We at PACE passionately believe that sports and business are structurally and functionally similar. They are competitive fields, require discipline to make it big, and require one thing to succeed at the highest level: good management skills. Thus, many forward-thinking organisations have adopted sports as a pedagogical tool to accentuate and add significant value to their learning function.
We approach OBTs as a multi-disciplinary process, and harness our expertise in training, pedagogy, psychology, management, the specific sport, and to some extent, organisational development as well. Using sports as a catalyst for learning and development is a highly specialised process and requires facilitation by experienced professionals to derive maximum value from it. If not executed properly, sports will just be another ‘fun activity’ for the participants with insignificant learning or takeaways, wasting time and resources in due process.
So, how do we use sports as a medium to develop management skills, especially at an organisational level? Here’s the five-step process PACE uses:
Identifying Objectives: We do Training Need analysis to understand the learning objectives. These learning objectives are carefully outlined to target specific improvement areas.
Record Observations: We use the selected sport as a medium to create a controlled simulation which gives us tremendous insight into how people behave, perform, and communicate in a competitive environment. We use measurable metrics to record these observations for future reference.
Discuss Observations: We use the recorded observations to debrief the participants, encourage them to discuss, reflect, and learn from these exchanges.
Align Sport with Learning Objectives: Finally, and most importantly, we create an alignment between the sports activity (including the succeeding exchanges) and the targeted management concepts outlined in the learning objectives.
Choosing the Sport: Based on the learning objectives we identify, we ideate on which sport we must pick, and what can be learnt from the sport (for example, boxing is ideal for individual development, and football for team development). Sports can teach us valuable management and life lessons. Take a look at some lessons you can learn while boxing:
Developing management skills through sports is a very dynamic, highly specialised, and proven to be extremely effective. We customize our program and activities to your specific needs and situation. For instance, you can have a one day, or a two day, or a multiple day workshop. Our program can address any management skills you want to enhance at your workplace. You can also choose any sport subject to the outlined learning needs and availability of logistics.
This training method is niche and highly specialised. Many most forward-thinking organisations have implemented it and seen amazing results, especially when there is a buy-in from all the stakeholders. And why wouldn’t it, when the training model inculcates sport, fun, competition, and targeted learning into a workplace.