Managing Others: Concepts from Sports, and Enhancing your Skills

Following our previous post, which shared Rich Cooper’s advice for aspiring leaders, we now share a useful video for those moving from managing their own output to managing others i.e. achieving output through others. As Dr Axel Zein puts it: “The day you become a manager, your job changes totally. When you’re an employee, your performance is defined by your own work… The day you become a manager, you realise that your performance is defined by the work that others are doing: your team… it’s about what they’re doing.. [and] what they need”.

In his 16 minute talk, Axel uses the analogy of team sports, and draws parallels to business: “...The players on the field... are the ones working. There’s a team manager, there’s a clear goal to win the game, and there’s a clear strategy on how to win the game. It’s the same in business”.

You have to get the right team together, you have to create a high-performance culture, you have to make them more productive, and you have to create an environment where people just love to work and love to give their best… It is mostly about growing others.”
DR AXEL ZEIN

Read more to watch Axel’s TEDx talk (including how leadership is about serving others, making it a totally different job than being an individual contributor), and see the five topics from sports he connects to managing others in a business environment. We then share other ideas for developing your managerial skills and being seen as a leader within your business.

Axel encourages those keen to become managers in future to “learn as much as possible, learn as fast as possible before you become a manager.”

...People will follow you through thick and thin if you inspire them, if you do something great, if you convince them, or if you care about them.”
DR AXEL ZEIN

Concepts from sports
In the talk, Axel sets out five concepts from team sports which he applies to managing others in a business context:
1) The team’s culture encourages high performance: everyone on the team is clear on the goal, and their roles in achieving the win
2) Individual performance is extremely visible: “anybody can see who the top players are... and anybody can see who doesn’t deliver”
3) Training is an ongoing activity: Axel highlights sports teams’ “obsession with training”, and asks “When was the last time you improved your business skills? And how often do you do it?”
4) Selecting the best leader, rather than the best player as the sports captain (the “leader on the field”), which he summarises as “the way they pick their true leaders and not the fake ones”
5) Celebrating victories: “they celebrate like there’s no tomorrow… celebrate because it makes them stronger”

And, just in case Axel’s distinction between great leaders and great players prompts an expectation that one person can’t be both, we note that it is indeed possible for an expert to be a great leader. In fact, as we set out in “Why Technical Experts Make Great Leaders”, technical experts have some advantages versus generalist managers when it comes to leadership.

Other tips for enhancing your management skills and leadership abilities

• Read the stories of leaders you admire, and form a mental picture of the type of leader you’d like to be e.g. collaborative, hands-on, persuasive, generalist…
• Understand yourself, including your strengths, as this will help you to determine what to build on authentically, and seek career opportunities that will inspire you – for example, you may discover that you’d prefer to manage specialists within your own technical domain rather than across a spread of disciplines
• Offer to mentor or guide others in your company e.g. new joiners or interns
• Find out what your company values in a leader through talking with your own manager, managers of other teams, and reflecting on the characteristics of existing leaders in your company
• Let your manager know that you want to develop your leadership skills, and talk with him/her about how you could practise these skills and/or take on more responsibilities that allow you to develop them – indicating your interests means they will be more aware of your career goals and will bear these in mind when opportunities arise
• Seek out mentors whose personal leadership experience/insights could be helpful to you
• Find opportunities to interact with existing leaders in your company so that you can learn from them e.g. perhaps work with them on specific projects – more time with and exposure to leaders will help you assess different styles, and you’ll also benefit from the halo effect; executive assistant roles are an example of this
• Request a key role on a project or propose a workstream or improvement that you could lead
• Practise encouraging positive action by others, acknowledging their contributions graciously
• Offer to pick up important work that others aren’t getting to or step forward for side projects – this will help you to be seen as a team-player who is eager to contribute
• Initiate a group project yourself by getting colleagues and friends together, brainstorming an idea, and starting work on it
• Share information constructively across your team and company as this will assist you to gain a reputation as a source of information, and signals your interest in helping other teams and communicating across boundaries
• Participate in activities outside your immediate team, as this will help build relationships with other areas, and bring new ideas into your team – committees or forums can be a good example of this
• Volunteering is a great way to develop leadership skills, including outside the context of your company (like sports teams or cultural activities), and allows you to showcase your skills at initiating, organising, communicating and motivating

For another Protagion post drawing parallels between career development and physical pursuits, please see “A mid-year review for active career management: what can we learn from physical endeavour?”