The language of management development - dominated by words like leadership, motivation and teamwork - is hardly peculiar to management. Every type of organised activity demands these qualities from people, none more obviously than sport. A top sportsman like Will Carling, with seven years of experience as England Rugby captain, obviously knows a great deal about how to lead, motivate and get the best out of grouped individuals (i.e. teams). But does his knowledge either include or transfer to business management?
Carling wouldn't claim to be any kind of authority on the subject, though, in fact, he's being too modest. One strength of seminars like those run by Insights, Ltd., which he founded three years ago, is that the education is two-way. The business people in the audiences (mostly in-house) learn from Carling and his fellow-presenters, and they in turn learn to recognise patterns of management thought and behaviour that impede performance. As in sport, that's the name of the development game - to raise levels of achievement.
Often, that involves dismantling barriers. Some are organisational. One major theme to emerge from the Insights seminars is that managers commonly rate their own performance on key criteria as superior to that of the organisation: i.e., the organisation is obstructing their ability to perform their tasks to greater effect. And that's not because participants have an exaggerated idea of their own excellence. Their self-assessments, on a scale rising from one to ten, usually average well below seven.
The idea that these ratings are not set in cement, but can be improved by taking specific action, is basic to the Insights concept. Working with co-founder Jim Foley, a manager and management trainer of great experience, Carling boiled down the qualities of leadership to ten key processes - five inward and the rest outward. The inward set are vision, self-belief, results focus, courage and integrity. None is dispensable, and all need to be combined with the outward five: team-work, visibility, communication, attention and commitment.
Carling shrewdly saw that sports personalities would play a dual role in helping managers to develop these ten attributes. Their star quality would focus the attention of the audience and ensure high interest levels. A little hero-worship does nobody any harm. And managers would draw inspiration and insight from listening to the personal experiences of athletes like Olympic swimmer Adrian Moorhouse, cricketer Mike Brearley, runner Sebastian Coe, round-the-world yachtswoman Tracy Edwards, footballer Gary Lineker and, of course, Carling himself.
Carling doesn't seek after charismatic impact, like the high-octane American evangelists of motivation. His style is quiet and understated, but high on pithiness, empathy and relevance. Being relevant is essential. The seminars are tailored to the individual requirements of clients who cover a vast range of industries: companies like top accountants KPMG, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Redland Brick, IBM, and Oracle. Feedback seminar participants is taken very seriously, and there are no long sessions with talking heads: the tempo is brisk and unflagging.
Videos of sporting action both reinforce the messages and enthuse the managers. Arousing that enthusiasm is fundamental, because the Insights idea is that people should leave determined to put into practice those self-selected key actions that will raise their performance levels. Inevitably, since their role is that of leaders, that means lifting the achievement of those who work with and for them, and thus the performance of the whole organisation - and Carling gets great personal pleasure from the positive feedback.
One manager, for instance, realised that, when touring scattered regional offices, he always rushed straight through to the person in charge, sparing no time for other staff. As a result of the seminar, he made a point of stopping by every desk and talking. Another senior manager adopted the practice of sending handwritten notes to colleagues who had done excellent work. For that, there's a parallel in Carling's own captaincy: before the vital Grand Slam match with France in 1991, the captain slipped a personal note of appreciation under every player's door.
These are minor touches in themselves. But they combine to play a major part in the ability of leaders to obtain better results from their teams and from their own developed talents. Carling is a profound believer in the principle that nobody's perfect, but everybody can be improved. That principle is fundamental to the training programmes and progress of individual athletes, like Moorhouse and Coe, who are never team players in the football mode. However, the Insights philosophy (like that of English rugby in the Carling era) is that team success is also built on individual striving for higher levels of personal excellence.
Excellent teamwork, in a virtuous circle, enhances individual performance in turn. That's demonstrated by the Insights seminars themselves. In discussions facilitated by the Insights presenters, people from the same company - but maybe from different functions and almost strangers - can achieve obvious and significant breakthroughs in ways of working together, and working better. Some quite startling failings have been uncovered: not by the Insights team, but by the participants themselves - which improves the chances that the faults will be corrected.
Correction is not easy, though, with perhaps the most common general failing: the top management that wishes its managers to show more initiative, innovation and personal leadership (which is why Insights has been hired at a minimum £7,500 a day), but imposes a strait-jacket of rigid 'bottom-line' disciplines. Teamwork that doesn't embrace everybody won't optimise performance, in either sports or business, and Carling, with the help of sports psychologists, has introduced practical, competitive exercises into the seminars, with the object of driving home by practical example the basics of interaction and communication.
As that introduction shows, Carling takes Insights as seriously as his rugby. While still under 30, he is building a career beyond sport, but which can run in parallel with football. That will involve further strengthening of the concept and operations and of the crucial skills of the team. But, of course, that's what management development - and Insights - is all about.
Robert Heller is co-author with Will Carling of The Way to Win, published by Little Brown at £16.99
