Leadership – What I Learned from Tennis

I had an interesting insight about leadership and management
from playing a team tennis match last week. If you don’t care
for sports, you might want to skip this one.

As soon as we began to warm up, I realized the 20-something,
strong, tall man I was playing had a much stronger game than
mine. Nick hit the ball very hard, both groundstrokes and serves.
He had a very aggressive style. I realized I could not possibly
compete with him by trying to match his style, yet if I did not
consciously decide otherwise, that’s exactly what I would
probably try to do. My ego would naturally want to “outperform”
him at his own game. If I tried that, I realized I would have no
chance of winning.

In leadership, we must adjust what we do based on the
situations and people with whom we are working. If we always
manage the same way – regardless of the circumstances
or people – we are likely to make significant mistakes and
create problems rather than resolve them. We must do our
best to understand the situation, create our best strategy for
dealing with it, test our strategy and move forward with it
or change the strategy if it doesn’t work.

We must stay conscious! – aware of the situation.

In that tennis match, I recognized I couldn’t hit the ball nearly
as hard as he did, but I am pretty good at placing the ball on
the court close to where I want it – both with groundstrokes
and serves. So, as we warmed up, I planned my strategy
for playing Nick. I noticed that he had a tendency to hit some
of his backhands wide, deep or into the net. He missed very
few shots on his forehand side.

So I adjusted my game. I worked very hard to hit to his
backhand side – again nothing fancy, just get it back to that
side of the court. I also realized that I had the ability to be
more patient than Nick, and I could use that to my advantage.
He would try to end the point quickly with a great shot. But
he missed a lot of those kinds of shots. When he did, he
became frustrated. The more frustrated he got, the more patient
I got, because the strategy was working. The whole strategy
evolved to getting everything across the net to his backhand
side and let him make the mistakes. It worked more often than
not.

The only problem I have with this analogy is the competitive
perspective. We are NOT competing with our people, but
continually working to learn how to best collaborate with
them in our leadership roles so we can compete effectively
as an organization in the marketplace. We must learn to adjust
our approach to match the needs of the situation and the people with whom we are working.

As leaders, we need to understand the situation, adjust our
approach, test it to verify whether it is effective, change if it
is not effective, and continue if it is. If we stay locked into
preconceived notions about how it should work, we greatly
limit ourselves.

If I had tried to play my “normal” game, I would have
inadvertently played into his strengths more often.

As it was, I adjusted to fit the situation and I won the
match 6-1, 6-3. May you be conscious enough to adjust
your leadership approach to better fit the need!

How do you relate to this message?

Ed Oakley
Change Management Made Simple