Language is truly an amazing tool. Spoken and written language enables a large part of human interaction, communication, and collaboration. It’s arguably enabled most of human progress.
However, just as language enables us, it can also become a barrier to communication, innovation, and teamwork.
A lack of shared languages and vocabularies can create boundaries and misunderstandings among different departments, professions, and members of high-performance teams in sports.
At several points in my career, I’ve experienced these problems with miscommunication firsthand. In these cases, people were talking, but not everyone was not hearing the same thing.
Cultural Divide
As I sat in the room with one of the directors from the Olympic Committee I thought I was having déjà vu. We were sitting in a tea room and as I waited for the translator to share what was being said, I just kept thinking we had this same exact conversation only a few days ago.
Literally, the same conversation. The questions, the suggestions, the explanations.
It was like being in a scene in the movie Ground Hog Day. I was reliving the same conversation over again.
I wondered whether my translator was getting it right? Was he not sharing something that was being said? Was he not translating my answers correctly?
It was a jarring experience and I was doing everything I could not become visibly frustrated.
After far too long, it finally hit me. The answer was something I should have recognized sooner.
After all, I’d prepped and read about communicating with different cultures.
This was a classic problem between the United States and Chinese cultures. The problem was a disconnect in cultural communication styles.
Context In Culture And Language
Context is a part of all communication. In the best-selling book, “The Culture Map”, author Erin Meyer lays out some key differences in communication between different cultures. One of her 8 scales is “COMMUNICATING.”
She explains that people and cultures communicate along a scale of context. A high context style is far less direct, much more non-verbal cues, and requires a high level of implicit knowledge.
Shared group understanding of what is meant by certain things. Words, saying, styles of response. This is very common in many Asian cultures including China.
On the other end of the spectrum was a low context style. Very direct, specific, and relatively little intuitive understanding.
Americans are the most low-context culture there is.
As Meyer explains, this is not surprising for a young country composed of immigrants. You have a lot of cultures, languages, and concepts mixing together. There is a lot of room for problems if we aren’t specific.
Coming from a low context and very direct culture in the US, I had to learn to “read the air” as they say in Japan. I had to read between the lines for what was NOT being said.
I needed more emphasis on small clues in body language, tone, and where the person was taking the conversation.
In my case in China, we were having the same conversation because my solutions were not what he wanted and he had other ideas.
However, where I may have expected to get that direct feedback in the US, in this high context culture, I should have immediately known by the repeat conversation along with other signals.
It was once given a sports analogy from a Chinese leader to explain communication styles in the US and China. They said that the US was like football. Very direct, in your face, to the point. China was more like table tennis; misdirection and subtlety were the keys.
This lesson (and that book!) were part of learning about cultural differences in communication and leadership styles. I’ve had Integrated Support Teams with members from numerous countries. Understanding that culture affects communication saves a whole lot of time and headaches.
Language is always interpreted within a context. Understanding the context you are in, and/or creating shared context helps improve communication.
Sports Cultures
It is not only in different world cultures where this occurs. Most sports will have some commonalities around competition, work, and striving to win.
But it’s not hard to see that along with commonalities, there are different broad cultures in different sports. The coaches and players of different sports pride themselves on certain athletic abilities that contribute to their game.
They can value different attitudes about practice, training, toughness, work, individualism, teamwork, and much more.
It’s not going to be hard to see that the culture in gymnastics may be different than ice hockey, which is different than the soccer team. Each sport has its own set of values, norms, and language.
If you have been part of a sports culture, it’s always a quick tell that someone doesn’t know the sport when they use the wrong lingo or use the right words in the wrong places. I
If you don’t know what the pitch is, and that boots aren’t the hiking variety, you probably don’t know football (…soccer).
When someone doesn’t know the language of the sport, it screams, outsider! Specific use of language helps to define a culture.
Shared Understanding
In many conversations, it’s easy to take for granted that the words we use have the same meaning to everyone. In sports performance settings we often describe the athlete’s abilities with words like; strong, powerful, and quick.
Unfortunately, I think there is far less agreement on these things than most people recognize.
Our team had just finished performance testing for an NBA team we were consulting with. We had run our battery of tests. We also asked the entire coaching staff to rate players on key abilities. These were abilities that we talk about all the time; Athleticism, Jump, Strength, Quickness, and Speed.
After we finished processing the data we compared the players testing results to the coaches’ ratings. As I looked over the data, I became concerned about errors in our data entry. But after going back over the data it was correct.
I was troubled.
We had performed three different jump tests; counter-movement, approach, and a reactive rebound test. For all three tests, the correlation to the coaches’ ratings of jumping ability was incredibly weak.
That led to more questions and discussion with the coaches. When the coaches were rating jumping ability they were considering the context of the game. In the NBA, the players are generally tall and already can jump well. What often differentiates their “jumping ability” isn’t the height they can achieve, but how and when they can do it.
Can they jump quicker than other players? Or maybe it’s that they jump well when off balance or with contact under the basket? Sometimes it was their ability to jump the second or third time to get the rebound.
This is what matters in the game and so it’s what the coaches cared about.
Jump height wasn’t that high up on the list.
The performance staff setting up testing and the basketball coaches rating players didn’t have a shared understanding of “jumping ability” in this context.
Now a situation like this can be problematic. It wouldn’t be surprising that a performance coach might set a goal around jumping ability in basketball. You can imagine a conversation with a coach who says that a player needs to increase his jump. The performance coach goes out and builds a program to increase countermovement jump height.
After weeks or months of training, the performance coach sees a few inches added to jumps and feels they had success. Unfortunately, the coach might not agree because it’s not showing up in the game situations they care about.
Ultimately it’s a failure for the performance coach because they did not deliver what the coach wanted.
These are the problems that occur when people use the same words, but with different meanings and concepts behind them.
It happens in all realms of life, and it’s very common in sports performance.
So, how do you overcome that?
Becoming a detective
For starters, you learn to rephrase, summarize, and ask questions.
When someone shares something, summarize and rephrase it back to them to see if you’re on the same page.
Nothing tricky here, but this alone can clear up a lot.
Every member of the integrated support team has a duty to try and get inside the head coach’s head. By that, I mean to understand their view of the sports tactics and technical aspects.
Understand what the coach means when they share what they want and don’t want. Understand their vision of success.
Since we often rely on words in communication, you better get them right.
This is especially important when there are new members to a performance team.
Let’s say it’s a college setting and a new strength coach has started working with the basketball team. In the jumping example the conversation might go something like:
PERFORMANCE COACH: Coach what are the training goals for Sam this offseason?
BASKETBALL COACH: He really has to improve his jumping. That’s really going to help him under the basket. He has to contribute with more rebounds.
PERFORMANCE COACH: Ok. So, he needs to be able to jump higher to help his play under the basket?
BASKETBALL COACH: Yeah…well not exactly higher. Just better underneath.
PERFORMANCE COACH: So, when you are watching him underneath the basket rebounding, what do you see him doing that he needs to improve?
BASKETBALL COACH: He does a good job when he’s squared up and has space, but when he’s not, or he’s tied up with a guy he struggles.
PERFORMANCE COACH: Got it.
So, it sounds like his jumping isn’t great when he’s either off balance or under pressure.
BASKETBALL COACH: Yeah, I’d say it not really his jumping so much as his positioning before he jumps.
PERFORMANCE COACH: That helps me a lot coach. So, if we can help him have the strength and control to hold better positions, and have him work on jumping in different planes of motion or off-balance, do you think that would help his rebounding?
BASKETBALL COACH: Yes. A lot of it really comes from his positioning under the basket. He gets moved out of space too often and then he’s going the wrong way or reaching for balls he could have got.
PERFORMANCE COACH: I think that may line up with his deficits in strength as well. To give him a solid base to hold position, I think we should set a goal of increasing his lower body strength and his power in the hips in lateral movement and to resist rotation. Does that make sense?
….You get the idea.
It’s fairly basic, but it gets taken for granted far too often.
Everyone on an integrated high performance team has to be willing to do this. It’s the only way you create a common language.
This requires a degree of trust. More for some people than others. When we are questioned, the reaction is often to see it as a challenge. A challenge to our knowledge, expertise, or authority.
This was hard for me. I don’t have a problem with questions. For me, its something I go to automatically. I want to understand more. So, someone asking me a question doesn’t trigger me to feel threatened.
However, I found I often triggered this reaction in others.
Because I was comfortable with questioning, I didn’t realize how others felt. My questioning was too fast or too aggressive for many people in both my personal and professional life.
So building trust first is key. The second is learning how to ask questions. Working on those two skills can make your team better as a result.
Precision of Language
When we talk about a new LED TV or a graphic image, you may describe the number of pixels. These are the tiny squares that make up a digital image. The more of them there are, the crisper and clearer the picture. This is the resolution of the image.
We also talk about this in measurements. Take timing for example. I can measure time with a sundial or a stopwatch. If I want to record a 40yd dash, I better be able to measure units smaller than a second.
I need the resolution to measure down to the hundreds of a second to give me enough precision.
Language is the same. The more precise our understanding and use of words, the clearer the concept can be communicated. When something is important in our culture and context, we tend to use more precise words.
You may have heard that the Alaskan Inuit people have 50 words for snow.
Whether thats an urban legend or not, there is evidence for this phenomenon. The Sami people in Scandanavia and Russia have hundreds of words for reindeer.
Why? Because these things are important in the lives and survival of those people.
The opposite also appears to be true. Researchers from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University wanted to see if people in warmer climates had fewer words for ice and snow.
In fact, they did. “We found that languages from warm parts of the world are more likely to use the same word for snow and ice,” said Alexandra Carstensen a co-author of the study.
If what we are talking about is important to us, the precision of our language matters.
Their Own Language
In high-performance settings, the physical qualities of players may be very important to performance. Saying simply that an exercise is “the best to make them stronger” does a massive disservice to everyone involved.
When we use language imprecisely, we can take a complex situation, or a nuanced and valuable thought, and reduce it to something oversimplified and inaccurate.
When the complexity of something is lost we remain ignorant of the situation’s reality and will have a harder time finding solutions.
For example, describing an injury risk reduction program as simply “very good” or “very bad” essentially means nothing. We can articulate the program’s success, factors that it addresses, implementation challenges, psychological factors, and much more to describe it.
Simply saying it is good or bad robs the listener of information they need to contribute. Dumbing the complexity down and taking away the nuance makes us ignorant. It makes it harder to collaborate with others and solve problems.
High performance teams are composed of many differnt experts. In each of their domains there is some shared context to the language that is used among others in that profession. However, when they have to work alongside other professionals from outside their domain, this lack of shared langauge can cause problems.
I was leading an Integrated Support Team as the discussion turned to an athlete’s return to performance program. She’d had a knee injury that greatly impacted her performance on the snow and had required some serious rehab.
With a new sports med member in the group, I listened as they discussed the needs with one of the performance coaches. As the conversation progressed there was an apparent gap in both common and precise language.
The discussion was revolving around how to develop and progress training for her strength & power. Those are pretty broad words. Our performance coach would break those down into a whole slew of different qualities and movement contexts.
The new therapist didn’t have this same perspective or knowledge and the words had other meanings.
When the performance coach was talking about training different movements and power qualities, I could see the reaction by the therapist wasn’t positive.
As the conversation went on, it became apparent they were thinking about heavy Olympic lifts every time “power” came up.
On the other hand, the performance coach was getting frustrated. He had a deeper understanding of the different biomechanics and qualities, be he was making the common mistake of assuming the therapist understood it the same way he did.
Other members of the team interjected some perspectives and ideas, but these 2 were not speaking the same language.
They were both in the same conversation but literally talking about different things.
Only by resetting the conversation and helping the team get some shred language on the topic did we move forward.
In fact, the two were very much in alignment with what they wanted to do, but they needed to understand the language the other was using.
Common Language Is Key
Problem-solving, shared goals, clear roles, and tasks all require that meaning of the language used is the same for the team.
Some of our biggest frustrations and failures can stem back to something seemingly as simple as this.
Create a common language and you’ve reduced the potential errors. You’ve sped up the process of communication and ideation.
All of which can help you with achieving your mission of performance at a high level.
