Professional Sport

Sport

How to affect fine margins in sport

The difference between success and failure in sport often comes down to fine margins and often it’s not just a simple factor of pure skill that impacts on winning.  We are able to accurately measure the value to which sportsmen put on areas of life and work.  And in addition we can identify to what extent a performer has strong or poor judgement ability either off the field or within training and competition environments.

The term judgement in this instance refers to a far wider context than decision making but also includes how a person interacts with people and their respective environment.  It is with this information that we are able to predict performance and identify potential barriers to success.

What the Judgement Index can do, is go some way to bridging the gap between potential and winning. Just as we can map indicators against capability areas for employment roles we can do the same for many critical sport performance areas.

What the Judgement Index can measure

This methodology has been adopted from our more traditional system of clustering performance indicators against key capability areas.  These areas will differ depending on the sport, for example team sports will probably require people skills factoring in where individual sports may be less dependent on this.  Some of the typical areas we will measure in sports men and women are:

Stress, wellness
Energy and burnout
Trainability
Competition judgement
Team cohesion
Player coach relationships

What the Judgement Index can’t do

Inform you of typical skill based competency i.e. who can bend a football around a wall of defenders or who could run a 4 min mile.  Although, as eluded to earlier we can identify potential issues that might negatively influence performance and undermine the realisation of potential.  Burnout and high levels of stress are two obvious factors.  To quote the Arsenal Football manager Arsene Wenger in March 2013 “my players are burned out both mentally and physically”.  Well, he started to recognise this at a point when the team began to under perform, but wouldn’t it be useful to identify signs of this at the earliest stages or even highlight players who might be more likely to burnout?

Our work in sport

England Rugby – the Judgement index has been used extensively as a support to recruitment for support staff at all levels from senior executives through to development managers.

Navy Rugby – See testimonial above.

England Golf – See testimonial above.

Power lifting – the Judgement Index was used to identify performance barriers for a talented power lifter who was not realising her potential.  From the information gained performance interventions were designed and implemented with the performer subsequently becoming World Champion.

USA Ryder cup (Paul Azinger team) – In 2008, US Ryder Cup Team Captain Paul Azinger harnessed the power of The Judgement Index to help him make the most perceptive choices possible in his team picks and also in the pairings for the match against Europe. Believing that having the insight to understand what selections and pairings would result in the best possible chemistry for the US team, Azinger successfully implemented the Judgement Index and achieved the first victory against Europe for the US in 9 years.