Build back better
Sport understands performance. People instinctively ‘get’ working hard, discipline, consistency. It is understood that being the best requires hard work and sacrifices and doing things that are uncomfortable and pressured. I hear people talk intelligently all the time about marginal gains theory – making small but significant changes to everything we do to make us go further, faster and better. Well, we seem to ‘get’ all of this, but only some of time. Where we often forget the need to perform at our best all too quickly is in the way we run our organisations – our governance, our strategy, looking after our people and the way we engage with the external environment. It is in these areas that our future success or failure will be determined – and without getting this right, we can forget about medals, performance and elite success. Without doing a lot better on the things that make our organisations and environment work, our organisations will face a real threat for survival.
This isn’t an article about code compliance or improving governance procedures. In light of a really positive announcement today that the ‘Code’ is being reviewed, I’m far more interested in thinking about how we embrace the current climate to do things in a genuinely different way. In the way we govern ourselves and the way we develop strategy, we must move from a culture of compliance, sometimes grudging compliance, to genuinely embracing the need for change. Thinking not of filling quotas but more of how a genuinely diverse board will drive performance in asking the right questions and raise standards. Our strategy can no longer be a document that sits on a shelf and we forget about for the next five years, but a creative, ambitious and credible plan for how we are going to make the world a better place. There’s a phrase about ‘culture eating strategy for breakfast’ – I agree 100% with this and hope that culture can become just as important as compliance – including in the way that the Code is reviewed and refreshed.
In looking forward, sport also has an unprecedented opportunity to meaningfully engage with and shape the external environment. Many have observed and have been rightly frustrated that the nation’s pubs were opening before the nation’s sports facilities. For what it’s worth, I agree that this was a mistake. However, the more uncomfortable truth may lie within our own sector. Rather than lament government for making yet another mistake, could we give some thought to whether we have the right skills, experience, culture and commitment to shape public policy and our operating environment in a way that our sectors very clearly do? Time is not on our side here – so how can we quickly drive performance in this area – putting the right teams, resources and expertise in place to be our best.
Finally, and to coin a phrase, ‘it’s all about people’. Our workforces have faced an incredibly tough time – for many of us balancing huge uncertainty, fear about the present, fear about the future and caring responsibilities.
The role of volunteers will be central to the future too – traditionally I think volunteers have been used (and used rather than genuinely appreciated and valued) as an extension of our paid workforce. As we enter an incredibly challenging and turbulent economic period, let’s start a conversation about how to think of our volunteers in a completely different way. We will almost certainly need our volunteers to do more against a backdrop of rising demand and costs and falling income. That role should not just be more hours, more activity and more of the same. It absolutely can’t be a grudging acceptance of the need to ‘manage’ our volunteers and must be a far more positive engagement of our fantastic volunteers to shape our identity, our priorities and our strategy.