Synergy of Skills: Navigating the Intersection of Business / Consulting Skills and Coaching in the Sports Arena

Introduction

Office during the day, volleyball gym during the night. Most days, I find myself straddling two worlds. As a project and event management consultant at HFP, daylight is spent advising our clients host city management matters and strategic projects of sports organizations. Come evening, I step onto the volleyball court as head coach of bizepsvolleys Bonn.

This article deals with how skills can be transferred between competitive sport, the domain of coaching, and business-related expertise at an overview-level. Also, it aims to be an argument for not being afraid to hire athletes or coaches because of their valuable transferable skills and despite their time constraints. At the same time, I hope my experiences can be a motivation for anybody striving to pursue a dual career path, especially in the area of high-level sport.

On the broadest of terms, I am advising to actively identify and then use transferable skills to your advantage, as we all have unique and diverse backgrounds which go beyond education and professional experiences. Happy reading!

Background

Business / Consulting: Acquiring and Applying Skills

At HFP, our main competence is to provide structure, knowledge, and tools for complex projects in the area of sports, especially in relation to sport events. Advising a diverse spectrum, from sports federations to city councils, we are currently immersed in planning efforts for EURO 2024. Amidst the whirlwind of deadlines and workshops, the ability to distill complex information into visual narratives and communicate effectively is a cornerstone of our success.

Coaching: The Art of Managing People

This spring marked a pivotal moment as I assumed the role of head coach for bizepsvolleys Bonn in the third division. Fortunately, I neither changed clubs (SSF Bonn) nor the environment (Hardtberghalle Bonn), which significantly smoothens the transition. For multiple years, I coached grassroots volleyball parallel to my own playing career. My coaching knowledge is accumulated through books, classes, and phenomenal mentoring by one of my own former coaches. This meant that I instantly became head coach with full autonomy, got the opportunity to learn-by-doing and lead a team since day one.

Bridging the Gap: Synergy and Transferable skills

Business / Consulting --> Coaching

Every coach is engaged in management (every coach is also engaged in psychology, as well as many other disciplines, but that is a topic for a different article). Coming from a consulting or business background, you are able to translate multiple hard skills to coaching. Imagine turning match plans and season strategies into visually appealing charts and graphs using trusty Microsoft Office tools. Professionalism can become a coaching superpower as you create documents that captivate your players, making them eager to follow instructions.

Client-first, a mantra every consultant and service provider lives by, also serves as a great motto for coaches if you substitute client for team. The team is always the top priority, and coaches work for the team, not the other way around. Drawing from the service industry, I can hone interpersonal skills to elevate my coaching. As a coach, you are dealing with people, not Xs and Os on a chalkboard. The way you interact with players, your kindness, how you deal with and react to their emotions influences your team’s play more than you can imagine.

One more: Organizational skills aren't just for offices and daily stand-ups – they're crucial to every coach's success. Time management becomes an art, whether you're a one-person show or part of a coaching team juggling practice plans, game strategies, self-scouting, opponent-scouting, and ever-important feedback loops with players. I am using a Microsoft Teams planner, a Notion board and multiple Excel-sheets just for my own organization. It might seam redundant to do all this when you are working alone, but it is the way I learned to work effectively, and it helps me to keep track of everything that’s going on in my team.

Coaching -->?Business / Consulting

This section partially covers both coaching-specific skills, as well as overall skills stemming from competitive sport, which apply to high-level athletes and coaches equally. Competitive sport consumes a lot of time and shapes a person’s mindset vividly, which, in turn, fosters a multitude of transferable skills.

Leadership… thousands of books and millions of pages are written on leadership and its different styles (LinkedIn is also full of leadership-influencers). Leading a sports team can propel you as a leader in business, as your leadership skills are battle-tested in real high-pressure situations. I do believe that there are some genetic characteristics that foster leadership skills. However, as with most other skills, leadership can be trained, and you will get better the more experience you gather. Coaching a sports team provides you with the opportunity to lead early on and you can put your leadership skills to test.

Decisions, decisions: Where coaches thrive. Coaches are continuous decision-makers, steering through weekly focuses, practice structures, weekend line-ups, time-outs, and substitutions. Business roles with high-volume decision-making become easier for coaches, who routinely make calls in the face of uncertainty ... a skill that eludes many in the business world.

The last item will not come as a surprise for athletes and coaches alike: resilience and self-evaluation are forged in the brutality of competition. In a world where wins and losses are harsh realities, coaches and athletes don't have the luxury of blaming external factors (the market, inflation, etc.). The blunt feedback, where every victory and defeat is palpable, becomes a valuable asset when transferring them to the business world. The relentless pursuit of improvement every week and being extremely hard on yourself are athletes’ and coaches’ second nature, setting you apart in the nuanced landscape of business where success is painted in shades of grey.

Transferable Skills: Be Unique

Beyond the realms of coaching and consulting, there exists a vast tapestry of transferable skills, each having a unique narrative of professional versatility. Trained psychologists, for instance, bring a profound understanding of human behavior and motivation, enriching not only coaching strategies but also enhancing client interactions in the consulting arena. Service industry professionals, such as call-center agents or waitstaff possess invaluable skills that seamlessly translate into the dynamic demands of business, coaching, and many other industries. Educators find their skills transcending the classroom into various domains. The list goes on and on. The essence lies in recognizing the wealth of skills embedded in diverse professional experiences and using them as catalysts for success elsewhere, where your competition might lack your specific skill set. Thus, my arguments transcend coaching and consulting - embrace the entirety of your skills to become a unique individual in whichever area you would like to strive in.

Navigating Dual Careers: Business and Competitive Sports

After laying out the synergies and transferable skills, coaches (and athletes) exhibit, it is equally important to address drawbacks, as well as limitations of pursuing two career paths, especially with one being competitive sports, which adheres to strict time schedules. Three times a week, I cannot stay late in the office, lunch “breaks” consist of practice planning while stuffing in some food and I always feel behind on coaching to dos when things get busier in the office.

Relating back to transferable skills, organization-skills are the dual-careerists’ best friends. Even if time is limited, you cannot afford to fall behind due to forgetting an important deadline or double-booking calendar slots. Plan far ahead and take some time multiple times a day to organize yourself, structure your to dos and go through the next steps of both your endeavors. Nonetheless, no matter how organized, dual careerists will have to accept certain disadvantages in comparison to their peers, due to their lack of time or full dedication. It is then up to recruiters and managers (as well as yourself) to weigh transferable skills to time constraints and availability issues.

In order to keep this article short, I will not dive into the subject of work/coach/life balance, which is probably the most difficult part of it all, but certainly deserves a mention (perhaps a topic for another time).

Conclusion

In summary, the combination of business/consulting skills with coaching expertise forms a potent synergy that transcends the boundaries of seemingly disparate worlds.

Looking ahead, future articles might delve deeper into specific transferable skills, exploring how to leverage them effectively in both professional sports coaching and business consulting, as this piece serves rather as a surface-level overview and introduction. For instance, a focus on setting up a seasonal plan and pre-season team meetings based on consulting skills could provide a practical guide for those aspiring to navigate the intersection of these two rewarding careers.

Join the discourse, share your reflections, and let's continue exploring synergies between business and sports.

?