One of the most common requests I receive is to conduct end of season Performance Reviews.

A Performance Review is ostensibly very simple and straight forward.

You interview the coaches.

You interview the players.

You interview the staff and management.

You pull together all the data and notes you’ve collected from interviewing coaches, players, staff and management and you complete a report for the organization’s Board and Executive.

If only it was that simple and straight forward in practice!

Performance or Politics – Which Game are you Playing?

When I get asked to do a Performance Review, I always ask the clients one question….WHY?

Why do you want me to conduct this review?

In my experience, there’s two reasons why sporting organizations want someone like me to conduct a Performance Review:

1. PERFORMANCE: They seriously, purposefully and uncompromisingly want to get better, to improve and to win. They are focused on learning, on success and on achievement and they see the importance of having a professional conduct an independent, objective, detailed, thorough review process;
2. POLITICS: They want someone to come in and give them justification for making decisions that they are unwilling or unable to make themselves. They’ve got one or more political agendas and they need someone to come in and provide the fuel they need to drive their agenda forward.

Unfortunately, whilst the majority of clients tell me they are about Performance, they are inevitably Politically driven and motivated.

This presents several problems.

The bottom line for any consultant is to do a great job for your clients and get paid. That’s the sports consulting business in a nutshell.

So how do you go about conducting a Performance Review, knowing that – for all intents and purposes – the Performance Review has very little to do with actually enhancing performance?

Performance Review – Looking Back to Go Forward

In this podcast I talk about my experiences conducting Performance Reviews for professional sporting teams and Olympic sporting programs.

I discuss some of the challenges I’ve had to deal with as a consultant when working through the Performance Review process and offer some novel and original ways that you can conduct your own Performance Review.

 

Wayne Goldsmith