We all know it’s important, we talk about it, say it is what separates the good from the great, but it is often hard to put your finger on. I am talking about “culture.” Culture is synonymous with sport, teams that rise to the top often are credited with having the best cultures. This week, Coach Dawn Staley, head coach of the University of South Carolina’s 2022 NCAA Women’s Championship basketball team explained “culture matters.” This is no surprise, as the best sports teams and organizations are described as having a shared identity, openness to change and meaningful interpersonal dialogue. Yet, understanding what makes the culture of an organization or team unique can often feel elusive. Using rigorous research methods, we can begin to systematically unpack a team or organization’s culture to explain what is going well and what needs to be improved. Culture can be described as the shared beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of a collection of individuals. This means every team and organization has its own unique perspectives, values, decision-making processes, not to mention its challenges. Since an organization’s culture is defined by its people, self-examination can reveal the culture of an organization, but more importantly, this means once a culture can be quantified, people can take meaningful action to change t
Famed Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant released this week a video discussing the importance of businesses using entry and stay interviews to “to find out why they [employees] joined—and stay interviews to figure out how to keep them.” The current practice of exit interviews is too late in the life cycle of an employee – if you really want to know what a person’s experience is, you need to ask what their expectations are prior to employment and how it is going once they are working. The use of these tools should not be exclusive to the business world. Sports teams and organizations should adopt these tactics to better understand their employees and athletes. Recent controversies with the Phoenix Suns and Washington Commanders, leaves us wondering, if these organizations’ leaders were proactive in asking what their people needed and how it was going, perhaps these toxic workplaces could
USA Rugby is the National Governing Body (NGB) for the sport of Rugby, that oversees four national teams, multiple Junior National Teams and an Olympic development pathway for elite athletes. IntelliSport Analytics will partner with USA Rugby’s Men and Women’s Sevens Teams (Olympic Teams) to support their Olympic missions. Data collection and analysis will drive strategic insights for high performance outcomes.