Chief execs at centre court, please ditch the sports analogies for business
In many ways, leadership in business is like tennis, football and cricket – it’s about timing, precision and creating the right circumstances that allow you to maintain control of the ball. Anyone in business will have noticed that chief executives, managers and bosses from different sectors often use sports as analogies to help them inspire, engage and explain. They frame who they need on “their team”, how they want that team to “win”, conceptualise the best ways to “beat the competition”, and seek the most effective ways to make “strategic selections” and consider “different scenarios”.
As all eyes turn to SW19, it’s my guess that bosses in boardrooms and on team awaydays will be serving up tennis metaphors aplenty over the next fortnight. Whether your employees are “acing” it, your tech is keeping competitors “pinned to the back of the court” or a project’s execution was “straight down the line”, tennis has a lot to answer for in workplace speak.
And it doesn’t stop in the world of business. My guess is that tennis has been the go-to sports metaphor for our prime minister, too. After all, he once raised £160,000 for his party to play a single tennis match – putting him amongst the highest earners in British tennis. He may also be finding hope in the fact that a tennis match isn’t over until the very last point is played – like Nadal’s incredible fight back against Medvedev in the final of this year’s Australian Open, fans often witness a wondrous comeback when the game can swing, the opponent can suffer an injury, and unforeseen events can create stronger leaders, whether it’s a rain check, the horrors of a war in Europe, or a future opposition meltdown.
When tennis isn’t on the agenda, it’s often top-flight football that offers the most opportunity for linguistic play. With the season beginning at the start of August, football analogies will be abound. Bosses will want teams to keep creating “movement off the ball”, hiring managers to “attract the right talent during the transfer window” and urging accountants to prevent the financial year from becoming a “game of two halves”.
But, there’s a real risk of analogies becoming laboured and alienating whole swathes of the intended audience – I know it is difficult for a football fan to fathom, but some people just aren’t interested in the “beautiful game”. At a recent company townhall, a Hoxton tech entrepreneur was preoccupied with extolling the virtue of Pep Guardiola at Manchester City in a bid to underline a tortured point about increased diversity in the workplace. The irony, of course, is that “football chat” tends to drive more men than women to distraction in offices.
The difficulty comes in this direct comparison between sport and business. Of course, there are countless similarities between the strategy, mindset, coaching and desire to succeed, but an organisation is not like an organised sport – there is no set of fixed rules or even an agreed final score. A win for your company is not about beating the competition – it’s primarily about creating value for the customer.
In business, you can beat your competition and still fail; likewise, you can thrive while your competitors succeed, too. Procter & Gamble, for example, is legendary for customer focus and has a history of actively discouraging competitor focus as a distraction. The result is that they have continued to be the world’s leading fast-moving consumer goods company, and the world’s biggest TV advertiser, almost twice as big as Unilever, decade after decade.
In contrast, some of the language of many tech and fintech bros has been focused over the past decade on which “dinosaur” companies they are going to “kill”. The ambitions for many have shifted, in recent months, from who they are going to wipe out, to whether and how they are going to maintain value at all. Wise, for example, listed in London last year with a value of £8bn. But rising costs have since put a damper on its earnings, and its share price dipped by close to 10 per cent after it published its reports on Tuesday.
Business is a continuous game, with no half-time and a requirement of constant effort. So even as the summer sport season gets into full swing, it’s worth remembering that business isn’t easily pigeonholed by sports cliché and analogy. We operate in a world that’s more fluid, less predictable, and where serving your customer is always more important than serving against the competition.