I am not a sports fan, and when I am leading team building & leadership retreats for Corporate Teams the topic comes up.
I have lead programs with professional and college level sports teams, and learned a great deal about the similarities and differences.
When someone tells me how Football or Baseball or Hockey or choose your sport are great example of organizations and team-work. They make interesting points and I politely listen, and still don’t really care about sports.
When I tell them I am not really a sports fan, the response is generally, What do you enjoy doing? My lame response, Reading books and writing about Team Development & Leadership, plus philosophy. Plus the whole idea of Fandom freaks me out.
While these sports teams are True Teams they all work together to achieve a common goal they are not Managerial-Accountability-Hierarchies.
More examples;
- They are NOT built up of manager-subordinate role relationships.
- They are collectives of individuals working with a coach – and with professional athletes, they are collectives of entrepreneurs on contract fee for service and not on salary in a working organization with managers and subordinates.
- For the team to work well in the field, they have to be able to sustain a cooperative team-work mode.
What do you think?
Are you a sports fan? What analogies do you find with sports and your work? How is being on a sports team and work team different? What would happen if sports teams were operated like a corporate organization? What would happen if we ran our corporate-organizations like sports teams?
michael cardus is create-learning
Mike, right on target. I have never had a candidate apply for a job with their agent in the room. Professional sports figures are more like a small business enterprise. -TF
Thank you Tom.
I often wonder what would our workplace look like it it operated like sports teams?