In the news, Inside Track, July 2010
Understanding underperformance
Was there ever such an interesting management question as “Why does the British Lawn Tennis Association continue to fail to deliver despite ample funding and facilities?” The LTA has a budget of £59.7 million, part of it tax payers’ money, and fails to produce significant world-class tennis players. They spend £25m on support for “high-performance” players and supply world-class training facilities, sports science support and “high-profile” coaches at their National Tennis Centre at Roehampton.
So what exactly is going wrong?
The LTA is no different from any other organisation: to understand underperformance, we need to look at the skills, motivations and aspirations of the performers, and what they need to develop. But we also need to look at the picture from a structural perspective: the pipeline, grass-roots access to coaches and (in the rainy UK) all-weather facilities before the kids get to Roehampton, the level and frequency of competition available year-round; and what in the surrounding environment makes a youngster pick up a tennis racquet and dream?
Finally, from a managerial perspective, what I would want to ask the LTA, or any underperforming organisation is, “How clear are your goals amongst management and your people? How aligned are management on what to deliver and how to deliver it? What are the consequences if they don’t? If its goals are clear, how well do they influence and work together with other stakeholders to move everyone in the same direction?”
You can’t begin to solve the problem of delivery and underperformance until you know what the root causes are. And finally, to begin to craft the solution, you also need to understand “what good looks like” for all of those aspects above – what can you distil from examples elsewhere where world-class performers flourish?
In the LTA, the solution is there to be found if they will only allow Pandora’s Box to be opened, so that we can understand from a structural, developmental, and managerial point of view what exactly is going wrong, and therefore how to fix it. Will ego and politics stand in the way of doing the right thing?
