Lessons from the Dugout

One of the greatest lessons football has for business is the value of coaching. Too often, in business, coaching is mistaken for counseling or mentoring, to the detriment of the organisation.While both functions are valuable, genuine coaching is only about performance.

In football, coaches are judged solely on performance. Nobody watches the process, only the results. If business adopted the same appraisal system, imagine the difference.

Insert into an organisation's appraisal system the concept of judging departmental managers solely on the performance of their staff -- there would be no meetings between appraiser and appraisee, only observation of the performance of staff.

That is what happens on a daily basis with football teams. The entire management team is judged, each week, on what happens during each 90 minutes of competitive play. It is the immediacy of such judgment, and the visibility of the managerial process that makes football the all-embracing model it is.

Where else are failures in personnel selection and man-management so totally visible? That visibility provides an access to the process denied in business at least until long after the event. As a consequence, the lessons from the dugout are profound, not trivial.

For more, see: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/09/22/chris.brady.football.ferguson/

Lessons from the Dugout