scottbarrow

Are You Playing Someone Else’s Game?

June 23, 2022
, 2:17 pm
, Business, Cycling, Leadership, Performance, Purpose

Lance

Believe it or not, after all the water under the bridge, I still listen to what Lance Armstrong has to say in and around professional cycling. Stay with me 🙂 He has some great insights, which demonstrate other factors he leveraged to win the biggest bike races. I’m not condoning what he did and I think his behaviour to others was very, very poor back in the day. But this isn’t about that.

The Honourable

It was interesting to hear him talking on his own podcast the other day. They were discussing the upcoming Tour de France contenders, and they mentioned the French team, Grouparma-FDJ, had decided to fully support one of their riders, Thibaut Pinot, to compete for general classification (the fastest rider across the entire 3 week tour) as opposed to taking their best inform sprinter Arnaud Démare to compete for individual stage victories.

Lance was incredulous at this as he felt, and I, and many others would agree, that investing in Pinot was a wasted effort. Criticising the decision, not the rider: “I mean, come-on! He ain’t gonna win it. Have you seen him the last few years? He’s not even garaunteed to finish in the top 10! Why bother? Why not get behind your sprinter who could at least come away with two or three stage wins with the form he’s got coming off the Giro*”.

Sounds pretty reasonable doesn’t it?

The Wise

So we can see how definite, clear, absolute and committed to the top goal Lance is, even now years after his competitive prime. If you can’t win the big one, at least come away with a stage win or two.

And then the other regular member of the podcast, Johan Bruyneel (Lance’s long time team manager and head tactician from his racing days, who directed an incredible 13 grand tour victories, and speaks 6 languages….. ) gave an alternative way of thinking about the team’s decision.

As he’d probably done so many time before with the hot-headed competitor in Lance: “Yeah but let’s remember Lance, it’s the French team. With the big French rider (Pinot). He’s very emotional. Cries when he has failures, and when he loses. The French press love that. There’s a French team manager. And it’s the big French race.”

The French Being French?

So while that team and rider will do everything they can to perform as well as possible, they aren’t considered a genuine contender for the overall general classification of the Tour. But what is critically important to them and their stakeholders, is that they represent France. Funnily enough to me, this reasoning actually seems to be quite stereotypically French 🙂 Something like: “If we die, we die representing France! Vive la nation! As opposed to other professional cycling teams with different national origins and different sets of values.

Go Deeper

So at this point I’m reminded of a concept that Cameron Schwab, of DesignCEO, first introduced to me:

Performance can only be measured against expectation.

Rather than an absolute measurement. For example, if you’re a small team with a small budget, and you haven’t got a top line rider, there’s no point aiming for the podium. A better measurement might be how many times you finished in the top 10 of stages, or were you able to finish in the top 15 of the Grand Tour at completion of the 3 weeks. Likewise, if you’ve just won the Tour de France the last two years like 23 year old Tadej Pogačar, and the expectation is that you’re in very strong contention to win again, coming second could be seen as a failure.

For someone else it could be a career made.

Walking Our Own Path

So the perspectives of Lance and Johan are both correct and valid, depending on the context and what’s valued and being targeted. Thus, it’s so important to be very clear what the expectations are, what the measurement is, (especially for when it’s all said and done) to align people and get them on the same page.

A simple, and common mistake, is for people, individuals, groups, organisations, to aim at, and play somebody else’s game.

The landmark book, Moneyball, was all about this. The Oakland A’s in Major League Baseball, realised they couldn’t play the same game (use the same strategy) as New York, while their player salary budget was one third of the Yankees*** It forced them to completely overhaul their entire player recruitment strategy.

The Exquisite Opportunity

Different contexts.
Different resources.
Different values.
Different constraints.
Different objectives.
Different measurements.
Different expectations.

But importantly, and this is where the art of it all comes in…

Same ballpark.

So where’s your unintended mismatch? Come on…

* The Giro d’Italia is 1 of only 3 grand tours each year. The others being Tour de France and Vuelta a Españia. They are made up of 21 days of straight racing with single rest days usually placed at the end of the first and second week.

** All teams have a national basis of origin while having mixed nationality riders

*** There’s no salary cap in Baseball. The Oakland A’s were spending $40million per year at the time, the Yankees $120M.

One of the things clients consistently say that coaching helps them with, is the surfacing of previously invisible ways of seeing and being. Their situations begin to have more options that can work, more successfully and more easily.

Now If these sentence catch your attention, even for a moment, it probably means there’s something for you to explore and benefit from.