As we, at VIM Executive Coaching, appreciate sports as much as the next guy, we often listen (with amusement) for the trite and occasionally inane excuses when a team, expected to win and to be successful, loses in often unpredictable or even improbable manners. We are generally uncomfortable comparing business or association executive coaching dynamics to any game played with a sphere. It is amazing how often the two worlds are directly and incorrectly compared.
The Coaches
One, particularly confusing expression is when at the post-game press conference, a coach or media prognosticator says, “Well, the coaches can’t play the game, you know.” While it is a completely accurate statement (unless we go back the “ancient times” of player coaches), it is a rather hands-off statement.
In the sports world, it is akin to saying, “We prepared the team for victory, and while we coached them as best we could, they (not us) ultimately lost the game.” The “Teflon strategy” might work from time to time, but given enough losses not even the coaches are immune from firings. Some executive leaders have adopted the same hands-off justifications.
However, the analogies from sports to business don’t translate well. The time compression of a basketball, baseball or football game, as well as the condensed seasons don’t match up against business cycles.
The turnovers on a sports team through drafts, free agency, injuries, age or demotion to minor leagues don’t match up against a corporate department or executive team in quite the same way either. A 33-year-old executive who celebrates her 34th with her co-workers isn’t summarily fired because she is perceived as too old to perform a marketing presentation. Long-term experience usually counts in organizations but on a football team, for example, long-term experience is often a way of saying, “He is missing a step.”
While locker-room dynamics where players can’t stand one another might concern the players or coaches, we as fans could generally care less. However, when the marketing and sales departments despise one another to the point of diminishing sales, or when R&D commits mistakes resulting in regulatory problems, or even when IT and corporate security bicker over a serious cyber-security breach stemming from an unheeded threat, executive leadership can’t say, “Well, we can’t do their jobs for them.”
In the world of business, there can’t be an artificial, hands-off separation. To walk away from a team, to react rather than to respond to problems, to lose all sense of authenticity, to allow departments or sections to openly bicker or diminish the corporate mission is a direct failure of leadership. Ultimately management is to blame.
An NFL coach cannot jump onto the playing field and kick a field goal, but an executive leader must get involved “in the game” when any number of poorly executed plans, ineffective or adversarial problems occur within departments or there are product flaws or serious QA issues.
Play the Game
To not play the business or association “game” is to not be mindful. The executive who walks away from her or his responsibility is no longer mindful and no longer effective.
Mindfulness must be applied whether dealing with a disagreement between a few employees or in dealing with issues of a major reorganization or an acquisition. All trite analogies aside, to not be involved in the day-to-day business, to not be authentic and aware will result in failure all the way to the top.
The executive leadership game must be played and it must be played by everyone on the team.