Winning in sports and business require many of the same strategies and much of the same leadership ability and intensity.

We have all seen or experienced the phenomenon: a frenzied crowd chanting and cheering, with the stadium or arena virtually rocking with excitement.

Home-team fans can almost singlehandedly will their team to accomplish the miraculous. The home-field advantage can take a good team and propel it to greatness while intimidating the opponents and creating tension in their actions that lowers their on-field performance at the most inopportune time.

Knowing this to be possible in sports, can a home-field advantage be created in business? Absolutely.

An examination of the home-field advantage model and business situations in which it has been used provides useful insights that businesses can incorporate
into their winning strategies.  

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Winning Over the Fans

Fans (or customers) are as vital to the success of a sports team (or company) as the employees themselves. Doing what it takes to make them fanatical  creates the homefield advantage needed to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

To win them over, five factors are required:

1. The team must have a distinct and consistently displayed identity and personality. This lets fans know exactly what their team stands for and looks like. They can personalize themselves through the team’s vision and identity. In sports, the Steelers, Yankees, Red Sox and Lakers immediately come to mind as good examples of this ideal. In business, Apple, Microsoft and Google are standouts of distinctive corporate identity. Yet, in fact, any business — large or small — can cultivate its own identity.

2. Fans need leaders on their team, multiple and different, to whom they can relate and whom they can almost idolize. They must want to emulate the actions, performance and distinctive style these leaders consistently demonstrate. In sports, the players are these leaders, and immediately Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter and Tom Brady come to mind. But also remember how many Yankees fans loved the gritty, tough-minded Paul O’Neill, or Patriots fans reacted to Mike Vrabel.

In business, Steve Jobs of Apple immediately comes to mind, along with his senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Philip W. Schiller. Microsoft had Bill Gates and now has Steve Ballmer as its well-known leaders. It acquired as its chief software architect Ray Ozzie, one of the
creators of Lotus Notes in the mid-1980s who had previous fame at IBM. Silent or tough, leaders must be consistent with the personality of their teams.

3. An enemy/adversary is often needed to draw the line in the sand and make it clear that the goal is to beat it. You can’t shy away from competitors. Although it isn’t life or death, the fans must believe their leaders are willing to do the death march to accomplish the destruction of their enemy. The Red Sox and Yankees are legendary foes, and both have unprecedented home-field advantages. Microsoft drew the line in the sand with its willingness to do anything to defeat Netscape. Upon completing Netscape’s destruction, Microsoft targeted IBM as its next enemy. Google and Yahoo went head-to-head, with Google taking the upper hand and now having a substantial corporate “home-field advantage.”

4. Access and information must be available. Fans must have access to updated information on their team at all times — individual statistics, team standings and record. They can watch their team on TV, listen to games on the radio and read about them online or in the newspaper.

Google updates and informs the public and its employees about its number of hits monthly, the length of time users spend on its site, its number of registered e-mail users and, ultimately, its advertising revenue. Google purposely compares its performance to that of Yahoo.

5. Fans need a voice to express their passion, whether positive or negative. Suppressing their voice will eliminate the home-field advantage. Teams with the best advantage also have experienced the harshest booing when their performance and effort wasn’t meeting expectations. The fans and their voice have often forced ownership’s hand in moving players and managers out of town.

Yahoo’s inability to compete with and perform against Google led to an uprising from its stockholders and the general public, forcing the board of directors to make executive management changes. Apple’s leaders and distinctive products have created a brand and home-field advantage that led to cheers from both its employees and its extended-family fan base. Apple has essentially turned the entire market into its home field.

In business, as in sports, creating a home-field advantage requires a team effort as well as leadership that takes individual responsibility. Using these five steps can enable companies to create their own home-field advantage and avoid potential errors that could prevent success.

Dirk Gorman was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers prior to founding Empire Surgical, a multifaceted sales organization in Belle Harbor, N.Y. More about Gorman’s sports-related strategies for personal and business success can be found at www.empiresurgical.com.