Tips for Building Teams - You Are What You Play

Golfing great, Arnold Palmer, is known to have remarked, ”I can find out everything about a person by watching him play eighteen holes of golf.”

Were we to accept this premise, then the sports field would substitute for psychometric personality evaluation instruments. The Myers-Briggs and Meredith Belbin tests popularly used in the corporate world could become a thing of the past.

The obvious difficulty would be in getting corporate executives to play a sport – any sport – as a large percentage prefers to live sedentary lives. And, if one could surmount this initial hurdle and manage to get them outside their cubicles, another dimension to test their personality would lie in their choice of sport.

Consider the following scenarios. David Beckham conquers Wimbledon, Roger Federer betters Michael Jordan’s basketball records, Tiger Woods beats Usain Bolt’s 100-metre timings and Michael Schumacher conquers the Golf Majors.

While conjuring up such images we can but speculate “what if these great champions had decided to take up some other sport.” Would they still be the best in the world? Indeed, why did they select their particular sport in the first place?

This then brings us to the moot question. Aside from the obvious fact they are all superb athletes, what do a Beckham, a Federer, a Jordan or a Woods have in common? The answers clearly lie in factors beyond their physical prowess. Are these champions so different in their mental make-up that made them select different sports and go on to excel in those?

To attempt to understand this conundrum, we should start with understanding the nature of sport. Sports are of various types, which for the sole purpose of simplicity, we can broadly categorize in three groups.

Firstly, we have the team games (like soccer, hockey, basketball, volleyball, baseball and cricket) where a team functions like a well-geared machine and churns out a winning performance. There are many cogs and gears within this machine. Some cogs may be bigger and better than the others but overall they generate a powerful synergy. CEOs of companies would clearly like their teams to operate in this manner.

Next, we have individual sports (like tennis, badminton, certain athletics and swimming events, boxing, wrestling and motorcar/motorbike racing). In these disciplines, individuals compete aggressively with each other and pit their wits against their opponents in real time. While in team sports, your opponent’s performance often decides the outcome; in individual events you are solely responsible for failure and success. Is it possible to suggest that a CEO’s personality would ideally suit such sports?

And the third broad grouping is that of a set of individual sports (like golf, archery, shooting, diving and certain other athletic events) where the participants do not actively engage with their opponents. Their real “enemies” are within themselves and with the hostile environment (the weather, the terrain and other playing conditions) making the degree of difficulty more acute. As it is not uncommon to find CEOs with a passion for golf perhaps we need to expand the head-honcho’s personality to include this group.

So, we now have three sets of sport, each demanding a different combination of physical and mental skills and mirroring these skills a set of personality traits that help predict who would play them best. So, can we predict that a largely introverted person would be best suited for archery or golf and an extrovert should be sent to play soccer or basketball? Do players adapt to their sport irrespective of their basic nature or do they select a sport that best suits their aptitude?

The words of the 17th century English philosopher, John Locke, encapsulated this theory when he wrote, “I have always thought that the actions of men are the best interpreters for their thoughts.”

We know that sports persons “chase their dreams” and play for fame and fortune. But, so do business professionals from the corporate world. They are as much motivated by career (fame) and increments (fortune).

It might not always be possible for business leaders/CEOs to get Arnold Palmer to map the personality of their team members. However, watching them play their favorite sports is doubtless a useful exercise to avoid the pitfalls of fitting “square pegs in round holes” and getting to know what makes them tick!