The connections between sport and business are many, but none is more important than the role of coaching. In general, people start out in both sport and business because they either love, or excel (preferably both) at a particular pursuit. A teacher may suggest you join a team, or a family member or business colleague may suggest you focus on your passion and strike out alone. You may see an opportunity to do something differently and better than others. The initial motivation may be to enjoy yourself, but at some point, results start becoming the focus: how much profit am I making? How many games am I winning? How can I improve? Or even, more profoundly, where is this going? Am I enjoying this as much as I used to? And for each of those questions coaching may help find the answers.
I recently attended a cricket coaching course for those wishing to help out the juniors at the local club. The trainers enjoyed showing us Bob Woolmer’s book “The Art of Cricket Coaching”. They didn’t need to open the book: it was enough to show us its size and weight. Around five hundred pages of close text explaining the best way of doing everything in the sport. For several years all cricket coaching in England had followed the book, but that approach had now been abandoned. What had been the bible was now ridiculed.
Why? Nobody had studied and examined cricket in such depth. Woolmer had been a good cricketer who had played with the greats and had observed what made them great. How could you improve on his knowledge?
The reasons are both obvious and interesting. Firstly, in the heat of a game, players cannot remember five hundred pages of instruction. It is just confusing. Secondly, most people play cricket for fun: no matter how well-intentioned, following five hundred pages of prescriptive rules is never going to be enjoyable. And finally, for those who did follow the rules, the results weren’t that great. Or in other words, in trying to develop from very good to perfect, players actually became worse.
This got me thinking about business. In so many areas, rules have replaced discretion. My background is in financial services, where the amount of regulation produced by bodies such as the EU and the FCA would astonish those outside the sector (banking regulation is now estimated to cost each bank £300 per client per year, and ultimately, that is a cost the client pays). The last thing businesses need is coaching and mentoring that imposes even more rules. Yes, these may be rules that you won’t be punished for breaking, but they still take up mental space and exact a psychological toll, and if you ignore them, what was the point of seeking a coach’s input in the first place?
But good coaching shouldn’t be like this. It’s not a one size fits all template. It’s not a straight path to perfection or a mould to be used again and again. True coaching is driven by the strengths and needs of the individual and tailored to their circumstances and goals. If you are looking for mentoring, it is because you are have the motivation and ability to succeed at what you do (you’ve set up a business, haven’t you?), and the curiosity to know how you can improve. In terms of a skillset, motivation, ability and looking to improve are hard to beat.
The role of the coach is to understand your strengths and let you play to them. It is nice to be perfect, but most of us do some things very well, some pretty badly, and most somewhere in the middle. If we can recognise our strengths and weaknesses and find ways of addressing our weaknesses and making the most of our strengths, the changes can be profound. We don’t need to be perfect, we don’t need to start from scratch and we don’t need to do everything ourselves. In fact, in most cases it is counterproductive to even try to do everything yourself.
I once worked with a fantastic lawyer, with a high charge out rate and a prodigious work ethic. On paper, he was a very successful partner in the firm. In reality, his clients rarely paid their bills and he was reluctant to chase them to do so. His skills were in the high-value areas of getting in clients and carrying out work, but he struggled to convert that into cashflow. He was intelligent and knew the problem, yet would do nothing about it: even when we are aware of our weaknesses, most of us prefer to ignore them. Once the responsibility for billing was taken out of his hands, client payments improved immediately. He was much happier to have the administrative burden lifted and to focus on the key areas in which he excelled. And compared to the rare skills of a specialist lawyer, administrators are plentiful and comparatively cheap.
It is a common problem. Businesses need a huge range of skills to be successful: entrepreneurial, technical, personal and administrative. Nobody excels in all of these areas. Coaching is about finding out what you do well, what you enjoy, and allowing you to focus upon your strengths. Letting you be the best version of yourself, not another person’s idea of what you should be.
To return to cricket. In place of the five hundred pages of small type, coaching is now based on four posters with bullet points. Batting, for example, is little more than have a balanced posture, look at the bowler, be decisive and hit the ball with the full face of the bat. Other than that, stick with what feels right. And for the coach, the message is clear. Keep it simple and keep your mind open. If something is working well, don’t break it in the attempt to make it perfect. Be the best version of yourself.
