The RAE defines resilience as:
- f. Adaptive capacity of a living being in the face of a disturbing agent or adverse state or situation.
- f. The ability of a material, mechanism or system to recover its initial state when the disturbance to which it was subjected has ceased.
We were all waiting for the start of the new year in the hope that many of the problems of 2020 would be left behind by the mere change of year which, of course, has not happened.
I would like to bring, once again, an example of a sports organization that has shown resilience in its first, really interesting, sense from the point of view of team/organisation management.
I am talking about the San Francisco 49ers of the American professional football league, the NFL.
This team was running as one of the great candidates for the title after runners-up last season and although this year they have not qualified for the final phase of playoffs I think it is a case to study.
It began the preseason without being able to carry out face-to-face training to teach the plays and strategies to be employed in the matches in addition to entrusting physical preparation to the players individually. While all teams in competition had the same limitations, this is a major disruption in a sport that requires great synchronization between players.
All the whiteboard work was done by videoconference both in that preseason and throughout the season in a sport that has a huge "emotional burden".
Once the season started, the team was losing almost all of its best players and their natural substitutes due to injuries. Some of these players were able to compete at the end of the season, but others missed almost all of the matches due to injury. At one point in the season 30% of the salary cost of players was not available to play. This gave the opportunity to see the huge work of developing internal talent in this organization when unknown players did a good job filling in for injured stars.
As if this were not enough, Santa Clara County decreed the closure of all sports facilities in December, so the team had to find a place to train, play matches during the last month of the season.
The solution was to move all essential personnel directly related to the team's operations to Arizona. A professional football team has 61 active players (not counting players in rehab), some 20-25 coaches and a multitude of necessary personnel: doctor, physiotherapist, props, cooks, administrative and management as well as a huge amount of sports equipment that goes beyond what you see in matches.
In one week, about 250 people were mobilized from San Francisco in California to Phoenix in Arizona, along with all the necessary equipment.
The great merit of this organization was to remain competitive and maintain its qualifying options until the end. This organizational success (beyond sports) can be summarized in the following points:
- Having created a winning culture by selecting and hiring people with that feature
- Aligning all areas of the organization towards achieving the organizational objective
- Ownership – Management alignment
- Management and development of internal talent
- Excellence in operations that support business/core activity
- Managers (including the coaching staff) involved in the well-being of the players and maintaining a realistically positive attitude.
As you can see, all of the above applies perfectly to a business-like organization.
Now the process begins to see if this organization fulfills the second meaning given by the RAE. It will be interesting to see how they manage the departure of key players, coaches and managers to other organizations.
Source: Iberinform - https://www.exportatuempresa.com/resiliencia/#
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