Leveling the Playing Field: Sports Metaphors at Work
On Metaphor, Inclusion, and What to Talk About Besides Sports
In its recent article lambasting the managerial class, the Atlantic offered up one complaint that caught my eye:
One truly insufferable habit of the modern manager is their reliance on the sports metaphor—the home run, the Hail Mary, the slam dunk—when trying to inspire their team.
If you’ve spent more than a week in a corporate setting, you’ve heard sports metaphors. From lay-ups for something easy, to audibles for last-minute add-ins, there are countless ways that sports are deeply embedded in the language of business.
Obama plays golf
This dynamic of sports analogy lives loosely around gender lines, and loosely around cultural exposure. Of course, there are many women who are avid sports fans, and many men who don’t keep up with the stats and stars of sports. And there are many who recognize the value of being able to dish about last night’s game or extend a sports metaphor with clients and colleagues even if they don’t follow every move.
But the primacy of sports metaphor in business is a double-edged sword, as it taps into an existing cultural paradigm around sports that can exclude those who aren’t steeped in it.
METAPHORS REINFORCE INSIDER AND OUTSIDER STATUS
This isn’t a new observation; a 2014 New York Times article refers to Betty Harragan’s 1977 book Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women and how she outlines the language of sports in business.
Boys learn the "rules of the game" as they participate on many teams, so that "by the mid-teens rules have become second nature to boys.” Understanding these rules and being able to speak the language of sports helps young athletes quickly "adjust to life within the inter-male dominance hierarchy of football and hierarchical organizations in general.”
When the world of business was ruled by men from a similar cultural milieu, the language of sports was an easy way to get to a common understanding.
Jargon “helps us coordinate our tasks and solve problems that we do regularly, but it also signals insiders and outsiders,” she said. Sports idioms tied to work can be vivid and powerful for men, and less so for women, she said.
Plenty of women have a passion for sport, and the growth of girls’ team sports might contribute to them learning ‘the rules of the game,’ bringing the sports metaphor to life for them.
But this is not the only metaphor applicable to business. When I worked on an all-female team, the metaphors shifted. We rarely talked about goalposts or slam dunks. The first time I heard a woman drop a business metaphor about fashion, I was floored. We could reference feminine things and create a space of commonality on our terms.
The same is true in rooms where it’s people of color; when I connect with Asian friends there’s a deep familiarity and affinity for certain metaphors and Asian-American cultural experiences, even if we all have different national backgrounds. When I was the sole non-Black person on an all-Black female team, the cultural references and metaphors were again entirely different.
METAPHORS HAVE A BIGGER IMPACT THAN YOU THINK
In linguist George Lakoff’s seminal 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, he explained how the metaphor of war in politics induces all kinds of ‘entailments,’ or implications. When we choose certain words to reference or simplify, we give it a certain perspective. Thibodeau and Boroditsky took this theory and provided it out with a take on crime:
Half of the participants read about a crime-ridden city where the criminal element was described as a beast preying upon innocent citizens (an animal metaphor). A separate group read essentially the same description of the city, only it described the criminal element as a disease that plagued the town (a disease metaphor). Later, when asked how to solve the crime issue, those who read the animal metaphor suggested control strategies (increasing police presence, imposing stricter penalties). Those who read the disease metaphor instead suggested diagnostic or treatment strategies (seeking out the primary cause of the crime wave, bolstering the economy).
When we use a sports metaphor, it has implications as well. It implies teamwork, but also competition. It implies excellence, but also defeating the other. In 2002 researchers Oberlechner and Mayer-Schonberger outlined four common metaphor styles for leadership, of which sports/war is one.
As we move towards a world that prizes collaboration, often across cultures and geographies, the top-down hierarchies and the competitive nature of not just sports/war, but also machine and religious metaphor leaves a lot wanting.
As more women enter the work space and find homes as leaders, there may be a new paradigm to tap into. Shirley Randell and Hilary Yerbury did a small study of how women leaders use metaphor in various cultures, and found language around cultivating and growing, like plants and animals. Adrienne Marie Brown wrote Emergent Strategy, which uses ideas of social justice, nature, and organic connection to describe strategy. (This is also of course not solely feminine; Geert Hofstede, one of the preeminent scholars on work culture has a whole treatise on flowers, bouquets, and gardens.)
This natural lens has a fresh set of implications in comparison to sports metaphors, teeing up collaboration and connection over competition, and inviting people in to more innate analogies of nature.
So when you’re slinging metaphors—whether sports, war, or otherwise—here are a few questions to ask yourself:
Who are you including or excluding when you reference certain metaphors?
Does the metaphor have implications that are different than your intent?
What other metaphor might you explore to tell the same story—and drive a different underlying intent?
One more note:
I can’t talk about metaphors and sports without a brief nod to America’s favorite coach, Ted Lasso, who’s gone and taken pop culture references to the next level in a culture that usually has no idea what he’s talking about.
Here’s a guide for how to nail his specific way of cementing his own outsider status while still steering clear of the competitive cliché typical of sports talk.
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