Partner Article

Leading teams: Tools and techniques for successful team leadership from the sports world

The sports context is often used as a powerful analogy for analyzing and interpreting team work, motivation, and leadership, with professional sports coaches held up as role models for managers.

In our book (Leading Teams: Tools and Techniques for Successful Team Leadership from the Sports World), using applicable excerpts from interviews with 80 coaches from a variety of sports (football, basketball, volleyball, rugby, and tennis), we identify the key functions and strategic behaviors of team leaders, with special focus on the processes that team leaders implement to promote team motivation and improve team performance.

We propose an original model that places particular emphasis on the team leader’s ability to create his/her personal credibility with multiple stakeholders at different levels, from micro (typically the players on the team and the technical staff) to macro (other members of the organization and external actors).

Credibility is one of the main team leader’s characteristics able to predict team performance. We found that credibility is the outcome of countless actions. It is the result of the combination of what team leaders do (i.e. their behaviours) and how they do it (their attitudes). In other words, how they work and interact with several key actors, not only the team members (players and staff, in our case). It derives from several perceptions that followers develop toward the team leader. The most frequently cited perceptions are:

1. technical competency, which is normally seen as essential, but not sufficient, to
2. energy, often associated with the outcome of both enthusiasm and passion;
3. fairness, which can be seen as a combination of sincerity, spontaneity, and good
4. consistency of actions and underlying principles across time and situations.

As for the “what”, our research has identified two macro areas of conceptually separate yet interdependent behaviours: coaching and managerial behaviours.

The team leader as coach deals with technique and tactics, and at the same time vouches for the quality of the project, managing players’ motivation and performance. Team leaders as managers acquire new competencies to manage a more complex organization, in light of the higher level of technical abilities of the players; greater expectations of athletes, fans, and owners; more intense environmental pressure; more numerous key stakeholders – often with conflicting interests - who affect the club’s decisions.

Team leaders therefore need to motivate individual athletes, build team spirit, synchronize organizational resources, and construct a positive reputation within their sphere.

Our model contributes to the team leadership literature highlighting the relevance of team leaders behaviors’ impacts and as a consequence its focus on multiple relationships.

Finally we summarize the key passages from conversations with thirteen professional coaches; each of them has an exceptional and unique personal story, replete with insight and inspiration. The entire book is interspersed with examples and anecdotes that enrich the content and provide a powerful patrimony of real life experience which provides readers with practical ideas and incentives for working with others and leading teams.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Paolo Guenzi and Dino Ruta .