Business Leaders Can Learn from Coaches

Either in sports or companies, rituals are powerful tools to foster teamwork: they can improve the team's performance through psychological states of activation, adrenalin rushes, and highly focused mental capabilities.

In sports, Haka is the most celebrated example. It's the traditional maori dance that the All Blacks, New Zealand's national rugby team, perform before each game. Neuro-cognitive research has shown that performers of such rituals experience emotional reactions such as feeling of connection with peers, loss of sense of time, energy injections that enable the attainment of flow-dominated states of mind that characterize athletes in moments of highest performance and concentration, what can be referred to as states of competitive trance. Many companies turn to Haka-like rituals to induce similar mental states, for instance in motivational meetings for salespeople.

Similarly, companies can draw inspiration from sport teams to engender a sense of collective identity. This is especially important in multinational firms and in the case of recent acquisitions, where it is necessary to create a new identity of values out of people coming from different contexts. A case study in point is the Grundfos group, a Danish company operating at the global level, which has grown over the last few years thanks to various corporate acquisitions. To stimulate teambuilding, the group periodically organizes the Grundfos Olympics, in which more than 1,000 employees from 55 countries participate. It's an elaborate set of rituals characterized by elements of strong symbolic content and emotional involvement: in addition to sporting competitions, there are ceremonies like the ones opening and closing the actual Olympics, with national teams parading and local residents joining in, until a final party wraps up the whole thing. In order to stimulate collaborative relations, the company is thinking about having foreign employees hosted in the homes of their Danish colleagues for periods of time.

Corporate leaders can learn from coaches in sports how to manage the rites of passage in a more planned, structured, and coherent way. The insertion of new members into a team is often problematic: for new hires in sales, it takes an average of 18 months for the new employees to be effective. A good team leader should then try to accelerate the integration of new team members. This integration strengthens one's sense of belonging and increases motivation, supporting performance and the sharing of experience, as well as the transfer of information among team members. The strategic management of rituals to reach such objectives is well illustrated by Gianluca Vialli. "In the Sampdoria football club", says the ex soccer player, "I had experienced how important for the success of the team was having a strong sense of attachment to the club. Boskov, the coach, said we players should go to sleep in Sampdoria pajamas! That sense of belonging was a formidable ingredient for our success. As Chelsea coach, I thought about how to nurture a sense of identity. So I created rituals for the newly arrived. I took the new players to visit the trophy room, the stadium, the offices; I had them meet Chelsea managers and employees. I organized meetings with supporters, showed videos about the club's history. All this to create a sense of collective identity".

Just like successful coaches, company team leaders should constantly think about how to use rituals to add symbolic meaning to corporate processes, to communicate and share values, shape expectations, modify practices and better company performance.