General Manager vs. Coach

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I’m not much of a sports guy when it comes to watching live sports, but I love sports documentaries. I’ll read, listen to, or watch any book, podcast, or documentary about a sports team. While I’ve written about the mindset athletes cultivate which can be useful for any leader, I’m increasingly interested in the parallels between General Managers and Coaches in sports and business.

General Manager vs. Coach

One of the sports parallels I’m most interested in recently is the dichotomy between a General Manager vs. a Coach.

While the dynamics are different from sport to sport, broadly speaking, General Managers are concerned with putting the best team on the field while coaches are concerned with bringing the best out of the team they have on the field.

Personally, the biggest shift I needed to make in my own leadership career over the last year is to transition from Coach to General Manager as I moved away from leading a front line team to a role where I now lead leaders. While it is imperative that leaders of leaders are still great coaches to the managers they lead, it’s also true that their ownership of the business becomes increasingly focused on putting the best team on the field.

My favorite framework for successfully putting the best team on the field is an old consulting standby which is useful for any leader making the transition from Coach to General Manager:

• People

• Process

• Technology

People

The above quote comes from one of my favorite modern day thinkers, Shane Parrish of Farnam Street and he’s right. I’ve often heard that all problems in business are either a Product problem or a People problem and I think that’s true.

In the same way that a General Manager is responsible for constructing a championship team while negotiating salary caps, trade deadlines, and egos leaders of leaders in the business world must do the same.

Hiring, performance management, and training are the main people related levers a General Manager has to pull in business. The first two are the levers by which you’re able to change the composition of the personnel on your team and are often the most important for a General Manager to examine initially.

From a training perspective there are two aspects to consider as a General Manager. The first is the training programs you develop to implement at scale across your entire team designed, always, to increase the median level of performance of that team. The second, is the training program you put in place to train your coaches. Investments in the coaches (front line leaders) on your team who are responsible for getting the most out of their team members.

Process

I love process and write about it often in this newsletter. From a General Manager’s perspective, well designed processes help ensure your team operates within a system by which they can be successful.

My favorite approach to developing comprehensive processes across your team is to take a Pareto view to looking at the daily activities of your team. Write a simple bullet point list of the 20% of activities that provide 80% of your team’s impact. Once you have this list, interview your top performers to see how they do this work so that you can document, standardize, and automate the activities of your best team members to make them standards for all.

The last component, automation, can be either automate or outsource. Effective General Managers utilize process to remove administrative burdens from their teams so that the players on that team can be most focused on those activities which drive immediate impact for the business. Automation is so important to business success these days that many companies are entertaining the idea of adding a Chief Automation Officer to their C-Suite. As a leader of leaders (General Manager) you can think of yourself as the Chief Automation Officer for your team.

If it can be automated or outsourced, do it.

Technology

While there is overlap between the Process and Technology component of our General Manager framework (particularly with respect to automation) I like to focus on this bucket separately as, to me, it represents a specific objective of General Managers searching for tools which help them accomplish their strategic vision or tactical mandate.

The biggest decision a General Manager has to make with respect to technology is whether to build or buy the technology they need to empower their team. While this decision is highly situationally dependent I like to use Jeff Bezos’s heuristic of "focus on the things that make your beer taste better" which he often used when pitching AWS to customers.

While it’s true Jeff was talking his own book, he’s not wrong that spending internal resources to build a tool which won’t give you a competitive advantage in your market or provide value to your users is usually a mistake.

As a General Manager be clear on your priorities, then research tools which act as a force multiplier for your Coaches or your team as they do the work of creating value for your business to accomplish those priorities.

Conclusion

All leaders can learn from the General Manager vs. Coach dichotomy regardless of whether or not they are leading a front line team or part of the C-Suite. When it comes time to act as a General Manager responsible for putting the best team on the field, explore levers across the People, Process, and Technology domains to help your team win.