We are currently
saturated with sporting events. Sport needs management and leadership like any
organisation does; and more visibly than most, professional sports people need
to perform. Of course performance is exactly what my company is about, although
we don’t normally deal with ‘sport’. That is, until now: the great athlete and
motivational speaker Kriss Akabusi recently became a licensee of our product,
and I guess this is a portent of the times! Kriss can speak for himself but it
is time for us perhaps to talk of performance in sport.
We have a very
simple formula that sums up the three core components of performance in any
walk of life: first, direction; second, skills and knowledge; and third,
motivation.
Direction is our homely
word for what at corporate level is called something else: strategy. The
business needs a strategy. On a personal level we call ‘direction’ our career.
And it can be summed up by reflecting on the vision, the goals and objectives,
and the process and methods of how we achieve these.
Not all sports are
equal. In some, the strategy is of necessity relatively simple. There is a
world of difference between darts and fencing; the former can virtually be won
on skill alone, whereas the latter is far more complex – skill is vital, but so
are a host of other factors – including environment, psychology, understanding
the referee, choice of blade, stamina, style, even left or right-handedness – and
judging the correct response to an opponent is critical.
In one-on-one
sports the great Chinese kung fu masters summed up a profound truth: to win,
first is courage (mind set and passion), second is strength (think – the tennis
marathon of Isner and Mahut – who weakens first?), and third is kung fu (technical ability). That is the priority
order.
A further
complication arises with team sports like football. Here the problem is
compounded because each individual’s ability has to be leveraged with every
member of the team. So management, perhaps, is even more critical than simply
having a ‘coach’.
The Mapping Motivation Series 