Is there Such Thing as a Bad Professional?

I often love to relate the sports world with the corporative world.

The last correlation was created by the article below:

The article tells the story of Patrick Bamford, an english player that had a promising youth career that started to fade away when playing for many different teams without showing what people expected from him, especially one of the world's biggest club teams Chelsea.

He has always been judged by the standards of the player it was assumed he was meant to be. Every loan spell that did not quite work out provided a little more evidence that he had not lived up to his early talent.

After receiving many chances, 2017-2018 season, it was thought that he somehow found his place: an average player. But two years after, he is a Premier League player (one of the world's most important and competitive leagues).

As written by Rory Smith on the article above: "More than that, he is a Premier League-standard player... A player written off as destined for life to be a second-tier workhorse has arrived in what is regarded widely — and occasionally even accurately — as the best domestic league in the world and has been transformed into Ruud van Nistelrooy."

What could be the reason for such a change in his career and productivity? According to his father, as he told once The Athletic, that he is working for a coach — Marcelo Bielsa — who “believes in him.”

I will let Rory Smith’s reflection be the starting point to what I can relate to the corporate world:

"Too often, as fans and as observers, we write off players when they fail to meet some indistinct performance standard. We determine that they are not good enough for this team or that level. We demand that they are dropped or sold or upgraded. We decide that they will never make it. ... Often, it is not so much that there are bad players. There are just players on the wrong team, or in the wrong system, or in a job that they are ill-suited to do."

He was, instead, waiting to find the right place, the right time, the right team, the right coach.

With that said, do you see any similarities that we can use outside of sports?

I believe the best coaches and team leaders are those that can identify within their team each person strengths and weaknesses, understand the best way to help and motivate them individually, so they can do their best for himself and his colleagues.

One of the best motivational coaches I had, knew exactly how I worked. Every time he started to see my motivation dropping, he use to put me on the subs team... every single time, that made me so angry that I came back to the starters team playing the best I could.

Or maybe I can use an example of when I moved to Chile and their soccer style was faster and more agressive than Brazil that I couldn't perform the same as I use to. And this one coach moved me to a different position that improved my game for years to follow.

With all said, I have two questions for you:

• Have you ever had an experience in your life like Patrick Bamford's and Marcelo Bielsa? In which a player/professional had a positive change in his career because of a coach/leader?
• Why do we see more examples like this in sports than in the corporate world? Is it because we are too focused on quotas, KPIs, forecasts and forget that it's our people that will make you reach those numbers? And that working first with the human side can greatly impact your numbers?

A reminder that judging players is often not quite so straightforward as decreeing some good enough and others not good enough

Please share your thoughts on both, I would love to read those.