Lessons from the Basketball Court: Three Expectations for Improvement

(Image courtesy of free clipart images)

I am head coach for my 3^rd grade daughter’s basketball team this season.  For most of the team members, this is their first year playing the game, and there is room for improvement for each person (coaches included!).

On the first day of practice, we discussed the three expectations that us coaches have of the girls as players. Ruminating on these expectations, it occurs to me that they have parallel significance in the workplace when trying to make improvements.  These are:

1. Respect
2. Always Try
3. Play as One Team

I asked the girls what each of these meant to them.  In their case, “Respect” meant to listen to the coaches, treat each other with kindness and be encouraging to themselves and each other.  This seems to be pretty similar to the baseline expectation in a workplace.  Treat each other with professional courtesy and respect; which extends beyond being “nice” into things like being punctual, considerate of new ideas, trusting others to do their job, holding people accountable for their work, and following the golden rule (i.e. do unto others).  One client recently asked me what the client needed to do in order for an engagement with AJC to be successful.   The first thing necessary is to want to change and improve.   Consultants help catalyze change, and when a client actually wants to change and improve, they are demonstrating respect for the work the consultant is being hired to do.

The next expectation is to “Always Try.”  For the girls, this means active participation:  to try to do every new skill or play being taught them.  They may not be perfect, or even very good, especially the first few times, but only by trying will they master the skills of the game.  The parallel here is quite apparent, and brings to mind that Shakira song from Zootopia:  Try Everything!  As was discussed in a recent article about The Beauty of the Pilot, we have to try things in order to find out how/whether they work, and as a very necessary step towards success.  In the case of consulting, for both the consultant and the client – active participation and trying to make things work, providing feedback on areas to modify and improve, and trying again.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – always try!

Finally, “Play as One Team.”  We will win and lose as a team or as a company.  It is of no use to the whole group to have a ball hog; this is not sustainable in basketball or in business.  Like the adage that “a team is only as strong as its weakest player,” everyone needs to work hard to improve.  Naturally there will be differing skills, complimentary and growing; but having a single person assume everything, or worse – optimizing in a silo when the functions or processes up or downstream lag, will not help the company’s bottom line.  AJC worked with one client this past year who was unsure of which of their six main process steps were holding them up in their overall timeline to complete a process.  They were experiencing a lot of personnel “pain” in one area, but when we collected duration data for which step took the longest, it was a totally different area than people expected.  We were able to address both areas; the first to find a better way to minimize the manual work that was causing people “pain,” and the second by changing their capacity and allowing the backlog at the bottleneck to flow more quickly, thus enabling the overall process duration to improve. 

In this way, playing as one team is akin to looking at the overall end-to-end value stream; considering the big picture to delivering a product or service, and using data to ascertain where the weakest area is.  Once we know that, we can improve there, and then move on to the next weakest area.  Always, however, we are working to improve the company or team as a whole.

After explaining the Three Expectations, one girl asked me why I didn’t say “Have Fun!” as an expectation.  Of course, I sincerely hope each girl enjoys basketball and has fun on our team!  However, this is something I cannot require or expect.  It seems to me that this is also true in business.  Sure, it would be great to have fun!  But we can’t make that an expectation as “having fun” is an individual perception.  If we follow our expectations above, it is definitely possible that all of our team members, on the ball court or in a business, will not only change and improve, but have fun too.