Management lessons business leaders can learn from sports

The question we at times ask - Why do some business leaders play a sport? How does playing a sport help them?
 
The similarities between business and sports are captivating as both advocate striving for best performance. There is strong transference of learnings from sports to business. 

There is a growing consensus among business leaders that playing a sport offers valuable insights specific to elevating business performance. Recent research has identified distinct aspects of business that can hugely benefit from stories of sports excellence.
 
One of the significant aspects that has unfolded, links higher emotional intelligence to better sports performance. Emotional intelligence is crucial for effective leadership. 

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Business leaders who play sports regularly are believed to reflect higher emotional intelligence and are better posited to cope with business complexities. It helps elevate the potential for overall success. They form strong relationships with their teammates and inspire them to perform beyond expectations.
 
Secondly, teamwork and motivation have emerged as powerful analogies that business leaders have established through sports leadership. 

In the words of Michael Jordan, "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." 

It is by addressing the intrinsic needs of team members that business leaders can inspire and motivate them to perform for attainment of common goal.

There exists a symbiotic relationship between leadership and team performance. A strong leadership emulates cooperation, coordination, and synergies among team members to produce best practices that optimise business performance.
 
Finally, a sporting experience enlightens business leaders is the aptitude for collective learning. Professional sports reflect great swiftness and flexibility to learn or generate new knowledge to stay competitive in the game. 

For business leaders, at times, the organisation structures, processes, and hierarchies cause constraints in acquisition of new knowledge and sustained learning. 

This can decelerate the pace of business growth. The organisation may lose its competitive advantage due to late learning of new emerging trends that are induced by the fast changing business environment.
 
The other question we ask often - Does playing a sport make you a good manager? What are the lessons a manager can take from sports? Do sportspeople make good managers?
 
It is evident that sports nourish the mind, body, and soul, fostering positive personality traits. Over the past couple of decades, business managers have been drawing parallel organisational learnings from the world of sports leadership and experiences. 

These lessons broadly lay emphasis on team building and work structures. By focusing on these aspects, managers can score success in personal as well as business endeavours.
 
Organisations are increasingly relying on team performance. Useful models of teamwork have evolved from sports that help managers to build high-performing teams. 

Team sports advance unique learning of inculcating optimal mix of cooperation and competition among the teammates. 

Through this, managers learn to take cognizance of facts that lead to early success of their teams. Early success builds faith and commitment of team members towards their performance as a team. 

With a high drive for team identity and team spirit, conflicts emerging from group dynamics are handled harmoniously, without compromising on the team's productivity.
 
The framework of sports is built on performance mode and practice mode. But in the real business world, managers are completely engrossed in performance mode, leaving very little room for new ideas and innovation to sprout. 

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Sports, thus, offer a unique lesson to space of time and energy to experiment and innovate. Furthermore, it is the spirit of experiment that helps build in the spirit of resilience. 

It helps managers to understand that failures are part of the learning process and help build knowledge with every passing experience.  
 
Team sport promotes egalitarianism, a 'level playing field' that considers every team member to be equal. This is incongruent with organisations where team management is exercised within scope of hierarchies and structures. 

Managers must ensure that such hierarchies should not create boundaries that obstruct interactions and flow of creativity.
 
In a nutshell, managers and business leaders derive inspiring and noteworthy lessons from sports experiences. These are indeed an antidote to help address VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) anatomy encountered in regular discourse of business activities.
 
So, what are the management lessons sports can teach us?  Research has drawn interesting insights from sports-workplace comparisons. The suitability and applicability of these lessons are found useful at various managerial levels within the organisation. 

To underpin the unique management lessons, one can observe sports experience and learnings arising from performing/playing at a national or global level.
 
A typical game set-up can be observed by splitting it into 3 core parts - preparing before the game, performance during the game, and lastly, evaluating after the game. To this, striking similarities can be drawn with organisational setup. 

Firstly, to score success at the global level, organisations must prepare exceptionally well. This entails understanding global competition, recognising global consumers' needs, designing unique product offering, providing excellent after sales experience, and building a sustainable business model. 

Secondly, while performing to deliver, organisations must exhibit commitment, mobilise resources appropriately, and manage teams to produce optimal performance. 

Lastly, while evaluating the performance, organisations must take a critical look at processes, systems and activities ensuring benchmark performance against its global competitors.
 
It is also unique to note the orientation during a national or global event. In an international game, the team spirit surfaces above the linkage of states, districts, or counties. 

The team mitigates individual differences as well as rivalries and plays for make the country win. There is a strong desire to exhibit stamina, expend sweat and tears, to achieve a common mission. 

In an organisational context, victory connotes offering product/service par excellence in the global market. This means the leaders must emerge above the notions of acclaim for self or their teams, or their processes, or their systems. Rather the focus should only uphold the organisation's goal. 

The leaders must aim to provide a congenial work environment that promotes collaboration to flourish. Similar leadership behaviours have been reflected by ace sports players such as Mohammad Ali and Mike Horn. 
 
(Dr.Lata Dhir is Professor of leadership and organisational behaviour at Bhavan's SPJIMR.)