… what football teaches us about resilience

For the past year I have received a daily email from Google’s Alerts Service for the keyword “resilience”. It is clear from this form of very scientific research that the concept of resilience is most commonly found in sport, not business!

Perhaps it is just that sports journalists are using the word more than business writers – and football writers encounter more resilience than other sports. Clearly I have been looking in the wrong place to understand this concept.

Both the major football codes in Australia (Rugby League and Australian Rules) had their Grand Finals this past weekend, so perhaps an appropriate time to reflect on the lessons that resilience can learn from football.

I wrote earlier this year that we need too use the work of well known management thinkers to help sell the value of risk/BC/resilience initiatives to our Executives. Here then is another example – this analogy between sport and organisational resilience is (again) proposed by well known management guru, Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

“One diffence between winners and losers is how they handle losing.”

In her book “Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End“, Kanter compares companies and sports teams with long winning streaks and long losing streaks. She is looking to understand how leaders, in both domains, led the turnaround from losing to winning. Even when a team is winning, there are setbacks – these might be a single loss, a bad quarter or just a run of play that goes against them. Kanter observes that a key difference between winners and losers is how they handle these inevitable low points, and how they bounce back.

“Troubles are ubiquitous. Surprises can fall from the sky like volcanic ash and appear to change everything.”

Kanter talks about the “pathologies of losing”. This leads us into a behavioural spiral, where we are tempted to behave in ways that make it harder to recover in time, or that simply make our situation even worse than it already is. Some of these behaviours include;

• Panic
• Throwing away the game plan (often follows panic)
• Self-protection, blaming another member of the team for the loss/setback
• Hiding the facts
• Denial, nothing we need to change or learn
• Neglecting the maintenance of assets, skills and capabilities

What she finds is that the consistent high performers have culture and support systems around them that help avoid these temptations. It is only natural to be tempted, but if we have good culture and support we can hopefully resist the temptation. Culture is especially important as winning and high performance, in both sport and business, is a team effort. We are all only as strong as our weakest link.

“Resilience is not simply an individual characteristic or a psychological phenomenon. it is helped or hindered by the surrounding system.”

Interesting that Kanter found a similar key attribute in her high performers as Valikangas found in Resilient Organisations. High performers are diligent in rehearsing and practice. They do not come to the big game without having done the hard yards on the practice field. If they have not done the practice, they tend to be the losers. It is what they have learned from their practice and preparation that enables the winners to remain disciplined and professional during the tough periods of the game.

As a coach you learn about the need to keep your athletes focussed on process goals (what to do on the next possession, etc), rather than encouraging them to think about the outcome (winning/losing). You also need to keep them focussed on the long-term, winning at the end of the season – even when there may be a setback in early/mid-season.

As somebody who supports a team that seems to have been in a ‘re-building phase’ for about 10 years, I certainly hope that Kanter’s Law holds true, and that we are past the middle!

Kanter’s Law : “Anything can look like a failure in the middle.”

The same may be said about our initial efforts at building resilience, or even or response to some crisis that disrupt the organisation. The key is learning to bounce back.

Kanter’s advice is for leaders to build “the cornerstones of confidence” when times are good, build this belief in the good times so you can weather the storm when it inevitably comes. These cornerstones are;

• Accountability
• This includes behaviours such as honest debriefs and learning from mistakes/failures.
• Honest reviews of strengths and weaknesses
• Collaboration
• Shared goals and vision, rather than pursuing own agendas
• Respects for your team mates and mentoring to improve the performance of less skilled members
• Initiative
• Featuring wide spread dialog and brain-storming to improve our performance
• Perhaps even some types of ‘safe fail’ experiments in practice – again similar sentiments to those discussed yesterdays post on Valikangas.

Building and maintaining this culture of confidence is a valuable insurance policy, in both sport and business. Because ultimately, in both areas of endeavour, it is performance under pressure that separates winners and losers.

Timely advice for those following the Rugby Union World Cup, currently being played in New Zealand. Losing key players from your team is a challenge – but no doubt the Wallabies have a stronger culture of confidence than the Springboks or All Black.

 Are you rehearsing and practicing a culture of confidence in your organisation?

How are you doing it?

Or are many of us risking the culture of over-confidence and complacency?

Reference : Kanter, R.M. “Cultivate a Culture of Confidence”, Harvard Business Review, April 2011, p34