The establishment of a Super League is a when not an if situation and domestic leagues will need to adapt. As with any major change, it is far better to plan for it than to simply let it happen to you while you’re not paying attention.
Irina Pavlova joins Sportsology as a strategic advisor
Sportsology is pleased to announce that Irina Pavlova, former president of Onexim Sports and Entertainment, has joined the business as a strategic advisor.
Sportsology appoints Tom Penn as strategic partner
Sportsology is pleased to announce that Tom Penn has joined the business as a strategic partner.
The COVID-19 Sports Executive Response Survey: The Results
Following the successful completion of several major leagues and other global sporting events in COVID-secure conditions, we decided to gauge the opinions of sports leaders as to how the pandemic has changed their organizations – and their own attitudes to the sports industry – in recent months.
Dragonfly-Eyed Decision Making
If intelligence isn’t the main reason why people are good at forecasting and decision making, how do ‘superforecasters’ set themselves apart from the rest? The answer – or at least part of it – is their ability to be ‘dragonfly-eyed’ in their thinking.
What It Takes To Win: Establishing Collective Ownership of Success
By ensuring that the DNA of ‘winning’ is subject to collective rather than individual ownership, What It Takes To Win ensures that organizations aren’t reliant on unicorn figures without whom nothing of substance can be achieved.
What It Takes To Win: Evaluating the Success of the Model
Once your organization has implemented the What It Takes To Win (WITTW) model, how should it be assessed? Naturally, winning is a good indicator but that can be transient.
What It Takes To Win: Principles for Success
If you are considering deploying the What It Takes To Win model, these are the 10 principles that can ensure that your organization is fully prepared to maximize its impact.
Sportsology to work with St. Louis City SC to create and maintain high performance culture
We’re proud to be working with St. Louis City SC as the club prepares to join Major League Soccer for the 2023 season.
What It Takes To Win: Identifying Success Factors
WITTW for team sports is a process aimed at blending evidence and experience, expertise and creativity, and accepting the role of data where it can illuminate the key WITTW factors and standards.
Practical Steps for Driving Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives Within Organizations
When an organization has made a commitment to a diversity, equity and inclusion agenda, there are a number of strategies that can be adopted to build diversity into its cultural structures and decision making processes.
The Business Case for Diversity
Irrespective of the clear ethical imperative to confront bias against minorities in the hiring process, the business case against discrimination is equally strong.
The Performance Benefits of Cognitive Diversity
Research shows that there is a significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and outperformance. This doesn’t invalidate the value of age, gender and racial diversity, but it does elevate cognitive diversity to an equal level.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Risk
The key is first mapping out the scenarios that may pose a serious threat to the viability of the organization. Once that work is done, we will have created a safety net that affords us more freedom to explore the opportunities presented by an industry navigating change on an unprecedented scale.
Georgetown Hoyas: Boosting Staff Efficiency with the Sportsology Recruiter App
In this article, we get an insight into how the Sportsology Recruiter app is helping to streamline the workloads of coaches at Georgetown.
Understanding the Value of Diversity
As the Black Lives Matter movement gathers global momentum, so too does the debate around the general lack of diversity in senior decision making roles throughout the economy and in the front offices of sports organizations.
Georgetown Hoyas: Codifying and Sharing Team Culture Using Sportsology’s Recruiter App
Download Brochure In April, Georgetown University became the first athletic department to use the Sportsology…
Introducing Culture DNA: A New Way to Measure Engagement
By helping to shape organizational change, we’ve witnessed first hand the importance of people, culture and engagement in driving those initiatives. That’s why we’re launching a new product to help our clients proactively monitor and respond to their organizational health.
Introducing Culture DNA: a new way to measure engagement.
The People-Focused Leader
One of the dangers of the Unicorn leader myth – particularly pervasive in sport – is that it prioritizes the cult of the individual over the wellbeing of the people being led. In doing so, it sidelines the importance of collaboration, communication and empathy to constructive leadership.
Georgetown Hoyas: Remotely Engaging Prospects With Sportsology’s Recruiter App
Download Brochure In April, Georgetown University became the first athletic department to use the Sportsology…
Embracing the Difference: Advice for Life in the Bubble
As the NBA and MLS play out their 2020 seasons in the Florida ‘bubble’, teams are busy trying to figure out how they overcome the challenges posed by such an alien environment.
Team Unicorn
In a 2017 interview with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, ghSMART management consultant Elena Lytkina Botelho pronounced the death of the Unicorn leader.
Sportsology Search: Analyzing the Latest Human Capital Trends in Pro Sports
Our executive search team has been looking at average tenure and time to hire data for general manager/president and head coach roles across the five major leagues (MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL, NHL).
Lobanovskyi, Zelentsov, and the Importance of the Exchange of Ideas to Effective Leadership
As we discussed in a previous article, the idea that ‘Unicorn’ leaders are able to lead effectively without the support of an effective team and strong processes is an illusion.
The Making of a Leader: Building Your Staff Team
In the final of three extracts we’re publishing from his new book, The Making of a Leader, Tom Young looks at how sports leaders can delicately balance the introduction of hand-picked backroom team with the legacy staff who are already in place
What Followers Want From Leaders
As we’ve discussed previously, the great leaders we might label as ‘Unicorns’ don’t operate in splendid isolation. Rather than being an omniscient force, they are often guided by a highly competent support team and benefit from effective organizational processes.
Fermi Thinking: Creating a framework for navigating uncertainty
As leaders in the sports industry, we’ve all been dealing with uncertainty in recent months as we navigate a range of unknowns related to the coronavirus pandemic. When faced with unprecedented scenarios for which we are relatively unprepared, a lack of prior experience and available reference points can make it difficult to understand potential risks and outcomes.
Challenging the Myth of the Unicorn Leader
In a 2013 TechCrunch article, the venture capital investor Aileen Lee used the term ‘Unicorn’ to describe the rarity of privately held startups with valuations of over $1 billion. Since then the term has been adopted to describe anything that proves to be rare and magical across a broad range of disciplines.
The Making of a Leader: Assessing Culture
In the second of three extracts we’re publishing from his new book, The Making of a Leader, Tom Young looks at how sports leaders assess and create culture while remaining mindful of the history of their organizations.
Restructuring After a Crisis: Learning from NASA
As we all adjust to the current global crisis, it can be useful to learn how organizations throughout history have adapted to major organizational trauma.
The Role of Empathy in the Return of Sports
As elite sports prepare to make a return, they do so not only against the backdrop of a global pandemic but also unprecedented social unrest. Despite the huge amount of planning that has gone into the safe return of competition, these exceptional circumstances have seen a number of athletes express understandable concerns over returning to play on medical and/or social grounds.
Kill the Company: The importance of external perspectives in restructuring
We are all living through a time of huge personal, social and economic upheaval. As people, businesses, industries and nation states navigate a global pandemic, structures and institutions once assumed strong are wavering under the strain of an unprecedented collection of existential threats.
The Making of a Leader: Big-Picture Thinking
The concepts of legacy and purpose are important and admirable pursuits, but all of the leaders I interviewed were acutely aware of the need to balance the big picture with a more immediate focus on the unavoidable requirement of elite sport: achieving results.
The Power of Systems Analysis in Organizational Restructuring
Join Our Mailing List Last week we examined the Viable System Model (VSM) and looked…
How to Build Team Culture Despite the Challenges of Remote Working
The coronavirus pandemic has necessitated rapid behavioral and technological change on a previously unimaginable scale. From schools and retailers, to manufacturers and our very own sports organizations, the crisis has caused entire industries to reimagine themselves in a matter of weeks simply to survive in a predominantly digital environment
The Viable System Model: A blueprint for organizational change
Join Our Mailing List Across the globe, professional sports organizations are beginning to recognize that…
Lessons in Crisis Communications from Senior Sports Executives
Join Our Mailing List The coronavirus pandemic may be gradually easing in certain regions of…
Transgenerational Response: Breaking the chain of organizational trauma
Join Our Mailing List So far, our short series on the subject of scenario planning…
Scaling the Mountain: Confronting the pressures faced by new front office leaders
For many, securing a senior front office job with a sports organization is the result of decades of hard work and the realization of a long-held dream. However, it’s not uncommon for the pressures of the job to prove a significant challenge to those who take on such roles without a clear game plan for managing the intense scrutiny and expectation.
Unforeseen Danger: The perils of a fixed mindset in scenario planning
Join Our Mailing List In our previous article on scenario planning, we discussed the benefits…
Returning to Competition: Balancing short-term necessity with long-term vision
Join Our Mailing List As major sports leagues around the globe gradually ramp up their…
The Importance of Diverse Perspectives in Scenario Planning
Join Our Mailing List If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that…
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