The Red Sox announced two weeks ago that the team hired sports psychologist Richard Ginsburg to helm a new department of behavioral health. Most of the business hiring for people who get behavior-monitoring responsibility is to improve companies’ service and product outputs, not to put an inward focus on employees. Still, the attachment of behavior to business models is very 21st Century, a gigantic departure from mass production and arms-length collaboration that companies have used to make their megabucks.
There has been a public push to raise the significance of the business opportunity that exists at the intersection of consumers’ data and behavior. An upcoming Forbes feature looks up close at A/B testing, the fundamental practice of finding out what works digitally. And as the practice gets further and further refined, the accumulated knowledge has as much to say about how people work as it does about how any specific product or service works.
Often it boils down to people’s habits and for companies, considering in aggregate the daily routines of individual lives. The exercise has become a C-level occupation, the Chief Behavioral Officer, recently documented in essays by John Balz on re/code and, in response to Balz, by Jesse Singal on New York Magazine’s Science of Us blog. The big picture trend is in the direction of “service design” where businesses put attention toward things like customer experience and obsess over the relationship they have with those same customer people.
What is different in sports is that on-field athletic product is the collective result of the habits of players, coaches and support staff. That is the wisdom of the Red Sox’ move, where the focus of the team behavioral health department is on the minor leagues, the early-career phase when many player habits are formed and are therefore easier to change.
A behaviors profession has emerged because of the benefit it brings to organizations, an implicit result of the inadequacy of the know how of the pre-existing cogs in staff and management. For sports, part of the message of the Red Sox move into behavior is that the usual channels that teams use to affect player (and coach) behavior is inadequate. Nowhere is the gap more critical than with athlete performance where staff are asked to compel (or nudge) players into improving their performance by making gains in speed, strength or skill, all of which result from new habit formation.
The Seattle Seahawks have succeeded by bringing in sports psychologist Michael Gervais. The Wall Street Journal recently elaborated on the positive impact Gervais’ presence has on player-coach collaboration.
Adding a layer of behavior expertise should set up the athlete performance to focus on providing information about what they are expert in, the performance training or skill development. The tradeoff is that the organization becomes more complicated, making effective collaboration more difficult. Nothing gets easier but the hope is that the situation gets better. But that’s not really any different from life which is, you know, all about habits and behavior.
Sports executives will have to consider the same C-level stature that other businesses are starting to give to behavior experts. Look at the situation with the Chicago Bulls where it isn’t just the behavior and habits of players that is called into doubt. The coach, Tom Thibodeau, likes to work his players hard in practice and in games. The organization hired an athlete performance expert and Ph.D. sports clinician, Jennifer Swanson, to prevent player injuries. Dr. Swanson’s pay grade is not high enough for her to seek new behaviors from Thibodeau, but that is what her job requires. What’s left is a conflict with no winners, not the players, the coaches or Dr. Swanson.