s goals, in order to become what you want to become?” they always come up with things like “innovation”, “product quality/excellence”, “customer satisfaction”, “reliability”, “the engagement of our people” etc. Which means that profits are not a goal per se, but the outcome of winning some other much more important fights. By the way, this is what my mentor and leadership guru, Ken Blanchard, said but I am glad to say that this also what was said about Steve Jobs in an obituary in Bloomberg: “Steve taught us that profits are not the goal but the outcome of something much more important than that.”

(Goal setting)

But it’s more than that: In an interview Duda said that when Olympiakos made it to the 16, and after he saw the draw, he told his players “If we make it to the round robin, it will be a big success”. This sheds a different light to “goal setting”. Goals are the outcome of a rigorous, continuous discussion focused on “what is the best we can do now”. Because the responsibility of a good leader, much the same as for a good coach is to bring the best out of his people, help them deliver to their full potential. And as he does so, he keeps asking “what are the obstacles for doing better” and he tries to remove these obstacles, and the potential grows and grows and then …the “miracle” happens! Olympiakos wins the Euroleague.

Not so much a miracle actually but the outcome of great leadership! And we have to thank Mr. Ivkovic for that, and this is said full-heartedly by a Panathinaikos supporter!

Great company leaders do exactly the same. They define the areas where they want to achieve results e.g. finance, clients, people, and they set respective goals. What they do differently than the not so great leaders, is that, as Jack Welch of GE said, “we do not want these objectives to be the ‘ball and chain’ that our people drag around through the year. We always look for what is the best that can be done, given the actual circumstances and we assess our people vs. this”.

But not all business leaders do that.

(Keeping score)

In sports “keeping score” is easy and transparent. And not only for the final score: e.g. in basket-ball they keep team and individual statistics. They have clear and meaningful metrics.

In business, we call them KPI’s. But they are not always meaningful and in the worst cases, they take a life of their own, so that people tend to “manage” and manipulate the KPIs.

(Clarity of roles and expectations)

In sports, when you have a good coach, every player, and every team member has clear roles. Depending on how the game develops roles can change, players can change. But at every moment everybody is clear about his role and what he is expected to achieve. In addition, the impact of his contribution is obvious to everybody.

Great business leaders do the same. The not so great …. well, they don’t. At best, they tell their people what to do (job description), not what they should achieve as a result. It’s like Duda telling his guy “you chase Navarro around and when he tries to shoot, you jump in front of him.”

(Right People)

In sports, good coaches know what kind of players they want, and they apply a rigorous selection process.

By the way, I believe that one reason that this selection process is so rigorous is that in sports you cannot hide performance. It is there in public, in an open view.

In business, the truth is that we can hide performance, and I believe that this is a big difference, which explains many other differences, including the phenomenon of many organizations doing a lot of useless stuff.

Sports are the excellent example of an inverted pyramid in action: The service providers, i.e. the players, are at the top. Everybody else is there to support them. Great companies do the same. Of course you will say “But these players are paid a lot of money, we do not pay our people that much”. Is it a good reason not to support them as best as you can? Or is it rather one more reason for doing even more so?

(Developing people)

Great coaches ask constantly “What these people need, in order to win?” and this is an on-going discussion. Great business leaders do exactly the same. And they do their best to ensure that their people get what they need: it can be a new skill, a new tool, a new system, or support when they feel down.

(Feedback)

Great coaches give instant, clear unambiguous feedback. They do not wait for the end of the championship to tell their player what they did right or wrong, how to correct their mistakes, how to build on their strengths. When a match is lost, they prepare the team for the next win, there and then.

Great organizations and great leaders do exactly the same. They believe that their job is “to help their people win at work”, that their job is not just to mark the exam papers of their people, but instead, they see that their job is to help everybody get an A.

(Culture)

Great teams and great coaches create the right culture, which helps the team keep winning again and again. They know that they need people with a big ego, who are submitting their ego to the benefit of the team.

In an interview, Johan Cruyff, who set the foundations of Barcelona said about the Real players: “who taught these boys behave like this? Look at how the Barcelona boys behave in and out of the field. They are down to earth people.”

You may not know this, but the All Blacks, the New Zealand national rugby team, is the most successful sports team, having won the most titles in the last 100 years. An ex-captain of the All Blacks said, “If you have a star player and he has the wrong attitude, get rid of him.”

Companies which are great or want to become great do exactly the same!

Now, coming back to the question what “is different between sports and business”, I will mention two:

▪ As I said earlier, in sports you cannot hide performance. In business you can, if you wish. But it’s only an option we have, but not one which we have to exercise.

▪ The other big difference, and you have no other option here, is that in sports teams and athletes compete a few times a year. In business, your people compete many times, every single day. It is a personal one-to-one fight: the salesperson of a bank brunch vs. the salesperson of the branches of the others bank. The logistic / supply chain person of your company vs. his counterparts of your competitors, competing to make products available in perfect condition, quicker, at lower cost etc. etc. In my mind, it only means that they have to do what great coaches do, only more of it, i.e. help them become winners!

Thank you!