God this was tough.
I had lifted myself off the grass at 6 am after collapsing for the third time in an exhausted heap. What was I doing? I had dragged my sorry ass to the other side of the world to peruse a dream that was fading fast.
In my early 20’s I decided to travel to the US to become a student-athlete. I love football and had some success as a junior here in Australia and the lure of having a shot at a career had me confronting this brick wall of pain I had just hit.
In the US college sport is huge. however, the expectations from your team and coaches are even bigger. Forget about the glamour that is sometimes discussed, being a student-athlete comes with high expectations and many sacrifices along the way.
During preseason student-athletes can be often found on the training pitch 2-3 times a day whilst balancing study commitments and other compulsory community commitments
Everyone was expected to be at a certain fitness level and regardless of their seniority or leadership position. If you didn’t pass your fitness test you were benched. I tried to prepare myself as much as possible. I went into my first trial confident that I was able to compete, I soon discovered the performance of my teammates was at another level.
My confidence and stamina quickly eroded as I found myself chasing the pack.
I stared at the noticeboard to see my name under the Breakfast Club. I soon learnt this was not the breakfast club I wanted to be part of. Over the next few weeks, I joined my breakfast team members in our gruelling 6 am fitness sessions
In the 1985 movie 'The Breakfast Club' staring 80's 'It' girl, Molly Ringwald, a group of teens who kept getting detention at school, decided to call their group the breakfast club as a joke, but this was not funny. It was detention for sure and it was painful.
A few years on, and I have been working in the HR space and have recalled on many occasions how I was managed in a professional sports environment, and how that can be applied to what I do today.
The team is all-important. However, the definition of team looks so different in the corporate environment. Too many organisations still operate as silos, seeing the work of the HR department as separate from any other. In my football team, the physio's role in making the team better was just as important as the coach's.
For too many companies, the culture, morale, and growth of team members are seen as exclusively an HR problem, when it is not even a problem, let alone something only one department can manage.
It’s time organisations viewed the management of their most important resource, people, as everyone's responsibility.
What Workplace Support Should Look Like
Professional athletes know what it's like to work under pressure. There are enormous stakes. A lot of people are watching. The investment in time, talent, money, and reputation are ever-present. They have to check anxieties and injuries at the door to stay calm, cool and collected.
If one player loses his or her composure, the efforts of the rest are squandered. Nothing’s more valued in today’s stressful business climate than a level head.
Resilience was a big part of life as a student-athlete, but the one thing I witnessed, that was done well, is the framework and support you had to be the best athlete you could be. Too often I hear organisations saying people need to be more resilient yet their tools/process and culture make the organisation so toxic that people burn out and yet we say the athlete or employee just wasn’t resilient enough.
In my experience in a professional sense, there was a big sense of collective responsibility. If someone was injured or not playing well there was always discussion on why and what can the team do to support the individual. Good businesses will do this as second nature.
Behind every great business are a great team of leaders, who endeavour every working day to motivate, encourage, and support their talented team members.
If your business lacks strong leaders, you can guarantee your company will struggle with poor individual performances, low morale, a bad reputation across the industry, and a high employee turnover.
Two major benefits of positive workplace connections are increased productivity and low turnover. It is important to develop a work environment that fosters the building of these connections. Business owners and managers should be proactive in encouraging and providing the opportunity for these connections to be made in the workplace.
Cultivating a growth mindset.
I’m a big believer in the growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe their skills were given to them at birth, and they have a finite amount of talent: They’re either good at something or they’re not. Growth-oriented people, however, believe that they can hone the skills they already possess as well as acquire and develop new skills and abilities.
Athletes understand the need to train hard for many more hours than you perform even when you are a veteran. Workplaces however underestimate the power of effective team training. They under resource and undervalue it.
Encouraging growth as a leader has many important benefits.
A growth mindset encourages people to try new things and risk failure when appropriate. Businesses that focus on perfection automatically inhibit their people from realising their own, and ultimately the company’s, potential, they’ll never try because they’re afraid to fail.
The end result of stifled efforts, of course, is a stagnant company. Rewarding new attempts, regardless of their outcome, develops outlets for innovative thinking and empowers people to take charge, moving their team past a fixed mindset.
If the fear of failure takes hold in an organisation, it is difficult to shake off. Despite multiple studies that show failure is good for learning, blame culture can spread like a virus. In a series of experiments in the US, researchers even found a tendency for people to start blaming others shortly after witnessing someone else passing the buck.
If people feel they won't get that promotion or salary raise, or, worst-case scenario, they will lose their job, then naturally they want to go into self-preservation mode and blame someone else.
Morale
I believe the first step to fostering morale is gaining trust. In business, it’s easy to picture leaders that are eloquent motivators or strong, spotlight-seeking personalities, people who embrace the idea of delivering the grandiose, emotional pep talk.
However, the true leaders of successful teams are the exact opposite. They’re the types of people willing to do the grunt work, not delegate it to others; they use actions instead of words to motivate; they speak up against management in times of crisis, even when it’s risky and unpopular; and, perhaps most important, they aren’t looking to take credit for the team’s success.
Just like trust, communication is key to developing positive long-lasting employee morale. Employers need to know what drives each employee and their individual performance. Implementing a blanketed approach towards company morale does not work for all employees, as we know, no two employees are the same.
Coaches know this intrinsically; you need different tools to motivate individuals and the persistence to find each person’s key.
Empirical evidence shows that individual creativity is influenced by a variety of organisational elements, including autonomy, the opportunity to learn from role models, and a supportive organisational culture.
Managers' ability to understand and participate in the creative process will influence their ability to manage innovation. Even when managers are not required personally to generate creative ideas, their leadership depends on their ability to lead the overall project as well as to evaluate and refine the ideas of others.
Managers' personal creativity influences that of team members because managers must make sense of the ideas and issues being presented and provide feedback that leads to successful development.
Creative leaders have been found to directly influence creativity among their employees through the provision of a supportive work climate, as well as acting as both a role model and an inspiration.
I see a direct link between morale and diversity in the workplace. We cannot continue to assure women - are valued when a pay and promotion gap remains. Many organisations have spoken a lot about this issue and some have acted, but the fact remains that women are still scarce in senior management positions.
Female Business leaders
Research conducted over the last three years as part of the US's ESPN sports network highlights the role that sport plays at every stage of professional women's lives, from girls to rising leaders to C-suite executives. With their problem-solving skills and team-building experiences, women who have played sport are uniquely positioned to lead in the corporate world.
Eighty per cent of Fortune 500 female executives have played sport in their earlier years. Power players include CEOs such as Ellen Kullman (DuPont), Meg Whitman (Hewlett-Packard), Irene Rosenfeld (Mondelēz International) and Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo).
Seventy-four per cent of respondents to the survey say a sports background can help accelerate a woman's career, and 61% believe sporting involvement has contributed to their own career success. The survey linked women in senior management positions to experience with sport, finding that 94% of women in the C-suite played a sport, 52% at a university level.
Business leaders need to understand the direct relationship between athletics and careers and to partner with the athletic departments of universities to identify high-potential candidates, much as they do with finance, accounting or business departments. Companies must also develop policies specifically targeted toward identifying and recruiting athletes early on.
In every type of employment, there are certain traits employers desire, persistence, time management, communication skills, determination, internal motivation. You may find that person in the economics class. You will defiantly find him or her in athletics.
Female student-athletes are often playing sport well before the age of 10, learning to communicate and receiving coaching in a direct, strong way. They may have had to break ground and play in boy's teams in male-dominated sports.
If you are serious about wanting to advance more women into leadership roles, you can’t underestimate the role of sport.
Everyone in the Organisation is HRM
During my time trying to become a college footballer, I was able to witness how, when you have the right structure and support in place, individuals can better deal with resilience as it's seen as a collective problem.
Organisations should be the same. Support cannot just be the role of HR. All members of an organisation are human and therefore must be part of the management and growth of human resources. Only a holistic approach to developing aspects of training, morale and company culture will succeed. Decisions on these critical areas need to include everyone, not just those in a single department.
Suffice to say I didn't make it past my one-year scholarship. I walked away with a new set of skills, I never expected, that has sustained me through disappointment and delight. Oh, and I still love a kick of the round ball.
