What would happen if you managed your team like a pro sports team?

High turnover is a trillion dollars a year problem in the United States. Okay, so if we don’t want to be like losing revenue and losing the bottom line to having to rehire folks, we’re going to want to do these things. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple Podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go.

Welcome back to the show. Today, I want to offer a hot take, and that is what if we started to treat our teams like professional sports teams and brought in everything that that represents? Okay. Now, if you’re thinking like, well, I’m not a professional sports team because I work in a bank or a tech company or in manufacturing or in healthcare, or I run a small business. Well, I want to empower you and encourage you to think about there are so many lessons we learn from the sports world that teach us how to run high performing teams.

These are some of the highest performing teams that can come together and beat the odds, that are under an intense amount of pressure, that really model and embody all of the elements of teamwork. That’s why teams and sports are often synonymous. And yet, when we’re in our own companies and businesses in the day to days of our roles, we often forget that, hey, we have a proven model for how to run great teams. And this applies even if you are not a sports person, okay, which admittedly I’m not.

And as I talk about sports, I often have to look up and make sure, like investigate and research them, talk about the right stuff. But for this, I know 100%, these three things I’m going to talk about today are true in most professional sports, if not all of them, and are something that when you bring to your team, it is going to be game changing. You are going to increase performance, you’re going to increase results, you’re going to use profitability, and you’re going to reduce attrition and turnover because there’s nothing more expensive than high turnover.

High turnover is a trillion dollars a year problem in the United States. Okay, so if we don’t want to be like losing revenue and losing the bottom line to having to rehire folks, we’re going to want to do these things. Number one, well, what do we do in sports? If you think about when you hear about those NFL contracts, and you think about NBA, and you hear these big numbers, well, teams pay a lot of money to get the best people, okay?

We pay a lot of money in these professional sports leagues. And I’m talking about, well, let’s just call it, I’m talking about men’s professional sports, stuff like NFL, NBA, MLB, okay? Let’s narrow to that. Those are the ones I’m talking about here. We pay top dollar to get top talent. And what’s so surprising and infuriating, let’s be honest to me, is to hear business owners and team leaders come to me and say, hey, I want to hire a new person, I don’t have a lot of budget, so I’m trying to go on the low end of this thing, or trying to get around these requirements on minimum wage or minimum annual salary.

And I’m thinking, how the hell do you think you’re going to have a high-performing team if you are wanting to pay someone as low as possible? It doesn’t add up. That’s not what pro sports do. They’re like, how do I pay this person the most I can? Or at the top end of it, how do I get this person that’s going to be doing the rest? How do I get them to come to my team instead of another team, right?

That’s the spirit there. Now, there was a lot of this inflating of salaries and getting salaries so competitive and out of range in this tech battle for talent that happened really during the pandemic, a little bit before. And that actually resulted in a lot of salaries that became so inflated and out of the normal range. I’m not necessarily talking about getting a bidding war with your talent. What I’m talking about is the lesson here is we pay high price for great talent.

We don’t try to think we pay people the bottom and the lowest possible amount and think they’re going to deliver at their best. I did an episode on this. I asked the question. I will ask it again. Would you do a good job for this pay? Would you do it? No. If you were offered a certain number and it was way below what you wanted and you went with the job because you were desperate or you didn’t have another option or you felt like, well, it’s better than nothing and you know it to the lowest end, you’re going to always be looking for that next job.

Of course you are because you feel like you’re getting ripped off. So we don’t want to do the same thing. We want to hire talent that’s going to kick ass and stay on our teams. We know we got to pay them at the top of that range. Now it should match their experience. It should be equitable across other roles, right? We don’t want to create disparities and folks that are doing the same role getting paid differently, but we want to be paying everybody on our teams at that top range.

We want to be competitive. We want to be making our company a destination to where people want to be. Now, if you’re working inside of a large company and you can’t, you don’t set the thresholds for pay, right? Well, you want to be making sure whatever you do have control over incentives wise, maybe it’s the raises, maybe it’s the bonuses, maybe it’s opportunities for folks to attend conferences or get professional development support or coaching or mentorship, whatever it is.

We want to be offering that and really painting the picture that we are creating a company where we’re valuing our team members, right? That’s the lesson here from the pro sports is we don’t think we’re going to pay like bottom dollar and get top results. It’s just doesn’t work that way. Okay. So get rid of that mentality of like, how can I undercut everything and think about how can I make people like pay, pay something people excited about or offer incentives that people will be excited about.

All right. That’s number one. Now, number two is, you know, making sure that we’re really utilizing people at our best. Now, because teams pay, you know, top dollar for their people, they don’t have a bunch of extra people that don’t really have a role on team. Let’s think about at least when you’re playing in the actual game, there’s a set number of roles. Okay. I’m not sure how many it is for a football. I know that it’s five for basketball.

You have a certain number of people in a game at a certain time. There’s not duplication of efforts. There’s not roles that are missing either. You don’t just have four because you couldn’t figure out how to hire somebody else. Okay. You have a bench and you have people that are growing and they’re cultivating their skills and they can be subbed in and out. Right. But when you’re on the field, when you’re on the court, when you’re wherever you are, you don’t have two people doing one role and you don’t have a gap there.

So a lesson here that we think from, from the professional sports metaphor is that we utilize our people the best we can. And we’re always thinking about, okay, how do I make sure that I don’t get stuck where I don’t have a player that can be subbed in or that I have a player that’s way, way, way lesser in the skill set that they’re not ready to sub in. But we want to always be thinking about when we have to get to that moment, we’re playing in the championships or we have a big, big event or a big launch or whatever it is coming up that we have our team ready.

Okay. So this takes active planning, resource management, understanding the strengths of our team members, understanding stretch areas, putting them in, in a situation where they’re really developing means we’re understanding when they’re starting to, we’re having those proactive, proactive conversations. I talk about, we know when they’re starting to feel frustrated or starting to feel like maybe burning out, or they’re not quite interested in the role. So we make sure we’re engaging them or if they’re not a fit or they’re not happy or not really wanting to be here, we find the right person that is.

Okay. So that’s our second lesson from, from pro sports is really utilizing folks at their best, not having duplication of efforts, but not having major gaps where like the, the owner of the team doesn’t come out to the middle of the court and start playing when, when you don’t have enough people, you have a plan and that person’s ready to come in and take action. Third thing. Okay. And this one hits real close to home that teams have a professional coach that teaches folks how to be their best.

That brings out the best in people that that’s setting up and figure out the plays and they’re helping elevate each team member. And when I talk about supporting your team and I talk about the how and bringing out the best in your team and making sure everyone understands how to be successful and really all the work that I do as a team operations consultant, a lot of times folks are thinking, well, should I invest in team development?

Is this really, you know, is this really what I need to be doing right now? Because I, I need to be investing in ads or in marketing. This is from the small business side or, or from the corporate side. We, and we don’t have time right now to dedicate to this. We, we have all these launches and projects coming up and people are just like spread so thin with deliverables. Well, I ask you, would a professional sports team think they can run at all without a coach?

Would they think they could win any games, let alone championships without having a coach? No, they don’t. So when we think, well, I don’t really need to invest in my team because they’ll just go out there and figure it out. That is literally like having a pro sports team think they can operate without having a coach. Now in sports, we know the coach is like a central, pivotal figure. You would never see that. You wouldn’t see the owner, you know, as, as committed as someone like, uh, uh, Mark, uh, Mark Cuban is to, to his team.

He’s not running out there and thinking that he can go and coach. No, he’s up there. He’s got the vision. He’s a leader. He’s like making sure he’s got, you know, where’s the team going, what players are needed, but the person that’s actually helping them figure out the, how that coach, that is a very distinct, different role. And we know we have to have that. So I want you to think about whether you’re a corporate leader or a business owner who is serving that role as coach, who is mapping out how this team is going to win games, how we are going to, who is going to be in the game at this moment?

When do we pass the ball? What plays do we run? Who is figuring that out? Because that’s the kind of work that I do to support teams. That’s what I come in and do. This is why I call my, uh, my system, the ops playbook, because we need a playbook for how we’re going to get work done. People don’t just figure it out themselves. High performers, people that are there to kind of 10 X and crush their work.

They still need someone to figure out what’s the map, what’s the direction, how are we going to get there? And so if you think you’re going to be able to deliver better results next year than you did this year, and you think you’re going to do that without a new plan or without a coach or someone to help you get there, I encourage you to think about like, what’s the shift you’re going to make? Like, how are you going to do that?

Because without a plan, you’re just going to be seeing the same things over and over. People need an objective person to kind of look at and see, okay, well, what do we need here? They need someone that’s an expert in to help develop them. And so you’ve got to think about what is your plan for developing and upskilling and upleveling your team. We got to be thinking about that all the time, because if you don’t have that, it’s literally like having a professional sports team that has no coach.

Okay. There was only so far that you can get on everyone’s talent. Eventually you need to run different plays. You need to have a new plan. Okay. So that’s why I do the work that I do, supporting teams, big and small in corporate companies, all the way to small businesses, because helping leaders figure out how do we best utilize our team? What is that plan for hiring? What roles do we need in the future to get us to where we want to go?

How are we going to set those people up for success? What systems do we need for tracking work and having a bird’s eye view? How do we make sure that everyone sees, you know, the line of sight between their role and the priorities of the company and the team? All of that work is part of what the coach brings out. And so if you’re listening to this, you’re like, I guess I don’t really have a coach.

Reach out, because the work that this coach will do, the work that I can support your team in doing, this is going to uplevel your team, every single person across the board, because the more clear folks are, the more committed they are to it. And then the more they’re passing the ball, they’re collaborating, they’re really bringing innovative ideas to the equation. And that is going to help you get to whatever goal you have for your team.

And it doesn’t matter if you have a small business. It doesn’t matter if you’re within a big corporation, because it’s all about really how do we optimize our teams? And that’s something I can help you with. So that is what I want to leave you with today. Thinking about this metaphor, what if your team was a professional sports team? What would you have to do to bring out the best in them? You got to make sure you’re paying and incentivizing them well.

Got to make sure you’re fully utilizing folks. You don’t have any major gaps that are really preventing you from playing in the game. And what coaching do you have? What structures are in place to really bring out the best in your team? All right. And if you want support on that, email me hello at leahgarver.com, and I would love, love to help bring out the best in your team. See you next time. That’s all I have for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.