The 'C-Suite' Executive Leader in Sport

Contemporary Global Challenges for Elite Professionals

Ian Lawrence

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839097003
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The 'C-Suite' Executive Leader in Sport explores the challenges of this unique role within elite professional sport.
Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book blends academic theory with practitioner interviews from leading figures working a range of elite sporting disciplines and organisations, enhancing understanding of the C-Suite executive within the world of elite sports, where the exploration of the role remains ambiguous and conflicted.
The 'C-Suite' Executive Leader in Sport studies a range of issues including global sport governance and best practice, high performance organisations, masterminding innovation and change, diversity and inclusion, current and future key challenges faced by sports organisations, C-Suite leader education and professional development, and the future of the C-Suite leader in elite sport.
Examining the lived experience of C-Suite executives, contributors analyse how this relates to existing research, seeking to inform and challenge those individuals responsible for identification, recruitment and promotion of C-Suite sports industry personnel. The book's findings have far reaching implications for analysis of C-Suite effectiveness and efficiency across sporting sectors.

Chapter One

Origins of the C-Suite

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice. (Jim Collins, 2001)

Introduction

Evolution of Organisational Structures

If we analyse the roots of contemporary organisational structures and their leadership hierarchies, we can trace the tradition of contemporary management practices back to 5,000 bc and the first government organisations developed by Sumerians and the Egyptians (Scott, 1987). The Egyptians, for example, had a highly sophisticated approach towards a variety of their civil engineering projects, which in one case required the planning, organising, and control of over 100,000 people working for approximately 20 years on one pyramid construction project alone. The practice of management is therefore as old as society itself with many of the practices employed today in leading, managing, and administering modern organisations having their origins in antiquity (Őnday, 2016). Indeed, if we reflect upon the historical evolution of our own villages, towns, and cities, we will in many cases be able to see the foundations of contemporary organisational design and the demand for workplace specialisation. Societies are dynamic, they undergo revolutions (social, cultural, agricultural, and military) and as a result their modes of subsistence evolve from ‘pastoral’ in which the primary means of subsistence are domesticated animals to a ‘horticulturalist’ society and the cultivation of crops using hand tools, to a ‘post-industrial’ society, in which the primary means of subsistence is derived from service-oriented work, as opposed to agriculture or industry. The structures and working practices of our communities have therefore evolved from a nascent demand for specialist ‘hunter-gatherers’ to demand for specialist farmers, home builders, and service providers. The demand for ‘specialisation’ is unlikely to be recede given the global impact of disruptive trends, such as the internet of things and technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality which are changing the way in which we live and work at an unprecedented rate.

It is important to note, therefore, that humankind has been making decisions about what to do and how to do it whether that be in micro-organisational units, aka ‘families’ by producing crafts or by hunting, gathering, farming, or indeed playing sport. Hierarchy, therefore, appears to be intrinsic to our own status, identity, and self and social worth. Such markers of status and importance appear to be symbolic indicators of where we are in the ‘pecking order’ (both at work and in our personal lives) (Leavitt, 2003; Pink, 2011). Despite the psychological nourishment that hierarchical structures appear to offer us, they are also self-evidently (as we can most likely pay testament from our own experience), capable of nurturing self-interest, authoritarianism, and fear amongst ourselves and our counterparts at work. Hardly anyone, it appears, has a good word to say regards ‘hierarchies’, whether that be our siblings, management gurus, consultants, or academics. However, forecast of their demise, by organisational critics has so far proven to be somewhat premature.

The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century provided the catalyst for most of the contemporary management models and hierarchies that we see in reflected in the modern-day elite sports organisation. The revolution built upon technological innovation and the techniques of mass production (assembly line technology) led to large-scale production of a wide variety of material goods. Technological advancements, made during this time, came about at such an accelerated pace that a certain degree of ‘chaos’ developed. Chaos underpinned, firstly, by inefficiency due to a lack of collaboration between employees and secondly, managerial inefficiency due to inexperience in supervising large numbers of employees. As a result, authority structures and standard operating procedures had to be developed and implemented. Just as organisations have evolved, so to have the theories explaining them. These theories range from ‘classical organization theory’, ‘neoclassical organization theory’, ‘human resource theory’, ‘modern structural organization theory’, ‘organizational economics theory’, ‘power and politics organization theory’, ‘organizational culture theory’, ‘reform though changes in organizational culture’, and ‘theories of organizations and environments’. The foundations, therefore, of multilevel hierarchies, that is, the structure of relationships, power dynamics, objectives, roles, activities, forms of communications, etc., have evolved and so to have the theories explaining them.

The historical roots of organisational structural analysis can be found in what is known as the ‘classical’ management perspective with its respective three streams: the ‘scientific’ management theory (developed by Fredrick Winslow Taylor: 1856–1915); the ‘administrative’ management theory (developed by Henri Fayol: 1841–1925); and the ‘bureaucratic’ management theory (proposed by Max Weber: 1864–1920). Classical organization theory was the first and main theory of organisations and arguably still has great influence today (Markle, 2011; Őnday, 2016). Each of the classical management theories were focussed upon exploring how best to ensure achievement of the organisational goals and objectives, and thereby lower costs of production and increase in profits. The classical perspective, with its primary focus on the ‘things’ of production, emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of the challenges that organisations faced in ‘tooling’ businesses during the industrial revolution. The task of training employees, scheduling complex manufacturing operations, and dealing with increased labour dissatisfaction and resulting strikes created the need for a management structure that acknowledged both scientific and administrative principles. In the late 1800s Frederick Winslow Taylor (who later became known as the ‘father of scientific management’) proposed that workers could be ‘retooled’ like machines, that is, their physical and mental gears could be recalibrated via education and training to achieve higher levels of productivity. This meant that management itself would have to change in striving to engender cooperation and harmony, rather than discord in group actions. Fundamentally, Taylor (1911) viewed that any management structure must be based upon ‘true’ scientific study and analysis and not ‘rules of thumb’ (Koontz et al., 2005, p. 14).

Max Weber (a German Sociologist) contribution to classical management theory was in his ‘bureaucratic’ management approach, one that stressed the need for a ‘top-down’ strictly delineated formal hierarchy, governed by clearly defined regulations and lines of authority (Stoner et al., 1992). Weber viewed the executive as having a key role in the role of management of its employees, but a relationship based upon a more formal and ‘impersonal rational basis’. Weber introduced elements such as clearly defined authority and responsibility, formal record-keeping, and separation of management and ownership. This was in part a reaction by Weber to many European organisations (in the late 1800s) being managing on what resembled a personal ‘family-like’ basis. As a result, employees were perceived as being loyal to a single individual, rather than an organisation or its collective mission. The dysfunctional consequence of this management practice, in Weber’s view, was that resources were used to realise individual desires rather than organisational goals; employees in effect ‘owned’ the organisation and used resources for their own gain rather than to serve customers. Critics of Weber’s bureaucratic and strict adherence to ‘rules and procedures’-oriented model cited excessive inflexibility, red tape, authoritarianism, and general lack of ‘human face’ (Eze, 1998).

Lastly, Henri Fayol’s (French engineer) contribution to the classical model of management was contained within an ‘administrative’ approach – which had at its core a focus upon the ‘total organization’ rather than the individual worker. Fayol’s model helped to define senior management functions with regard to: unity of command and control, centralisation and coordination of planning, division of labour (role specialisation), accountability and responsibility, and subordination of individual interest to the general Interest (Stoner et al., 1995). One of the most significant implications of Fayol’s research are his recommendation that organisations create a ‘scalar chain’, that is, one in which there is a clear line of authority from the ‘top’ level to the ‘lowest’ level. A scale in which all employees acknowledges a hierarchy of superior and subordinate relationships.

Origins of the C-Suite

The positions that collectively make up the ‘C-suite’ in large businesses (so named because of the tendency for all of their titles to feature the word ‘chief’) have their roots in classical management perspective and associated models. The trend at the top of an organisations to have an executive team with functional ‘specialists’ that report directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) include, a Chief Operating Officer (COO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), and more recently, amongst others, a Chief Data Officer (CDO), a Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Culture Officer, CDO, and a Chief Experience Officer. The trend towards expansion of the size of the executive team, that is, the managers reporting directly to the CEO having doubled (from 5 to 10 or more) since the mid-1980s (Guadalupe et al., 2013). This is argued to be in part a reflection of the growing impact and ‘harmonisation’ of information technology within business operations and the demand for owners and their CEOs to have ‘specialists’ who are closer to the ‘product’ (for a detailed analysis of how information is ‘harmonized’ within the C-suite please see Guadalupe et al., 2013).

The origins of a small executive team held responsible for overarching leadership can be traced back to the period, when businesses were gaining unprecedented scale and regulators and shareholders demanded more management accountability. Alfred P. Sloan, whose years as CEO of General Motors (1923–1946) transformed the organisation into the world’s largest company, created the prototypical model when he distributed profit-and-loss responsibility across managers of key business divisions and regularly assembled them to decide on matters above the divisional level. A model or template for leadership defined as ‘C-suite 1.0’ by Kelly (2013). Other corporations followed the ‘1.0’ template established by Sloan at General Motors, one of a clear hierarchical structure and centralised leadership. C-suite executives reporting directly to the CEO were tasked with making critical decisions, allocation of resources, and monitoring performance. The emergence of new technologies in the 1980s, global deregulated markets famously led General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch to warn in the 1995 that ‘if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, then the end is near’ (cited by 2020). Prophecies of this nature led to a change in the composition of the C-suite from general managers to the demand for ‘specialists’ with the ability to provide technical and functional expertise and thus drive ‘change on the inside’ heralding the rise of ‘C-suite 2.0’ and era of ‘command and control’ (Kelly, 2013). Executives with functional specialisms in marketing, finance, sales, human resources, and IT have led to an ever expanding and more specialised leadership team and C-suite 2.0 model. A model that is now prevalent across all business sectors including elite sport. A model that is largely unquestioned, but whose complexity and layers come at a cost. Disruption within the sports ecosystem demands that each element of a business reacts with agility, dynamically. Within C-suite 2.0 it is unlikely that such complex layers of hierarchy communicate with sufficient coherence, quality, frequency, and alignment that responses to the external environment are both efficient and effective. As a result, the CEO is placed in a position of enhanced and greater responsibility than ever before. It is the responsibility of the CEO within the modern 2.0 model to articulate and maintain coherence and alignment of vision throughout a technically complex and multilayered structure. The impact of the current Covid-19 pandemic and next wave of globalisation have forced the CEO and their C-suite of direct reports to face both existential challenges and potential opportunities. Rapid technological change, evolving sports business models, demands for diversity and organisational reform will inevitably challenge C-suite to evolve further to ‘model 3.0’ and address the limitations of the current ‘typical’ team of functionally oriented executives.

Perceptions of a sports league’s global allure are inevitably skewed when viewed from within the context of a nation’s own enthusiasm and bias towards its own sports. For instance, in the United States, the biggest annual single socio-cultural annual event is the NFL ‘Super Bowl’ – typically attracting an average of more than 100m TV viewers just within America alone (Sporting Intelligence, 2019). One way to consider the global (non-domestic) popularity of leagues is to review the annual earnings from all broadcasting rights for each league derived from foreign markets. Sporting Intelligences report reviewed the ‘Big 5’ leagues of North America (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS) and the highest earning soccer league in Europe (the EPL). Most neutral observers can probably agree that the most popular league in the world – with genuine widespread popularity across both continents – comes from data collated from within that group (Table 1).

Table 1. Earnings from ‘Foreign’ (Overseas) Versus ‘Domestic’ Sources.

Source: Adapted from Global Sports Salaries Survey (2019). Available at: https://www.globalsportssalaries.com/

The Owner(s)

In contemporary society, professional sports clubs bear little resemblance to their historical roots and have changed dramatically in response to a variety of dynamic social, economic, political, and technological factors. However, sport is by its very nature competitive. Business leaders, therefore, are constantly attempting to seek a ‘competitive advantage’ – something that makes their club or entity more successful than its rivals (Szymanski & Kuypers, 1999). For successful leadership in a highly competitive league, there is an inevitable and understandable tendency for owners and their senior leaders to imitate and replicate what appear to be tried-and-tested ideas from elsewhere. A club owner, must however, be prepared to be courageous and in doing so have the business acumen and ability to assemble a team of decision-makers who can challenge existing models of management. A challenge that requires short-term optimisation of current ‘strategic assets’ of the club, for example, a ‘star’ player, manager, location, or club reputation whilst looking to the future. A future should be predicated on being sustainable, whilst mindful of the structural macro-environmental constraints in which the league operates.

A key factor in the appeal of investing in professional sports clubs is due to the opportunity that sport provides to ‘reach’ and ‘engage’ with a global audience. In the case of the English Premier League, for example, a reach that in 2018–2019 extended to over 3 billion viewers across 188 of the world’s 193 countries (as recognised by the United Nations). The pervasive reach of high-profile sports brands, offers their owners the potential to derive revenue (from prize money obtained from domestic and international competitive success), appeal to global sponsors, and thirdly, to use the profile of their team to engage in ‘sportwashing’ or the strategic, intentional use of sport (by club/business owners) to enhance its reputation and image. A term coined by Amnesty International (2018) reveals the importance that elite sport plays within the intersection of sports, politics, business,...