By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

With the playoff season in full swing, the city of Vancouver has shifted into some kind of frenzy. Their hockey team’s every behavior will be examined under a microscope and failure will not be tolerated – there’s a silver mug to be won and this team was built to win it. The team must perform to its highest ability and – luckily for them – they’ve been immersed in an environment which will enable them to do just that. Thanks, in large part, to the management team which brought these individuals together.

General managers of major sports franchises are ‘glorified Human Resources managers’. That’s what this speaker said in his talk recently at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He makes a very strong argument. It’s the responsibility of the management team for any sports franchise to ensure the success of the team, through systems including performance evaluations, rewards, strategy and culture, recruitment, selection and labour relations. Sounds like HR to me.

Of course these functions aren’t referred to by their traditional ‘HR’ names, so the link isn’t obvious at first. Refer to drafts (recruitment and selection); the ‘trap’ (strategy); and the ‘doghouse’ (labour relations), and your sports fan will know exactly what you’re talking about.

There are many parallels between the traditional commercial organization and sports franchise:

• Both are driven by pressure to develop and promote a successful product for stakeholder benefit
• The financial success of the product determines how viable the organizations will be in the long run
• Each must create an environment conducive to performance and success, through the motivation and well-being of its human capital
• Both use visionary and goal-directed behaviors to achieve objectives

Major sports organizations are models for High Performance Work Organizations (HPWO) – they use optimal work/life balance; health and wellness practices; reward systems (using social and economic incentive schemes); and succession models to create highly-competitive teams and highly-qualified individuals. Traditional organizations can take a few pages from the playbooks of sports franchises to push their teams to be high-performance machines. HR professionals, specifically, can feed off the systems and practices used by these sports organizations to help create work environments conducive to high performance – just as management of these sports franchises have fed off of HR professionals to perfect such systems.

So the next time you’re shaking nervously at the edge of your seat during Game 7, ask yourself: are the people of my organization ready for overtime?

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is the membership and CHRP administrator at BC HRMA. After several grueling years in school, Nilesh graduated in October 2010 from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honors. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.