🥇The Olympic Edition
🥇The Olympic Edition
5 Sports Lessons for Communications and Community at Work
If you’re looking for an ice-breaker to start a 1:1 or team meeting the next two weeks, the current Olympics offers creative ways to spark conversations, even if someone is not a sports fan. Here are several options:
If you could compete in any Olympic sport, which would you choose?
What city would you nominate to host a future Olympics?
If you had the power to add any sport or activity to a future Olympics, what would you suggest?
What’s one communication or community-building skill that can be learned from the Olympics?
The last question is the inspiration for this edition of The Switchboard. In honor of the five Olympic rings, I chose five sports with relatable learnings. Each sport is accompanied by a quote from a feautured Switchboard leader to illustrate impact at work.
🎯 Archery: Focus and Concentration
🤺 Fencing: Strategy and Decisiveness
🦘Trampoline: Courage and Coordination
🏄 Surfing: Balance
🚣 Rowing: Teamwork and Relationships
🎯 Archery: Focus and Concentration
Archery aims an arrow at a target and significant focus is needed to hit the center, the bullseye. According to the Olympic Committee:
It is one of the oldest sports still practised today, and is closely linked to the development of human civilisation…Archery requires great concentration and dexterity.
To succeed as an internal communicator, employees must practice and perfect the ability to focus their agendas, meetings, emails, posts, presentations, conversations and documents. If there are too many messages or priorities, the audience can get lost and not understand the takeaways, recommendations or CTA (call to action).
While someone may have all the information, if it’s not shared properly, it can be overlooked. One way to address this potential road bump is through Executive Presence, the ability to inspire confidence from others by performing as a leader no matter your level.
Discover archery's lessons in action:
Ethan chatted with Harriette Cole, leadership coach and media trainer to Fortune 100 executives and Grammy-winning music artists such as Alicia Keys. Her biggest lesson was on the power of preparation. Alicia Keys was her best student because she prepared relentlessly. She has a three-part formula for Executive Presence: Preparation + Confidence + Full Focus = Executive Presence. Full focus is critical and most people miss this when they go into an executive meeting, they get so stressed, they don’t focus on the core meeting goal. You can watch Ethan and Harriette’s discussion here.
🤺 Fencing: Strategy and Decisiveness
The literature nerd in me has always associated fencing with Shakespeare — Romeo and Juliet. It’s evolved since then to become a sport. According to the Olympic Committee:
Fencing is one of five sports which have been permanent fixtures at the Olympic Games since the first modern Games were held in 1896…Based on sword fighting, fencing demands speed, anticipation, reflexes and great mental strength.
With fencing, athletes bring together multiple skill sets — strength to tap the opponent first and the ability to anticipate their moves. Each action requires swift coordination, which is key to communications. As communicators bringing together multiple stakeholders with different opinions to align around a common message, strategy and decisiveness are critical.
Discover archery's lessons in action:
You play a very crucial role in coordination. When you’re willing to step out of the comms lane to own more decision-making, you can have a huge impact by being collaborative and serving as a project manager. Sometimes you end up being a tie-breaker or a negotiator on a major announcement before it’s shared! There aren’t many disciplines that let you have that level of visibility at an organization.
🦘Trampoline: Courage and Coordination
This is not your childhood backyard trampoline — it takes serious practice and skills. The Olympics’ Trampoline requires “courage, coordination and consistency to deliver.” Athletes are rewarded by the difficulty of the bounce and how it’s executed. When jumping, competitors bounce high into the air with choreographed routines.
When thinking about the ways we build community at work, it requires courage to test out programs — as the organizer, you might wonder: will anyone show up for this event or is this program aligned with our long-term goals? But if we don’t experiment and try out new ideas quickly with courage, we’ll never know what will have the biggest bounce and ultimate imapact.
Discover trampoline's lessons in action:
Courage is about being proactive about finding and clarifying the ambiguous areas that lurk in your organization. Often, strategy, goals, owners of work are unclear and create inertia. It can be really uncomfortable calling it out, but you need to be brave, bring it up respectfully, and find a path forward.
🏄 Surfing: Balance and Uncertainity
As a water sport, surfing requires balance — athletes need to be able to stay on a board and ride with the wave to follow the flow of the water. With the water, there’s an unknown of the force and impact it can have on the surfer. According to the Olympic Committee:
[Surfers] perform manoeuvers and tricks on a wave…Surfers are also judged on their speed, power and flow (the way in which a surfer seamlessly connects their moves from one to the next).
In many ways, surfing feels like managing information that is shared at work. There’s a dialogue between the ocean and the surfer just as there’s information shared between leaders and employees. When that balance happens, communicators can ride the waves of conversations at work. But, there’s always an element of surprise — will there be unanticipated questions or a change in plans that impact how the message lands.
Discover surfing's lessons in action:
Communications needs to be consistent but also tailored for each group for it to be effective. In addition, authenticity and transparency is what builds trust and relationships. It’s important to have channels for dialogue to manage the flow of information both ways so that it’s not just talking to someone, but having a conversation.
🚣 Rowing: Teamwork and Relationships
For rowing, I immediately think about the true story turned book and movie, Boys in the Boat, which tells about the incredible experience of young men from the University of Washington who competed in the 1936 Olympics as the underdog. The Olympic Committee describes rowing’s origin:
as a means of transport in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, but it was only in England between the end of the 17th and the start of the 18th centuries that it became a sport.
Rowing is a team sport with an eight-person crew. Each boat is led by a coxswain who steers, coaches and keeps the pace. When in unison, each rower’s stroke can speed the boat to victory or slow it down. The relationships formed between the team make or break its success.
Communication is also a team sport as messages are crafted based on the collective knowledge of employees, each one shaping the message and outcome. This takes palce in real time at meetings and results in written memos, strategies or employee upates.
Discover rowing's lessons in action:
Nothing gets done without teamwork and relationships. It's very important to understand the motivations and interests of the groups you're trying to engage or reach internally or externally. From there, you must work to find the sweet spot of shared interests that allow you or your organization to tackle big issues.
Thank you for tuning into this edition. If you learned something new, consider sharing it or commenting. I welcome your thoughts on which Olympic sports can teach us about communications and community at work. Add your thoughts in the comments. Signing off for this edition. —Julia
