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Chapter 21
The Myth that Sport Teams and Work Teams Are Similar

People who like pro sports have a special disadvantage in team building: they expect the process to mirror their favorite sports team.

This expectation nearly always fails, and is especially unpleasant for other team members who don’t happen to follow pro sports. Posting action pictures of Michael Jordan or Randy Moss or [soccer person], in hopes of engendering feelings of healthy competition and stellar performance, just doesn’t connect for other people. But try explaining that to pro sports fans.

This disconnect was brought home to us by the publication a couple years ago of Everyone’s a Coach, a collaboration between Ken (One-Minute Manager) Blanchard and Don Shula, Hall of Fame coach of the Miami Dolphins football team.

We love Ken Blanchard, and we admire Coach Shula. And the book itself is harmless enough, a melange of inspiring sports stories and happy team talk.

But then USA Today interviewed us for an article on the book, and the analogy between coaching pro sports teams and ordinary work teams. The paper wanted us to endorse the concept. Based on our experiences with teams, we couldn’t do it.

Sports teams at the pro level are not quite teams in the sense that we use the words. They are really entertainment teams, and they perform very well under enormous stress. But there's no carryover to our kind of teams.

True, sports teams are groups of people with selected areas of expertise, who share a common goal (winning). But they are led the old-fashioned way, by a supervisor/coach, who is above them in the hierarchy.

Can a sports team be “self-directed”? A self-directed sports team -- everyone doing what he or she thinks is best, and hoping it all fits together -- usually means a really mean head coach is about to be hired.

Do sport teams empower individual team members to make decisions on their own? (“Instead of cutting to the left, as the play calls for, I think I’ll cut to the right. I have a crazy hunch it will pay off.”)

Do sports teams create an atmosphere where players are allowed to -- encouraged to -- make mistakes? (“That was great, the way you roughed the kicker in there, Bruno, and got us a 20 yard penalty. Your learning curve is really up there.”)

Sports teams are somewhat cross-functional. A team of 50 players will have many specialists. But the different functions seldom put their heads together. Offensive players may be friendly with defensive players – but they do not work together. And no one talks to the kicker.

The argument really breaks down over compensation and rewards. True teams are compensated at least partially on a team basis. One player helps another at the same position to succeed. Sports teams are dominated by superstars who take the lion’s share of rewards, with journeymen and practice team members scrambling to pick up the scraps. Everyone is paid on individual contracts, according to individual not team performance. And good, loyal players are traded away the moment 'the team' nears its salary cap.

Professional athletes know about only a narrow bandwidth of teamship. Just making the team is so competitive, that a collaborative atmosphere afterward is hard to maintain. The first thing many athletes instruct their agents to negotiate is private rooms on the road. It used to be said of the Boston Red Sox, circa 1985, that after games they’d leave in 45 cabs.

Do sports teams show the kind of loyalty and confidence to team members that they need to do good work? (“Sorry you hurt your ankle, Leroy. We’re trading you to Cleveland.”)

Then there is the issue of gender and sensibility. Many men like pro sports, and some women like pro sports. But though pro sports are the coin of the realm to these fans, everyone else will be severely alienated by rah-rah gridiron exhortations.

Indeed, many women, dropped into this team environment, will wonder if they are expected to pick up a pair of pompoms and do splits.

Most of all, work teams do not work under the time constraints of pro sport teams. If we fail, we generally live to strive the next day. Pro sports is an unreal world of win/lose and sudden death elimination. Thank God we are not there -- yet.

So what we say about sports metaphors is similar to what we said about adventure learning: it’s great, and it’s fun, but it is no substitute for the hard work of norming and storming that every team must pass through.

 

 

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What Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right

"The American business approach to workplace teams is filled with powerful subtleties and is also quite different from the Japanese. The phrase, "How come all this quality stuff don't work," nicely sums up the challenge making teams work in America. Authors Robbins and Finley present practical solutions to the problems with and misconceptions about teams that will be valuable to any organization inclined to assign teams to work on legitimate operational issues. Pragmatic team tips covered here include team decision-making, communication skills with teams, reward and recognition ideas, the importance of effective team leadership, and the fundamental factor of organizational culture that could help or hinder team success. The authors swap narration of chapters, enlivening this useful handbook on how to make the commitment to teams a success. Serves well any manager's interest in maximizing productivity and quality improvement with teams. Recommended for all quality professionals." -- Quality World