Football, Business & Softs

Sport and Business, the great analogy…

Sport is perceived to be the best school of life for its ability to teach skills, values, attitudes, perseverance, and management of all kind of emotions. Sport is also a great analogy to the Business and Corporate worlds.

There is an expectation that good professional players will make the best coaches, and more average players might just turn into coach assistants. There is often the same expectation that the best professionals, delivering well in their day-to-day job, will turn into being the best leaders in an organization.

The missing piece

Is it actually the case? Sport is actually full of examples where fantastic players turned into bad coaches and struggling players into fantastic coaches. Jose Mourinho, Arsène Wenger, Patrick Moratouglou for example did not stand out as outstanding players on a pitch or a court, while Magic Johnson or Diego Maradona never became role-model coaches either.

Coaching in sports means assisting athletes in developing their abilities to full potential and make them able to work as a team. It is about understanding the strengths and unicity of each player and get them to succeed together, motivate them, or reassure them after a defeat, deal with internal conflicts, manage own frustration and the one of the substitutes, keep the big picture in mind, get them to go the extra mile during training or getting their full attention to follow instruction. It is about giving clear and short messages, ideally one key give-away during the game, to ensure that instructions will be followed even when under tremendous stress. Lastly it is also about analyzing the situation and adapt to it quickly with the right tactic or strategy.

The right combo

Knowledge of the game and past experience in this case are nothing without the right soft skills. There are no good or bad soft skills, everyone has thankfully a different set of skills that make them unique. That is why some are great coaches and some are not as good.

A good coach is enthusiastic, focused, analytical, respectful, good communicator but also needs to build strong relations with the players and gain their respect through honestly, respect and empathy. How to be compassionate without being a good listener?

Why should it be different in an organization? Why are soft skills not always fully assessed when managing talents, at all level of an organization, so that everyone can be in a position to deliver the best of themselves for the team or for the organization. The next manager may well be this competent clerk who has all the right mix of soft skills to lead others.

At fairception we help people map their soft skills, reliably through the eyes of others. There is no right or wrong combo of skills, only the one where someone is either in the right spot or in the wrong spot looking forward. The latter generally leads to frustration and a bitter sense of waste.

After intense self-reflection and using the outcome of the prototype of fairception last summer we have reached one conclusion within the team. None of us will be the next coach of Manchester United or Bayer Munich !, not only because we lack essential football knowledge, but also because – among other weaknesses – frustration management is not our top skill ! But that is perfectly OK... our strengths are elsewhere!