Football and Corporate Communication: A Common Link

I am fairly certain that fall is my favorite time of year. Yes, the trees are beautiful when the leaves change color and the crisp, cool air is refreshing with a few minor snow drops signaling winters imminent arrive. But, winter signals something else: football play-offs!

 When I say I am a football fanatic, it may be an understatement. When we moved into our new home in Boise, I was able to build my “dream room.” My theater room features a 120-inch screen with high definition T.V. and cinema-quality speakers. But don’t even think about playing a movie on it; it is strictly for those glorious days of watching college and NFL games. (Please don’t tell my wife, but the third Direct TV satellite is on its way so I can now have ninety channels of football. I think I am dead meat!)

 While watching the Patriots take on (err…clobber) the Seattle Seahawks this last week, I began thinking about how the players on the field communicate with each other. Frequently, you’ll see the quarterback point out to his lineman a potential threat from the defense. Other players must also communicate successfully, including the coach, who sends in plays from the sideline.

As a leader, the coach’s job is multi-faceted: play developer and director, team organizer and trainer, motivator and counselor, strategist and tactician. It reminded me a lot of the corporate world and today’s business leaders. Recently, I have seen many corporate leaders struggle to communicate successfully with their “players” about the direction, vision, strategy, and execution of a series of specific “game plays.” The increasing struggle to communicate a company’s strategies to employees is impeding the growth of organizations.

As long as a company is big enough to have a bureaucracy or a political structure, then information becomes a valuable commodity in trading for favors or getting a head start on internal competitors. Internal competition comes in many form factors: competition for keeping job or receiving a promotion, jockeying for a pay raise, or increasing one’s status within the organizational political hierarchy. Part of a manager’s task should be to help employees overcome the natural tendency hold information to themselves. The manager must ensure that competitive, customer, and market information flows upward to management, downward to operational subordinates, and laterally to keep people connected and informed. Even seemingly unimportant “pieces” of information can be the one “puzzle piece” to understanding a competitors’ new marketing strategy, shifts in market trends, or customer opportunities. In my opinion, the extent that managers motivate and manage their employees to share information is a significant measure of manager.

But how often do you hear about leaders promoting, much less talking about, corporate information sharing? All too often information is compartmentalized or never shared in the first place….at least until the most advantageous moment for the individual information holder to exploit his or her specific knowledge, most likely for personal advancement.

Not too long ago, I was a part of a company strategy meeting where a specific employee seemed to suddenly have the answer to the CEO’s question about a competitor’s next movement. Earlier in the day, during a series of meetings on this very same topic, the same employee held back the specific information that he later shared with the CEO.

Information is indeed a valuable commodity and is frequently equated with power. This generates two different approaches that are similar to our approaches to money: hoard it, save it (like some kind of security blanket or a weapon in a turf war), or invest it. The more confident (or maybe competent?) know that information shared (invested) returns increased power to the originator. This perspective seems to tie in with the view of either (a) the organization as a pyramid in that to win you must climb through narrowing layers to reach the ultimate job [power] or (b) organizations as webs or networks with unlimited possibilities and opportunities.

Information sharing is critical and is the first step to truly being a leader and having an effective, winning organization. But, information connectivity and sharing alone are not enough. Sharing and connecting enable the import and export of information. If an organization connects everyone and everything that it knows, then only very limited competitive advantage is achieved.

The real value is in knowledge creation, which requires positive information sharing. New knowledge is the key to a competitive advantage.  New knowledge drives markets, trends, and advances in a company’s position in the market. Recently, a client discovered from a group of sales and accounting executives that a competitor was getting ready to launch a competing product in a specific market. The sales employees knew this from talking with their customers who had seen the product in beta and in pilot programs.  My client was able to determine the planned launch date, the features and functionalities of the product, and any perceived strengths and weaknesses all from the small handful of sales staff. Quickly, the company prepared a counter-selling campaign to ensure that their customer base was loyal and blunt the launch of the competitor’s product. And, it worked: The rival’s product launch was received poorly, but, my client’s company would not have known this information if it were not for a fluke discussion with a group sales staff at a regional sales meeting.

Knowledge creation is at the very heart of business value and competitive advantage, and as such should have a significant degree of focus and priority by the enterprise.

When the Seahawks go back to the locker room at halftime, the head coach leads the team in a mid-game debriefing session where they collectively review the game to that point. Each starting player gives his opinion of the game and shares his experiences on which player on the rival team is the hardest to cover, which one seems to be the slowest or to have a specific weakness, or what plays seem to be working or not working from their own experience. A linebacker is going to have different information and a different perspective than the quarterback or a safety.  They create new knowledge by aggregating all the shared information and individual analysis from the meeting to make mid-game corrections, develop and execute new strategies, and even potentially change the player lineup.

Anyway, if you’re as big of football fan as I am, you know that the next few weeks are going to be great.