Coaching - a World Cup winning strategy for your business

The Fifa Women's World Cup has had eyes glued to the TV like never before in women's sport, and I had the pleasure of seeing the Matildas take on (and beat!!!) Denmark live on Monday night.

Now, people have been talking about what businesses can learn from sport since the beginning of time, but Monday night got me thinking, what if managers always coached their team with the same belief and intensity as if they were preparing for a World Cup?

After all, the stakes are just as high in business - the top performers remain, the poor performers are knocked out.

4 ways you can show up as a coach for your team as if you were preparing for the World Cup:

1. Identify what it means to be a coach - Sir John Whitmore defined coaching as “Unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them”.

2. Understand when to step in and when to step back - Whitmore says, “We all have a built-in, natural learning capability that is actually disrupted by instruction”.

As a coach, it's your job to hold space for your team, not to tell them what to do. This is a crucial difference between traditional command and control style management vs coaching. Coaches ask the right questions and guide their team toward peak performance because of their unwavering belief in that person's potential to succeed.

You never see the soccer coach step onto the pitch and tell their player where to shoot; they trust in their players to make the right decisions because they know they have unlocked that person's potential and they wholeheartedly believe in them.

3. Focus on strengths - The best coaches know two things - not everyone is great at everything, and not everyone has to be great at everything. Coaches identify and nurture their team's talents and foster personal growth that contributes to the team's success.

Strikers are not great goalies, nor do they need to be. Could they stop some goals, sure, but why would they need to?

When you focus on the individual strengths on your team and you foster growth in those areas, you'll notice a striking (pun intended) difference in performance, engagement and outcomes.

4. Bring the team together under a common goal - Out on the pitch, every player is working toward the same goal - win the match. Yes, they have individual focuses (that play toward their strengths), the striker is trying to score, defence is trying to stop the other team from scoring, the goalie is trying to stop balls from entering the net... They all have their roles to play but they are all working toward the same goal.

Effective coaches know how to bring a team together and guide them toward victory.

If the striker only cared about themselves scoring, they would never pass the ball and the team wouldn't score half as often as if everyone always passed to whoever was in the best position to take the shot. Yes, everyone wants to be the one to score, but they have a higher purpose, the team scoring.

When you bring your team together under a common goal, you get them focused on the collective results rather than focusing only on themselves.

Imagine a world where every manager transforms into a coach.

Just as soccer teams thrive on teamwork and the guidance of their coaches, businesses can harness this winning formula for success.

Your team's victory is yours to nurture.

Are you ready to score big?

The Effective Manager Program empowers your managers to show up as coaches.

Take the first step today to unleash the potential of your managers and your team and watch your performance soar.

We're taking applications for our final intake of The Effective Manager Program for 2023 which kicks off in September.

Your journey to victory starts as soon as you click that link.

Go on, take a shot.

Jess Weiss