How do Pat Cash’s comments on Roger Federer’s tennis style changes help your teams performance?
How do you transfer knowledge within your business? Its funny I had a client the other day who was speaking about how some people in the organisation were no good at learning.
In fact you could spend serious time with them in specific situations and they would come back the next day having not retained a thing.
I had read some days before an article by Pat Cash on Roger Federer: Pat was commenting on how Roger had made some significant changes to his tennis style, here is some of what he said:
Roger is ”Now hitting the ball earlier and stepping into a more advanced position on the court. He is hitting his shots harder, courtesy of his fantastic racket-head speed. That’s a great bonus here in Melbourne because this year the court surface is sticky, which makes the balls fluff up quicker than normal and consequently sees them coming more slowly onto the racket.”
So how does this effect the way you are training your people to perform. Well what I like about Pat’s description is that he really breaks down some of the things, most people would have no clue about what so ever. Things that are crucial to Rogers performance, in fact it was only a couple of weeks after the article was written that he won the Australian open again.
To see the article – Click here
In your business how are you transferring the knowledge that is crucial to the success of your highest performers. Do you have the ability to break the crucial things down to a level that actually anyone could understand them?
There are many different ways of training like:
- On the job training
- In front of a room
- Being tested via online tests or surveys
- Getting the individual to be buddied up with experts on site and having them work together then be tested afterwards by the same or other people.
Knowing, what you need to break down how and why can be a big link the chain of success.
Pat goes on to say about Roger:
“By taking the ball earlier and hitting it harder he’s in effect shortening the length of points. Also, by playing that little bit further into the court, he’s not covering so much ground. Somebody such as Nadal who plays way behind the baseline might need seven or eight paces to get from one extreme to the other but being more advanced to take the ball almost on the half-volley a lot of the time lessens the effort.”
Consider the following scenarios:
1)You are a project manager and have no idea how to bring up the topic of continuous improvement with your team.
2)You work on a project where you continuously see one of the team produce more output then three others put together.
3)Your team on the factory floor have one member who is able to produce more than 200% more than the others.
What questions might you ask the performers, how would you then record those things, to get significantly better results from the changes you then have to make?
- How can you bring it to life so that as performers get better this new knowledge is captured?
- What process could you use to transfer this knowledge?
- How might you educate the masses?
- Where would you store the data?
There are very good answers to all these things, some of which lie in the technology. Others need to have been thoroughly designed as business processes which then become part of the “Way things are done around here”.
Peopleformance 