“The disadvantage of using sports analogies in leading your business is that if members of your team didn’t play sports in the past or are unfamiliar with the analogies being used, they will not be able to relate. Your efforts to communicate will leave them unable to draw any logical and emotional connections and may even work to exclude them.”
- Ray Carnes, from a 2022 LinkedIn post*
On Monday, a close friend and Client asked me about “leading, versus coaching or managing.” So I cued up eleventy-three sports metaphors – and then canned them, thanks to some dude named Ray Carnes (*whom I’ve never met and whom I quoted without permission).
Leading, coaching and management are discreet disciplines. All three matter. In difference-making teams, however, leadership is table stakes. “Good” organizations may have strong management and coaching cultures. Difference-making organizations have great leadership, every time.
You may recall our REELAX Leadership Model.
Leadership is about setting the vision, making it real, and assuring that the vision is at the heart of everything the organization undertakes, says, and does.
Coaching is about skills development, instant feedback, and situational awareness. It’s about repetition; identifying what’s happening and understanding what’s about to happen. It’s about implementing and cementing positive behaviors based on why we’re doing what we’re doing or why we’re not doing what we want to do but shouldn’t. Coaching, therefore, is about execution.
(That seemed like an icky paragraph. Sorry ’bout that! As an English major, I fear that from the grave, the late, great Mary Pettit and Dian Marker are likely trying to retract my GPA…but I digress…)
Sports metaphor spoiler: Coaching is about Herb Brooks in this scene from Miracle. It’s about getting more from a team than the team believes they have to give.
Management is actually more about “measurement.”
“Pat, the vision clearly calls for ________, and we’ve coached to this thing you should do to realize the vision. You have the skills to do it every time, but you’re only doing it 71% of the time. What gives?”
My Client’s company is exceptional. A team of Difference Makers, it is staffed almost exclusively with leaders who have a firm grip on its vision. What they need is someone to coach, develop skills and measure the outcomes so that all that leadership makes the maximum difference.
They’d get there on their own. The question is how quickly they want to get there, how much fatigue, stress, and distraction they’re willing to endure to get there, and whether they want a chance to REELAX on the way there.
PS @RayCarnes, I hope you like what I did with your post!
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