Stephen Billing’s Blog

Use your sports analaogies sparingly and with good thought for how they apply to your organisational setting.

Sports analogies are very common in business life. After all, organisations have teams, and businesses are trying to ‘win’ and so it seems very natural to look to the sports field for analogies of organisational life. As a keen tennis player I am very attuned to elements of competition and winning – I am proud that I won these cups in a tennis tournament!

I think the popularity of sports analogies is also fostered by peak team experiences that people might have in sports teams. When management trainers are promoting teamwork they often ask people to think of peak team experiences they have had, with a view to attempting to transfer these peak experiences from other domains to the business domain.

The prospect is appealing, of people being able to have in their business life this same kind of transcendental experience that can come from being on a winning sports team – the relationships and camaraderie, the feeling of being winners, the emotional support, the focus on an end result and so on.

This is regardless of whether or not in the business domain, the people working together are actually a team or not.

An analogy is a comparison between one domain and another. Sports analogies compare sports experience with business experience. So they are useful to the degree to which sports and business are similar.

It is often taken for granted that these similarities are obvious. But it would be useful to remember three key limitations of sports analogies when used in business settings.

1. Are you dealing with a team or with a committee? I am grateful to Alan Weiss for this idea. If you have a team, everybody wins or no-one wins. In other words, the team’s performance is what matters more than the performance of the individuals. If you have a committee, one person can win, e.g. the top sales person or the GM Operations, while others lose, i.e. the other salespeople or the GM Marketing. If you have a committee in operation, the sports analogies are little more than empty rhetoric, especially those about team spirit.
    
2. Is your team mainly driven by short term goals? Sports have short term goals which assume high levels of intensity and importance (i.e. win this current game). Most corporate settings do not have this same degree of short term intensity. Instead they are complex and the relationship between cause and effect is obscure. Often people cannot see how their individual efforts contribute and so more sophisticated approaches are required.
    
3. Are the elements of competition and results strong? In sports, competition is the whole point and the results are evident immediately according to the scoreboard. Even in competitive industries, many of the people in your organisation never get to meet the competitors, and the evidence of the results of their work is usually not as strong as in a sports team.

Sports analogies are commonly used in organisational settings in a taken for granted way. Have a good think about how you use sports analogies in your organisational situation. In addition to the points about their validity and limitations above, there are lots of people in your organisation who hate sports, for whom competition is anathema.

Indiscriminate sports analogies will alienate those people, not include them.