3 Reasons Your Performance Systems Are Limiting Your Team’s Success - Part 2

Reason #2 - Your Performance Staff Doesn’t Know They’re Supposed To Help You Win

Okay, this sounds a little ridiculous, but hear me out. Everyone working in a sports organization wants to win, but seldom do the employees know how their efforts directly tie into supporting that goal. Hopefully, your leadership has communicated to its employees the mission, vision, and values of the organization and what they specifically mean for each department. Following the mission, vision, and values should be the organizational priorities for its team/s. For professional sports teams, the priorities will likely be related to enhancing player acquisition (increasing the probably of executing successful draft picks or trades), improving player development (enhancing player skill), and optimizing player deployment (ensuring that your players are consistently available to play at a high level). In NCAA athletics, the priorities are centered on enhancing player acquisition (recruiting players who will be successful) and player development, while also optimizing student-athlete health and welfare. How each department fits into the organizational vision should be clearly articulated to all staff so that they can shape their systems around supporting those goals. 

Without knowledge of the organizational priorities and clear directives from leadership on departmental expectations, employees may narrow their focus to their specific skill sets at the expense of the overarching goal. This can lead performance staff to confuse their methods (increasing strength and range of motion, reducing pain, improving conditioning, etc.) with their purpose (supporting winning via the organizational priorities). For your performance staff, this means they are likely to operate compartmentalized in their area of responsibility. In contrast, while maintaining their focus on their core skills, they should also open their aperture to seek how they can use their skills to create solutions for the organization. This creates the opportunity to build collaborative relationships with other departments that will expand their abilities to impact scouting, recruiting, draft operations, player skill development, and player game usage strategies. All of these operations fit into the organizational priorities, can be supported by your performance staff, and have a direct impact on winning.  

Getting players strong, mobile, fast, etc. aren’t the primary goals for your performance staff. Those are some of the methods they use to support the primary goal, which should be creating solutions that help the team win.

In the next post, we will look at Reason #3 - Understanding what actually impacts winning.