Abstract
By applying the fundamental psychological characteristics present in sport to projects, improvement in project outcomes will rise significantly. This can be done by using a methodology known as the performance matrix which clarifies rules roles and responsibilities, makes feedback timely and precise, and creates opportunities for reinforcement through goal achievement – the basics for all sporting success.
Introduction
Sports (and sporting personalities) are overused as motivational analogies to the world of business. Unsurprisingly they generally focus on winners - they are often interesting, entertaining and inspiring but they unfortunately miss the key learning's which are factors common to all sports and all those who participate in sport – not just the winners. Sports and projects both rely for their success on essentially “discretionary” effort, which is performance over and above the average. The world of sports is very effective at producing this discretionary effort and the world of projects is not so good.
By applying the fundamental psychological characteristics present in sport to your projects you can improve your project outcomes significantly, but unlike professional coaches, project managers are often not equipped with the wherewithal to utilise such methodologies.
The authors are a project manager and an organisational psychologist - both are sports people. The paper is based on practical experience and supported by research into both sports psychology and high performance within the world of business.
The paper covers four topics:-
- The desirable characteristics present in sport from a psychological perspective & the associated traits of champion performers
- How to plan for project success by recognising the differences in capability and performances between individuals and teams.
- Consequential requirements for managing project performance
- Look at a specific implementation method - Performance Matrices
The desirable characteristics present in sport
It is estimated that over a quarter of a billion people in Europe and USA willingly & regularly participate in sport at all levels from novice to professional. Whatever the reason, physical, mental or social, taking part in sport - win or lose is a win in itself and it is an inherently reinforcing activity. People overcome and achieve goals either set by themselves or the team. The focus often tends to be continuous improvement, to do better than they did before.
On closer investigation in what makes sport successful you can identify five key characteristics, they are: Feedback, Reinforcement, Goals, Rules, & Roles and Responsibility.
Feedback
Sports great appeal is in its transparency of performance and the capability that delivers it. Feedback in sport is instant. You don't have to wait until the end of the day or week or month to determine how well you performed. Players know how well they are performing at every instant regardless of the role they play in the team. A team knows second by second how well they are performing.
Roles and responsibilities
In a sporting team, be it football or whatever, each player has a defined role with clear responsibilities. These roles and responsibilities can be defined further into the specific behaviours or instructions a person has to do in order to satisfy the requirements of their role successfully: stay in front of your opponent, lead out when attacking. Players know how well they are performing against their roles and responsibilities by the feedback they receive, through their senses, team mates, coach and fans.
Reinforcement
Players also receive reinforcement from other players, coaches and supporters when they have done a good job. Reinforcement is immediate at the time they have completed the good play, kicking a goal, taking a mark, stopping an opponent or shortly afterwards - quarter time or completion of the game. There are multiple and frequent reinforcement opportunities and sources.
Rules
All sports have rules which define what's in or ok and what's out or not ok. There are boundaries, as in the field of play and there are rules related to conduct. Players, officials' even fans know the rules, they may even discuss them at length.
Goals
Individual players and teams have goals. The goals are both short-term and long term as well as micro and macro. If you are a defender your immediate goal could be to stop the opposing player from scoring or even stop your opponent from getting to the ball before you do. The team has short, medium and long term goals such as win the half, win the game, finish in the top four and win the premiership.
Champion performers, whether teams or individuals are experts in using these characteristics to optimize their performance.
Feedback: Feedback is often referred to as “the breakfast of champions” champions seek it out and most importantly act on it. In Formula One racing all performance is scrutinized after each out lap, cornering speed, breaking distances, refueling speed, comparisons with team mates and opponents, lap times, etc.
Rules: At the USA Grand Prix in Indianapolis in 2004 Michael Schumacher performed an audacious overtaking maneuver on his team mate when the yellow flag was being waved. A yellow flag means no overtaking at that point. Because Michael Schumacher knows where every flag marshal is stationed at the track (he walks the track at each GP) and knows the yellow flag rules that you can overtake once you get passed the yellow flag he was able to make his move at the appropriate time - he was 10cm behind Rubens Barichello at the flag, hence no overtaking but he had the momentum so he was able to overtake once they got passed the flag.
Reinforcement: Champions reinforce those around them so they can deliver. They are the first to praise their team. Champions also have the ability to reinforce themselves.
Roles and Responsibilities: Teams play to their strengths and work to reduce their weaknesses. Knowledge of performance and capability is important when allocating roles and responsibilities, coaches and players don't get many second chances if they don't perform!
Now compare a typical project with sport on the five psychological factors we have discussed.
Exhibit 1 – Sports/Project comparison
Distribution of Performance
All sport is interested in capability both individual and team, capability is clear, highly scrutinised and measured. Everyone knows a team's current capability via their most recent results, results for the year or current performance as they are occurring.
All players, coaches and fans accept and know that there are differences in capability and act accordingly yet in the world of work we pretend that all performers are equal. Repeated studies have shown that as job complexity increases the difference between top and average performers increases significantly. For software programmers this difference is huge with “star” performer productivity more than 3 times average and “superstar” performers more than 12 times. This means averages are extremely inaccurate and misleading as planning constants and also as performance management baselines. One person's good performance is another's poor performance!
Unfortunately most projects act as if all resources will regress to the mean and then manage them accordingly. We are yet to see a large project which is planned based on the individual capabilities of the participants.
Exhibit 2 – Performance Distribution of Programmers
Note that this same performance profile is seen in practically all popular sports: Tiger Woods in Golf and Roger Federrer in Tennis are examples of “superstar” performers.
Performance Matrices
As stated earlier three of the key learning's from sport are feedback, goals and reinforcement. Applied to your projects you should have a highly visible, that means on the walls not on the web, visual tracking system at individual, team and project level. This visual tracking system must be timely and accurate and totally unambiguous.
The following chart is an example of what we recommend and what we have been implementing in projects for over 10 years. On the vertical axis is a progress measure and on the horizontal axis is time and therefore progress is easy to see. This orthogonality is important, note that GANTT charts do not have it and hence progress is not as easy to see.
The features of this chart are that it provides instant – in this case daily targets and feed back; awareness of progress towards the end goal; it becomes easy to identify areas that require improvement or have high achievement; performance review meetings become easier to manage and take less time because of the obviousness of the performance and it also provides a strong self-reinforcer since everyone knows how well they are performing.
Exhibit 3 –The importance of visual tracking
What drives this chart is a performance matrix, which is a development of a psychological tool known as a behaviourally anchored rating scale. It addresses the two remaining of the key learning's from sport: rules (scope) and roles and responsibilities.
The following matrix utilises four pages of Gantt chart. Features of the matrix include:
- Pinpoints – these are the major functions that have to be fulfilled within the project.
- Activities – these are defined as sub goals that need to be achieved.
- Ownership – which determines who is responsible for what activity,
- Weighting - This determines the importance of each of the pinpoints in relationship to each other and to the overall project success.
- Points calculation which is used in graphing the performance in the previous chart.
What is important to note is that the matrix is simple to use and can be adapted to measure any type of performance. The performance matrix takes the complexity out of performance measurement making it readily usable at the individual, team and project level.
When a team have created their own performance matrix they have addressed:
- Specific responsibilities & Flexible deployment
- Shared goals
- Measurable results
- Challenging but attainable goals
- Focus on sub-goals
- Immediate feedback
- The opportunity for 360° positive reinforcement
- Emphasis on behaviours
Exhibit 4 – Performance Matrix
Summary
Sport is an intrinsically rewarding activity and the five psychological characteristics present in sport that make it rewarding are feedback, clarity of rules, reinforcement, goals, and clarity of roles and responsibilities.
All performers are not equal and they know that and organize themselves around that to capitalize on their strengths and to minimize their weaknesses.
Performance matrices provide performance clarity and visibility and reinforce the five psychological characteristics present in sport so that project team performance can reach the same levels of success and enjoyment that most people get from sport.