Bri­an Lewis

The 21st cen­tu­ry en­vi­ron­ment re­quires a nim­ble­ness of thought and de­ci­sion-mak­ing on a dai­ly ba­sis that is prov­ing chal­leng­ing for al­most every sport leader.Hav­ing to fo­cus dai­ly on grow­ing the sport you lead while work­ing with key stake­hold­ers from all over the globe, while at the same time ad­dress­ing na­tion­al needs, is at best in­ter­est­ing and at worst sim­ply over­whelm­ing.

In T&T, a huge chal­lenge is to re­turn sport par­tic­i­pa­tion to pre­vi­ous lev­els and then man­age ex­po­nen­tial growth strate­gi­cal­ly in a sus­tain­able way.Mak­ing choic­es that are best for the long term vi­a­bil­i­ty of sport be­comes the strate­gic pri­or­i­ty.Build­ing the un­der­stand­ing and trust across the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers is al­so nec­es­sary.

Adding val­ue to stake­hold­ers, who are in essence clients, re­quire bal­anc­ing the in­creas­ing de­mands in­her­ent in a mem­ber based non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion that al­so func­tions in a bur­geon­ing com­mer­cial in­dus­try.Com­ing up with strate­gies for the di­rec­tion of the NSO, specif­i­cal­ly on the busi­ness de­vel­op­ment side is prov­ing a sig­nif­i­cant step up for every sin­gle NSO.

Most sport lead­ers are fac­ing the hard ques­tion: how to bal­ance their love of sport with the busi­ness of sport while at the same time fac­ing up to the re­al­i­ties of the po­lit­i­cal side of sport.There need to be some hard choic­es made; the re­sis­tance to change is pow­er­ful and in­flu­en­tial.Mov­ing lo­cal sport for­ward is a jour­ney. And like every jour­ney it starts with a sin­gle step with ob­sta­cles to over­come along the way.

Where is T&T on that jour­ney from de­vel­op­ing a strat­e­gy to mak­ing im­por­tant de­ci­sions and de­liv­er­ing on ob­jec­tives what is our guide?How do we po­si­tion sport in T&T for ac­cel­er­at­ed growth? How do we po­si­tion T&T as an emerg­ing force in glob­al sport?How can we in­te­grate the di­verse ob­jec­tives and agen­das to de­vel­op a unit­ed strat­e­gy?

I re­main con­vinced that T&T pro­vides the near per­fect stage to de­vel­op and sus­tain a pow­er­ful pres­ence in the the­atre that is glob­al sport.T&T is alive with po­ten­tial. Sport tal­ent and po­ten­tial is in our DNA.What will it take for pol­i­cy mak­ers and man­i­festo drafters in the po­lit­i­cal realm to wake up to the un­tapped val­ue of sport?

Mod­ern sport is a di­verse busi­ness.Set­ting goals, sin­gle mind­ed fo­cus on suc­cess, be­ing a team play­er are all lead­er­ship skills that are de­vel­oped from play­ing sport.NSOs are re­spon­si­ble for gov­ern­ing their sport, fol­low­ing rules and reg­u­la­tions as es­tab­lished by their in­ter­na­tion­al fed­er­a­tions and at the same time pro­vid­ing mem­ber or­gan­i­sa­tions with in­creas­ing­ly de­mand­ing ser­vice ex­pec­ta­tions, of­ten in the face of tremen­dous fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties.

The per­son ul­ti­mate­ly re­spon­si­ble for the strate­gic di­rec­tion and im­ple­men­ta­tion for the NSO, for un­der­stand­ing its strengths and weak­ness­es, is its pres­i­dent.The pres­i­dent must be able to demon­strate the full range of mod­ern lead­er­ship skills com­mon­ly found in suc­cess­ful cor­po­rate and com­mer­cial en­ter­pris­es.

The abil­i­ty to serve, in­spire, mo­ti­vate, em­pow­er, guide and at­tract the best peo­ple.The NSOs brand, im­age, rep­u­ta­tion and com­mer­cial val­ue can ei­ther be en­hanced or di­min­ished by the leader.How­ev­er, notwith­stand­ing all that has been said pre­vi­ous­ly, the most im­por­tant peo­ple in any sport or­gan­i­sa­tion are the ath­letes not the sport lead­ers.

Next week we will take a look at the na­tion­al sport pol­i­cy which should be the doc­u­ment that pro­vides the guide and sys­temic frame­work for all lo­cal sport stake­hold­ers in­clud­ing the Min­istry of Sport and Sport Com­pa­ny T&T.Bri­an Lewis is the pres­i­dent of the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee. The views ex­pressed are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of the Olympic Com­mit­tee.

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