Are you a professional or an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to managing and coaching your business team?

The coach in an amateur or school team (if there is one at all) is there to exhort the players to greater heroic achievement. The game plan is "kick butt!" or "watch the defense" or "don't let them score". In an amateur business, you often hear "work smarter", "watch your costs" or "I don't want to see a single sale lost".

Amateurs win with huge doses of energy and enthusiasm, quick thinking brilliant "heros" on the field and threats of being dropped from the team. And sometimes that is enough. Especially when you're playing another amateur.

Unfortunately, a lot of first-world competitors are professionals. What do professional teams do differently?

There is obviously access to the best people, and the best equipment, the best training practices and a 24 hour focus on the game and how to improve it. And there is the financial backing to pay for it all. But its not always the richest, biggest teams that win. Sometimes a professional team hires great "heroes" from other teams - and still loses. What is missing?

What a winning team has is a game plan.

First, they assess the opposition's strengths and weaknesses. But knowing is not enough - they then define and describe in detail, exactly how they intend exploiting the weakness, and avoiding competing head on with the strengths. Winning teams LEAD the game to be played in the way that suits them. And since the opposition will be doing the same thing, the players on the field need to understand both the plan and the specific tactics, to continually redirect the game back to THEIR game plan.

Perhaps the most important point: when it comes to the crunch, the game is won by the players not the coach. It is irrelevant how much the coach knows, and that he can see the problem from the sidelines (so can many amateur spectators). It is also no good if the coach goes onto the field and starts playing for them!!

The plan needs to be so integral to the players thinking and actions, that in the crisis of the moment he still knows how to behave. If you think the business world changes quickly, try an ice hockey game or a rugby match. The direction can turn around in a few seconds. But a good game plan not only allows for change, the players themselves understand the big picture, so they can respond quickly and in a co-ordinated way. A game plan that lies unread in the bottom drawer would be more useful as a paperweight.

A business needs a game plan. It needs to understand its competitors, exploit their weaknesses and avoid competing against their strengths. The team needs to know how to mitigate its own weaknesses, and make sure it understands what strengths are leading to success with customers and shareholders.

Your objective is to force your competitors and industry follow YOUR game plan. But you can't lead if you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you (and your industry) are going, you will be relegated to following someone else's agenda.

Share your gameplan. Like the professional sports team - the game plan cannot remain in the heads of the top management team - with the rest of the staff operating on a "need to know" basis. It may make the management team feel safe and in control, and give them ammunition to criticise from the sidelines, but it won't win the game.

Is it efficient for your business team to be forced to come to the sidelines every few minutes to ask what they can and can't do. Yes, it makes the coaches feel all-powerful and clever - "look how they can't do without me and the place falls apart when I'm not here". Give your team AS MUCH INFORMATION AS THEY CAN HANDLE and let them use their considerable skills to win the game.

Remember, it's the players on your business team who score the goals - not the coach (even though the coach was one of the great players of the past). By ensuring that ALL your players understand your business game plan, they will be able to identify environmental changes quickly, and know how to respond appropriately and in a co-ordinated way.

Keeping [the right] scores. Sports teams are fortunate - scorekeepers are provided free to measure the score. And the media provides a neat set of indicators on "possession", "territory" or breakdowns of scoring. Business is not that fortunate - it needs to define and measure its own performance indicators, and then assess what led to success. And they need to keep winning over the season, not just individual games.

DO YOU HAVE A GOOD GAME PLAN?

Is your team amateur or professional? Are you as coach providing your team with a clear, well thought, practical game plan that they understand and will follow? Or are you exhorting them at the top of your lungs to "work harder"? Do you keep diving onto the field to save the game in the final minutes?

Game plans can operate at a holistic business level, or at a departmental or project level. In all cases you need to

• know your objectives (how will the business as a whole profit from this initiative)
• know your capabilities as well as the core in-competences that need to be addressed
• have a set of plans in place to deal with in-competences quickly and efficiently.
• have a defined set of performance measures in place to know how you're doing against the plan