Business Insight Zone

Spring Training is well underway in Florida and Arizona. (But don’t worry, non-baseball fans; this post is for you, too.)

Those baseball players, young and old, go through practice regimes of increasing intensity over the weeks, preparing themselves to play full-bore by Opening Day. The best of them hone their games, winter and summer, through deliberate practice.

All of this gets me thinking about how we in the business world could emulate ballplayers — not in a rah-rah, go-team kind of way, but in their systematic pursuit of improvement. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Break your WORK down into components.

Position players in baseball need to do three main things during games:

• hitting,
• fielding, and
• baserunning.

For you the list may be a little longer:

• reading reports,
• writing e-mails,
• crunching numbers,
• analysis,
• listening,
• negotiation,
• presentation,
• strategizing,
• . . .

Fill in the blanks based on the nature of your own duties. Whatever the tasks that occupy your day, this key point remains:

We can benefit from considering the components of our work separately, because then we can think about how to improve them individually and in concert.

Break your DAY down into components.

For the players in Spring Training, the daily routine includes big, methodical doses of:

• stretching,
• running,
• throwing,
• batting practice,
• weightlifting,
• skill-specific drills, and
• simulated and exhibition games.

(And, we can hope, no juicing with steroids.)

For you and me, each day might also include some specific “drills” — though I have to confess that this is where the analogy gets hard for business people. Many of us don’t put ourselves through regimes of practice designed to make us better bit by bit.

But consider what we could choose as areas of focus:

• inbox management,
• effective meetings,
• meaningful conversations,
• prioritization,
• time management
• . . .

These activities usually aren’t as cut-and-dried as lifting weights or taking batting practice, and in my experience the various aspects of the business day slosh together much more than the different aspects of baseball. (One of the reasons I’m careful about using sports analogies: the arbitrary rules of sports make them much easier to analyze than the messiness of real life.)

Still, I think the moral of the story holds true . . .

You can get better part by part.

If you want to be a better “hitter” in business — let’s say by running better meetings — then you can practice specifically for that.

There is often synergy between the parts, too. Running sprints improves an outfielder’s fielding and his baserunning, for example. In business, learning to prioritize helps your ability to manage time, manage your inbox, run meetings, strategize, and so on. And improving any of these things tends to improve the others, too, in a virtuous cycle.

Tell me what you think:

Are you ready for your own Spring Training?

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Related posts:

• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?

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Image by macroninja, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Productivity, The working life