Re-Thinking

High-Performance Teamwork

“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”

Patrick LencioniAuthor and founder of The Table Group(Lencioni, 2002)

autopia.com.au

Ten lessons businesses can learn from elite sports teams

Image source: www.theroar.com.au

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Foreword 3

Introduction 4

Develop insight versus “outsight” 5

It’s not “Win or Lose”, it’s “Win or Learn” 6

Establish meaning and purpose 7

You have to develop belief 8

Embrace empowerment over hierarchy 9

Coach the team versus the individual 10

Make team success essential for individual success 11

Striking a balance between preparation and performance 12- 1. The mix of preparation and performance 12- 2. Managing energy and effort 12

Harness team diversity and inclusion for increased performance 13

Tokenistic effort is worth the same as no effort 14

Conclusion (and words of warning) 15

Contents

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Re-ThinkingHigh-Performance Teamwork

Teamwork, both in the elite sporting arena and the business context, involves the engagement and interaction of individuals to achieve an outcome that is, ideally, greater than the sum of the efforts of the individuals. This involves the elusive search for synergy. Whilst there are some commentators who attribute the creation of synergy to luck, the very fact that some teams (and some leaders of teams) can create this synergy time and time again, suggests there is something more to it.

The Olympics are that rare time when we see a plethora of high performance individuals and teams. It is true that the Olympics offer entertainment for those who watch around the world; however, for those who are astute, there is also a potential master class in high-performance team dynamics.

I recall watching the performance of our gold medal-winning Women’s Rugby Sevens team at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. There was something about the individuals on the team that set them apart. In a game that requires explosive power, extreme speed and elite fitness, it was the character of the individuals that shone brighter than their physical prowess. The players seemed to have equal shares of courage, grace, passion and fortitude. At an individual level they were inspiring, and at a team level they were almost unbelievable; a team that came together on the greatest sporting stage to achieve something that most of us could not even dream of, let alone plan and execute.

This Olympic experience (all of it spent in Australia, sitting on a couch and watching TV) inspired my curiosity. How do elite sporting teams achieve this remarkable team dynamic, and what could those of us in a business context learn from this and take back to the work environment?

At Autopia, we have a long and rich history in working on thought leadership in the areas of gender diversity, gender equity, flexibility, diversity and inclusion. As a result, we felt very comfortable taking inspiration from the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens team and we are very fortunate to have three members of the team launch this paper, as follows:1. Emilee Cherry at our Brisbane launch event2. Chloe Dalton at our Sydney launch event3. Ellia Green at our Melbourne launch event.

We invited David Wakeley to author this paper. An experienced CEO who has led organisations including Virgin Money Australia, Australian Institute of Management and, not so long ago, Autopia, David also has a keen interest in gender equity and team dynamics. David met with team members and coaches from our Rio de Janeiro gold medal-winning team and has combined their insights with extensive research and reading on the dynamics of successful teams to bring us Re-thinking High-Performance Teamwork: Ten lessons businesses can learn from elite sports teams.

Greg ParkesExecutive General ManagerAutopia

David WakeleyNon Executive Director & Strategy ConsultantBank Australia &The Women’s College within the University of Sydney

Foreword

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Introduction

What sporting teams and business teams have in common is the human dynamic. In an organisational context, we choose to work together in order for the combination of skills to drive an outcome in the form of a “collective dividend”. In a team sporting context, this is not so much a choice as a requirement of the rules of the sport itself. However, in both cases it is clear that some teams are able to work more effectively together and create a much higher “collective dividend”.

You don’t win an Olympic gold medal without doing a lot of things right. This paper begins with that premise and applies insights from elite sporting teams to an organisational context.

The paper provides 10 lessons in team dynamics from high performance sporting teams in the context of contemporary organisational theory. As a result, the paper provides some opportunity for reflection for those of us who have not been, and perhaps never will be, part of an elite sporting team.

Given that this paper has been inspired by, and built on, the success of the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens Team at the Olympics, we have devoted a section of this paper to gender, including observations about how our society views women’s sport relative to men’s sport – as it is likely that this same cultural bias impacts our workplaces.

This paper does not suggest that great sports persons will necessarily be great team members in an organisational context; rather, the paper seeks to distil insight from the combination of team members in an elite sporting team. That is, we are seeking to distil rules of engagement in a team context, to encourage organisations to apply these rules to their own teams.

It is often said, “The only constant is change,” and there is little doubt that competition has increased and will continue to increase. Now more than ever, we need to create high performance teams not only of our organisations, but within our organisations.

We all know that high performance teams have the ability to outperform other teams. However, they do more than that. High performance teams also have the potential to lift both the performance of other teams within their organisation and other teams within the competitive market space.

Teamwork

“Talent wins games, teamwork wins championships.”

Michael JordanNBA Basketball Player

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Re-ThinkingHigh-Performance Teamwork

Develop insight versus “outsight” 1

1 Ibarra, H. (2015). Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing. 2 Ibid.3 Pascale, R. (2000). Surfing the Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business. New York: Crown Business.

Elite sporting teams do something very different to many teams that exist within organisations. The vast majority of the learning of elite sporting teams is achieved by doing. Put simply, they don’t go to a tertiary institution for four years to understand sport theory before the sporting activity is undertaken.

In an organisational context, we often seek to learn or gain insight prior to commencing a task, rather than learn by the action of completing the task. In her excellent book, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Herminia Ibarra puts forward the concept of the Outsight Principle. She argues: “The paradox of change is that the only way to alter what we think is by doing the very things our habitual thinking keeps us from doing.”1

Much of our development of leaders and of teams seeks to set ourselves up for success by first increasing our self-awareness and then identifying the gap that exists between where we are and where we would like to be.

The Outsight Principle argues the complete opposite. It suggests we should take a leaf out of the book of sporting teams and take to the field to learn by doing.

The problem with seeking to “think and then act” is that the way we think is shaped by our past experiences. The only way to change the way we think is, actually, to do different things. It is an important point to note that Ibarra does not suggest that there is no place for thinking, but rather that “thinking and introspection should follow action and experimentation – not vice versa.”2

If we extend the application of the Outsight Principle to teamwork in an organisational context, it would infer that teams should act as high performing teams, gaining external (to the team) knowledge and new experience, and in doing so, they will gain the skills of being high-performance teams.

Action vs Thinking

“Adults are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.”3

Richard PascaleAuthor/Management Guru

64 Tucker, R. (2013, December 02) ‘7 High Performance principles for sport and business’, The Science of Sport, https://sportsscientists.com/2013/12/high-performance-principles/, (accessed 26

July 2017). 5 Collins, R. (2014, April 14). 7 Leadership Lessons From Professional Sports. Retrieved from Inside HR: http://www.insidehr.com.au/7-leadership-lessons-from-professional-sports/

It’s not “Win or Lose”, it’s “Win or Learn”

Elite sporting teams are able to understand that failure is a reality of the game, and that mistakes are just the school books to learn from.

Failure aversion - as is often seen in business – is something difficult for the elite sportsperson to understand.

In the words of Roger Collins, Emeritus Professor and Leading Management Consultant: “Successful sporting teams not only practice their collective and individual behaviour, but also set aside time to revisit matches to identify effective and ineffective moves. Yet the reality of many leadership teams is that they confuse busyness with achievement and progress.”5

In an organisational context, failure is often something we are quick to sweep under the carpet in an effort to demonstrate that we are moving forward with a clean slate and positive mindset. This process denies the organisation the opportunity that every elite sporting team would take; the opportunity to review the performance, understand the potential for improvement and implement plans to improve the probability of success in the future.

Organisations have an opportunity to “never waste a good crisis”. We will all have moments of failure and taking the opportunity to learn will ensure that the moment of crisis will not likely be repeated.

Richard Pascale, author and management guru once said, “Nothing fails like success.” If we are prepared to learn from our success, perhaps the opposite is also true: “Nothing succeeds like failure.”

In many organisational contexts, there is little tolerance of failure. In fact, there are often significant consequences of failure. By contrast, the reality for any elite sporting team is that it is extremely unlikely that the team will win every game, and if losing a game is categorised as failure, then there will, in any sportsperson’s life, be many moments of failure.

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Paradox of Failure

“The paradox of failure is that those who wish to be successful are also those that are best able to fail – the “good failures”. Being a “good failure” means understanding that innovation, progress and improvement are never smooth processes, that failure is inevitable and is an opportunity to learn. It is not even failure, really, but rather the successful learning about what did not work.”4

Ross TuckerScience and Research Consultant, World Rugby

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Establish meaning and purpose 3

6 Seligman, M. (2004). Authentic Happiness: Using New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: New York: Free Press.

There is an oft quoted allegory about a person who approached two brick layers and asked them what they were doing. One replied, “Laying bricks.” The other answered, “Building a great cathedral.”

The sense of purpose of contributing to something bigger than yourself creates meaning in the role of individual team members and, as a result, engagement in the purpose of the team.

The positive psychology movement defined a progression of happiness that leads from pleasure to engagement to meaning. As published in Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment,6 studies have shown that among professionals, having a sense of “meaning” can cause greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turnover and increased loyalty.

While positive psychology may have been popularised in recent times, Winston Churchill clearly demonstrated the power of meaning when he said these words: “You make a living out of what you get and a life out of what you give.” Despite many of us acting in a self-serving manner, it is a universal truth that the satisfaction that comes from an act of generosity has more significance and lasting impact than the pleasure of rewarding one’s self.

Elite sporting teams are constantly engaged in something bigger than the individual. If we take the case of the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens team at Rio, they were not just winning an Olympic gold medal, but they were engaged in a purpose that transcended even the Olympics. By playing rugby for their country, they were doing something their mothers could not have dreamed of, and they were part of a contemporary movement that is, at last, changing society’s views of gender.

In interviewing the Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens team members for this paper, it was clear that they see their roles and responsibilities extending well beyond the rugby pitch. They appear very aware of their place in history, and the responsibility they carry for the generations of girls and women who will follow their examples.

Meaning and Purpose

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Antoine de Saint ExuperyFrench Pilot, Writer and Author of The Little Prince

Motivation

“You don’t do it for the money, you do it to see how good you can be, you do it for what the team are striving to achieve and to provide shoulders for the girls that follow to stand on.”

Emilee CherryAustralian Women’s Rugby Sevens Player and

Olympic Gold Medalist

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You have to develop belief 4

An optimist believes that everything will turn out well and, as a result there is nothing they need to do to impact the outcome. A pessimist believes that the worst outcome is the only outcome and, as result there is no point in taking any action to impact the outcome.

Elite sporting teams have belief. For elite sporting teams, optimism is not enough; you have to believe your actions can make things happen. Whilst the concepts of purpose and meaning are ongoing in nature, teams gain the most value from the concept of belief when it has a specific focal point. In other words, the concept of belief has a clear link to the specific setting of goals within the team environment.

The act of goal setting is an objective process. On the other hand, the concept of instilling, nurturing and promoting belief is steeped in human engagement. Good leaders can set clear goals. Great leaders can set clear goals and build belief in the team members who need to engage in the delivery of those goals. Belief is not passive, it is compelling.

Belief requires emotional engagement in the goal. The compelling vision of how the goal will be achieved results in urgent, fervent desire that has the consequence of action.

Elite sportspeople, and by extension high performing individuals in an organisational context, need to believe that the goal is challenging, but not impossible and that the goal is consequential.

Leaders of elite teams create belief in many ways. Some foundational examples include:1. Believing in the individual players and the team itself.2. Making the role of individual players meaningful to the

performance and purpose of the team. Some leaders describe this as “role and goal clarity”.

3. Creating an environment of trust where people are valued for their strengths and not marginalised for their weaknesses.

4. Ensuring actions speak much louder than their words. Team members are ready to be inspired, and willing to believe, if given a reason.

5. Coaching creativity into a team and not out of the team.

Team members tend to reciprocate the behaviour of the team leaders. Often team members will live up to not just the expectations of the leader, but the example set by the leader. A leader who offers trust will have team members who demonstrate trustworthiness, and a leader who has belief will have a team that shares that belief.

Belief

“A passionate belief in your business and personal objectives can make all the difference between success and failure.”7

Richard BransonFounder, Virgin Group

7 Branson, R. (2014). The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership. New York: Portfolio.

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Embrace empowerment over hierarchy

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Traditionally, in both organisational and sporting environments there has long been a very clear hierarchy, with decision making at the top and delivery at the bottom. In both contexts, this model has proved outdated and has delivered slow, inefficient action that is anachronistic in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive world.

The current cohort of senior managers grew up in an era characterised by the instructions flowing down a hierarchy, and information flowing up a hierarchy. This command and control structure extended to having everything from vision and values, to strategy, structure and tactics stem from the top of the organisation – the very part of the organisation that is, as a general rule, the furthest from the customer base.

Some sporting teams have attempted to operate under the model where the coach is the CEO and the assistant coaches are the executive team who make all of the decisions for the team. Not surprisingly, this approach has failed.

Once an elite sports team crosses the white line onto the sporting field, the decisions must be made by the team members themselves. The CEO must empower the team members to make these decisions.

Organisations have the opportunity to learn from elite sporting teams and view the role of the CEO as the role of a coach, working with a team to develop skills to be responsive to a changing environment, without losing focus on the outcomes required.

The coach in an elite sporting team trades in trust, not in control. Control-orientation coaches innovation and creativity out of the team, whereas a trust-and-empowerment-orientation coaches responsiveness, creativity and innovation into the team.

This process of trust and empowerment of the team is not one left to chance. Elite teams train in a “live fire” environment – that is, a real-world environment – to develop within the team the strategic and tactical agility to make decisions on the field in a live game.

Elite teams understand the concept of restraint. For example, they practice creativity and innovation within the training environment before taking it to the field. They promote innovation, but they ensure their probability of success is optimised by trialling creative solutions on the training paddock prior to taking them on the field.

Empowerment

“The setting of our team identity, ‘what we stood for’ and ‘who we are’ had to come from within the team. The coaching staff can enable us by providing the time and space, but we have to own it.”

Chloe DaltonAustralian Women’s Rugby Sevens Player and Olympic Gold Medallist

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Coach the team versus the individual

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Organisations increasingly understand the value in investing in personal development facilitated by executive coaching, as a win-win for both individuals and the business. However, the vast majority of organisations favour one-on-one coaching of executives over team coaching. This is in significant contrast with many elite sporting teams.

As a general rule, when an individual athlete is selected for an elite team, they bring with them many of the skills that might be developed in a one-on-one context. Therefore, the role of the team coach is to make these talented individuals work together as a team.

Of course, team coaching does exist in an organisational context. However, it takes place far less frequently than in the sporting environment. It would appear that a captain of an elite sporting team has no issue accepting the guidance of a coach, whereas the organisational leader seems to feel that the need for team coaching somehow marginalises their own leadership.

John Eales (former Wallabies Captain) has written extensively on leadership. In his first book, Learning From Legends,9 he asserts that many of our greatest sportspersons are humble, are open to input and are seeking to learn from others. While the popular media would have us believe that elite sportspersons can be arrogant, it seems that the greatest players on the world stage are open to input and thirst for the opportunity to better themselves.

It seems that, should our organisational leaders have a genuine desire to form high performing teams, then they need to be humble enough to accept they do not know it all and seek the guidance of a team coach.

Executive Coaching

“Sporting and leadership teams can always benefit from an independent observer who provides feedback, encouragement and guidance. It seems paradoxical that coaching of individual leaders in organisations has gained so much traction over the past decade, yet few leadership teams acknowledge or draw on the benefits of this valuable role.”10

Roger CollinsProfessor Emeritus and

Leading Management Consultant

8 Eales, J. (2006). Learning From Legends. Sydney: Fairfax. 9 Ibid.10 Collins, R. (2014, April 14). 7 Leadership Lessons From Professional Sports. Retrieved from Inside HR: http://www.insidehr.com.au/7-leadership-lessons-from-professional-sports/

Mentoring

“Mentoring is a two-way street; you need to haveenough humility to accept advice from other people, to feel that you do not know everything yourself, and to seek advice from others.”8

John EalesFormer Wallabies Captain

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Make team success essential for individual success

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All team members have egos and all teams need to manage egos. When it comes to high-performing teams, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that they are likely to have more team members with bigger egos compared to other teams.

In organisations, we value high-performing individuals. Often, organisations can value the individual at the expense of the team.

There is little doubt that team incentivisation can be an effective tool to managing egos. However, we must also acknowledge that team incentivisation might only work most effectively when all team members are high-performing individuals. For example, Michael Mankins’ reference (below) works because all team members were regarded as being the best at what they do.

The concept of team incentivisation still has merit when the composition of the team is not universally “the best of the best”, however, the leader may need to carefully engage the team in peer-to-peer development.

The work and research of Joseph Grenny makes the important point of peer–to-peer accountability: “Our research shows that on top performing teams peers immediately and respectfully confront one another when problems arise. Not only does this drive greater innovation, trust, and productivity, but it also frees the boss from being the playground monitor.”12

Grenny also suggests that organisations should adopt a policy of “It takes two to escalate.” In other words, both peers need to agree they can’t resolve it at their level before they escalate the issue.13

As a final point in managing egos, we need to realise that in today’s organisational environment, very few teams and very few individuals have too little to do. As a result, it is very difficult to tackle issues of peer-to-peer accountability as separate from the business issues. Carolyn Dewar and Scott Keller, in their work on organisational culture, remarked: “Culture change efforts run as standalone programs typically are last on the list and rarely succeed. Successful efforts, we’ve found, are fully integrated into the business initiatives you are pursuing.”14

11 Mankins, M. (2017, June 6). How to Manage a Team of All-Stars. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/06/how-to-manage-a-team-of-all-stars)12 Grenny, J. (2014, May 30). The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2014/05/the-best-teams-hold-themselves-accountable13 Ibid. 14 Keller, C. D. (2012, January 26). Three Steps To A High Performing Culture. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2012/01/three-steps-to-a-high-performa

Incentivisation

“The primary vehicle for managing individual egos is to make the team success essential for individual success. When the so called “Dream Team” took home the gold at the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, the egos of NBA all-star team members were kept in check by the fact that no one team member could take home gold unless the entire team was successful.”11

Michael MankinsPartner Bain & Co, San Francisco

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THE MIX OF PREPARATION AND PERFORMANCE

MANAGING ENERGY AND EFFORT

In elite sporting teams the players spend >95% of their time in training or practice and <5% of their time on the field in game time. In organisations, it often feels like we reverse the percentages.

An elite sporting team would look at an organisational activity like sales execution and not understand why we spend 90% of our time in the performance of the task (with 10% devoted to training), driving a conversion of, say, 25%, when we could spend 75% of our time in the performance of the sales function (with 25% devoted to training) and drive a conversion of, say, 50%.

There is an old saying: “If you want something done, then give it to a busy person.”

Within many organisations, leaders load work on to their most capable individuals, despite understanding the laws of diminishing returns. The result of this is burnout or total loss of the key talent to the organisation.

Many commentators have observed the gender differences that exist in the management of energy. Whilst organisational leaders are willing to load work onto the shoulders of their most capable resources – male or female – in our society, it tends to be the women that perform more of the home duties. This naturally leads to an increased chance of burnout or turnover for women. Some data would suggest there has been a marginal improvement with respect to the share of domestic workload, particularly in younger couples. However, as a society we should see the pace of change for what it is – too slow.

Elite athletes understand that pushing their bodies to the point of “failure” will allow them to extend their limits in the future. However, the important lesson for organisations does not come from learning how to push further or harder, rather, the important lesson of rest and recovery for optimal ongoing performance.

From the perspective of an elite sporting team, our organisations do not seem to understand the relationship between preparation and performance. They seek to understand the moments that matter and ensure their preparation allows them to be at their peak for those moments.

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Striking a balance between preparation and performance

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When it comes to preparation and performance, there are two interesting contrasts between elite sporting teams and organisational teams. The first of these is the mix of time devoted to each of the activities and the second is the management of energy within each of the activities.

Training

“Each day we arrive for training we are weighed and measured, as well as self-disclosing the hours of sleep from the previous night. These measurements dictate our workload for the day.”

Ellia GreenAustralian Women’s Rugby Sevens Player and

Olympic Gold Medallist

Task Performance

Training25%Conversion

Organisational Teams

50%Conversion

Elite Sporting Teams

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Harness team diversity and inclusion for increased performance

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Within many organisations, particularly larger ones, it is relatively easy for an individual to exclude other specific individuals in the conduct of their work. The drivers for this may be conscious or unconscious; however, irrespective of the driver, the behaviour is dysfunctional for the team.

In an elite team sport, such as Rugby Sevens, an individual does not have the option of who to pass the ball to. This might suggest that diversity and inclusion are a given and hence do not require focus, however, the opposite is true. The team must ensure their onboarding processes are effective. All team members, irrespective of their background, need to be brought into an inclusive team environment in order for the team to be fully functional and high performing.

Elite sporting teams yearn for diversity as they are acutely aware that a homogeneous playing group will contain players with similar strengths, and similar weaknesses. In an organisational context, we are aware that homogeneous teams make rapid decisions (because they think alike), however, we often ignore that they may have common blind spots.

Elite sporting teams yearn for diversity as they are acutely aware that a homogeneous playing group will contain players

with similar strengths – and similar weaknesses (the latter being an unacceptable risk to any high-performance team). In an organisational context, we are aware that homogeneous teams make rapid decisions (because they think alike), however, we often ignore that they are likely to have common blind spots.

It appears that the goal orientation that exists in elite teams (related to the “meaning and purpose” and “belief” lessons above) drives a behaviour of wanting to onboard and include new players as fast as possible. Elite teams focus on inclusion to ensure their speed to success. They invest a considerable amount of time on the training field, but they also invest a vast amount of time in a social context (more than we do within organisations).

Onboarding is an area where organisational leaders could learn a lot from elite sporting teams. Talent is our most expensive resource and yet few organisations claim to have fully optimised their onboarding process. If we can engage existing and new talent in the meaning and purpose of the organisation and ensure all team members have belief, we will be focussing on collective success and not our individual differences.

Diversity

“If you don’t have diversity on a board you get an echo chamber effect of opinion and it leads to quite extraordinary decisions being made – like massive acquisitions at the top of the resources cycle which ends up blowing up balance sheets.”15

Andrew Forrest AONon-Executive Chairman, Fortescue Metals Group

15 Hot Copper. (2016, December 5). Men in minority on Fortescue board.

Retrieved from Hot Copper: https://hotcopper.com.au/threads/iron-ore-price.2535482/page-13743?post_id=21118334#.WW10GsZL3BJ

1416 Beecham, D. S. (2016). Elite Minds: How Inners Think Differently To Create A Competitive Edge And Maximise Success. U.S.: McGraw-Hill Education - Europe.

Tokenistic effort is worth the same as no effortOrganisational leaders desire high-performing teams, yet it appears paradoxical that a significant proportion of them devote relatively little time and money to the development of the same. Some organisations like to window-dress their efforts around development of high-performing teams, running programs to meet the criteria set by the board or others.

In these organisations, the real desire is to deliver the program rather than substantively change the performance of the team.

When it comes to team development, there are many potential factors that drive this tokenistic behaviour. One of the key drivers is our tendency to expect our leaders to be ready made, rather than have programs to identify and develop potential leaders. The tendency for some organisations to acquire ready-made leaders from the external talent pool seems to be built on the potentially false assumption that other organisations are doing a good job at the development of their leadership talent.

Many organisations value task-orientation over people-orientation, and where individuals are promoted from within the organisation, they make the potentially false assumption that the best technical performer will make the best people leader. As a result, the best sales person is promoted to be the sales leader without adequate attention given to the development of team leadership skills.

If I had one clear learning from spending time with elite sporting talent in the generation of this paper, it would be that a token effort is of as much worth as no effort. Elite sportspersons understand that you can’t window-dress your way to an Olympic gold medal. They also understand that real effort has real rewards.

In business, too many people look for the quick solution that can be achieved with the least pain and frustration. In government, too many people look for the quick soundbite over substantive change. In the elite sporting context, athletes fight their way back from reconstructive surgery, training hard for four years for the chance to compete for the next Olympic gold. Elite sportspeople want their team mates to come from the deepest talent pool possible; they want to include them as an integral part of the team (almost an extension of themselves) and they are prepared to do the difficult things because they are the right things to do.

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Don’t Skip Practice

“Where elite athletes practice far more than they compete, business leaders are often expected to compete relentlessly often with little practice… that can leave them ill-prepared when the stakes are high.”16

Stan BeechamAuthor,

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The common ground is the human dynamic and how we interact to provide an outcome that is consequential and delivers a “collective dividend”.

The paper needs to be read in the context of contemporary culture in Australia – and it appears our culture is in something of a transition in relation to, at least, our engagement with elite female sporting competition (the source of inspiration for this paper). However, the pace of change is slow and we would be foolish to believe that the forces that shape our society are not present within the organisations we lead. The inequality our elite women sportspersons suffer relative to their male peers also has a reflection in the workplace for many of us in an organisational context.

In far too many cases, organisational leaders seem to see the lessons from a sporting context as “edutainment” rather than education. They enjoy the speeches given by elite sportspersons but are reluctant to take on the lessons and apply them in an organisational context. I believe we are selling ourselves, and our organisations, short if we adopt this approach.

As mentioned at the outset of this paper, you don’t win an Olympic gold medal unless you are doing a lot of things right. Elite sporting teams have much to offer those of us

who sit in an office and seek to compete in a market place, as opposed to a sporting field; however, a word of caution is also appropriate. Nancy Katz states: “… in reality, sports references often build boundaries not bridges. While the use of sports language may not involve an intention to exclude some members of the team, its potential to have that effect must be recognised.”17

The lessons from elite sporting teams are a rich library of knowledge for the contemporary organisational leader and other team participants. There is significant merit in understanding that we can take the lesson without adopting the persona of the sports person or the sports team. The lesson can be of enormous value, however the individual sportsperson or sports team may not resonate with all members of your organisational team, and hence result in division not inclusion.

The Australian Women’s Rugby Sevens team completed their 2017 season during the preparation of this paper, finishing a very impressive second in the world. Next year they go in search of a Commonwealth Games gold medal to sit beside the Olympic gold medal that they already have.

It was impressive to watch (and re-watch) their Olympic gold medal campaign. However, even more impressive than carrying the weight of the nation’s expectations on the Olympic stage, is that they are transforming the nation’s collective mindset on gender equality.

Conclusion (and words of warning)This paper has sought to find points of intersection between the drivers of organisational success and sporting success with respect to teamwork, and to communicate these in an easy-to-read “Ten Lessons”.

17 Katz, N. (2011, August 1). Sports Teams As A Model For Workplace Teams: Lessons And Liabilities. Academy of Management Executive, 15(3), p. 56.

Autopia

Autopia is a financial services firm specialising in novated leasing and chattel mortgages for the Australian SME & large corporate sectors, and is part of ASX-listed Smartgroup Corporation. Autopia provides an end-to-end solution to both businesses and their employees for all things vehicle related through an advice-driven, service-centric model with strong online capabilities. Car buying, financing, maintenance, tax reporting & compliance, right through to vehicle disposal – Autopia helps optimise tax effectiveness and delivers “Intelligent Car Ownership” to hundreds of organisations and thousands of drivers throughout Australia.

autopia.com.au

David Wakeley

David is a Non Executive Director of a number of organisations, including Bank Australia, Adviser Ratings and The Women’s College (within the University of Sydney). Prior to engaging in a “portfolio career” David was the CEO of Autopia, AIM (NSW & ACT) and Virgin Money Australia. David has a keen interest in Gender Diversity, The Future of Work and is focused on organisations making significant and sustainable change, both for the organisations themselves, and for the people engaged with and within the organisations. David lives in Sydney and is married with two children.