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As the calendar turns to a new year, the doors of opportunity swing wide open, especially within the Canadian sport sector. Teams are actively seeking the right individuals to fuel their ambitious objectives, aiming to build momentum in the months ahead. The upcoming year is poised to be action-packed, with ongoing initiatives and the upcoming Games creating a pivotal moment for the Canadian sport sector. 

However, amidst this landscape, the sector grapples with a pressing need for skilled individuals, underscored by a surge of nearly 700,000 job vacancies reported in Canada as of September 2023. 

January marks a significant surge in hiring, with a specific emphasis on summer internships as a primary avenue for talent infusion. Students, eager to apply their burgeoning knowledge, are drawn to the SIRC’s job board as an ideal platform. Capacity building, crucial for thriving in a rapidly changing environment, becomes synonymous with the pursuit of top talent possessing the requisite skill set. 

So, how can the Canadian sport sector recruit top talent for the year ahead? 

Welcome Gen Z through internships and new graduate opportunities 

Gen Z, the latest generation to join the workforce,  are known as ‘digital natives’ and will reportedly  make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025. With summer internship season upon us, it’s a great time to think about how organizations can welcome this new generation to the workforce. Internships are a great way for students to put their knowledge into practice and for organizations to welcome new ideas to the table. 

With some forward thinking and strategies, an organization can generate a talent pipeline by creating internships where responsibilities can grow into a long-term opportunity upon graduation. This can be a compelling offer for the newest generation in the workforce, as reports show young people are more concerned than other age groups about employment stability.  

Nearly 80% of employers have reported that internships are a valuable recruitment technique, and evidence shows that retention rates are nearly 25% higher for those who found new talent through internship opportunities.  

Get the word out about your latest opportunities 

As organizations look to welcome these ’digital natives’ to the workplace, they must first consider how to reach top candidates through digital recruitment strategies. To find the best candidates in the current market where it is reported that job vacancies outnumber candidates nearly 2-to-1, jobs postings need to reach far and wide.  

In 2023, SIRC’s job board was viewed more than 455,000 times and jobs posted reached an average of 266 potential candidates. In 2001, SIRC created the job board to capture the unique job market of the Canadian sport and recreation and it was the first of its kind. Now, jobseekers can find staff, coaching, event based, board, and volunteer roles within sport all in one place.  

“As a new graduate who wanted to work in the national sport space, I knew the best way to look for job opportunities was through SIRC. SIRC is a one-stop shop that shows all current opportunities in sport all the way from the grassroots community space to the national sport space. A career page posting led me to finding my current role with Athletics,” shared Gabby Faoro, the National Teams Coordinator for Athletics Canada. 

In addition to placing new opportunities on the right job boards, digital recruitment strategies should be complemented using social media to get the word out about your latest opportunities. Social media can be a powerful recruitment tool to create higher visibility with greater efficiencies, enable brand awareness for candidates, and target jobs ads to reach the right candidates. 

Finding top talent to support the Canadian sport sector in 2024 will require organizations to develop digital recruitment strategies that speak to “digital natives” entering the workforce. With its undeniable reach, SIRC is proud to collaborate with employers in the Canadian sport sector to ensure the job board is part of their digital recruitment strategy. 

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become increasingly popular and common. AI can be beneficial in improving work efficiency and reducing workload of staff. This SIRC blog outlines 3 different AI tools and how they can be used in order to aid sport organizations communications efforts.

Ottawa – September 18, 2023 – The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) is excited to introduce Values-Based Coaching: A True Sport Approach – an interactive, self-reflective e-learning course for coaches at all levels of sport. Interactions between coach and participant are important determinants of an individual’s sport experience: the values and practices modelled by coaches can be powerful and enabling for all, or they can drive participants out of sport for a lifetime.

Values-Based Coaching: A True Sport Approach gathers a coach’s previous experience, knowledge, and sport-specific needs, then demonstrates how they can use the True Sport Principles to nurture positive and enriching sport experiences for every participant. The course walks coaches through personal reflections about their values, coaching philosophy, and motivation, then gives them practical tools and resources to implement a values-based approach to their work. This innovative course also extends coaches’ understanding of long-term development and explains the connections between Safe Sport and True Sport.

Continue reading: www.cces.ca/news/new-interactive-e-learning-course-guides-coaches-toward-true-sport-approach

 

 

Group cohesion in simple terms is ‘the glue that helps teammates to stick together’. Cohesion is important for not only group sports but individual sports as well. To help teams become more cohesive, coaches, sport psychologists, and athletes can use team building activities. Team building activities may include games played with teammates, puzzles the team have to solve together, or activities that involve sharing feelings or ideas with teammates.

“They’re not yelling at you. They’re yelling at your shirt,” is the refrain that Nicole Pagliaro, a Harassment Officer for the Huronia District Soccer Association, repeats to her young referees, so that they’re armed with mental defenses for dealing with abuse.

But fewer officials young and old are feeling like the positives of the job are worth the abuse and stressful environment. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the decline in officiating numbers. Now sports across Canada are facing an officiating crisis.

Sport can serve as a setting for addressing social justice. By expanding the meaning of life skills, seeing life skills through a sociopolitical lens, and teaching life skills that address youth’s social realities all stakeholders in the sport system can work together to progress the positive development of youth and evolve life skills.

An important step in evolving life skills involves creating alignment between how athletes learn and use life skills, and how these skills are understood in the context of social movements.

Does hosting the Olympics result in a higher medal count for the host country? A recent study examined purported home advantage at the summer Olympics from 1996 to 2021. The findings suggest that assumptions about the “host effect” are exaggerated.

Social media has become an increasingly commercialized space within the sporting industry, with brands and sponsors seeking to reach consumers through athletes’ platforms.

So is social media good, or bad, for the sport industry? For athletes? For women and athletes of marginalized communities? The answer seems to be: it’s both. Or, rather, it depends who you ask.

This article outlines some of the challenges that athletes face within our increasingly digital world, and how sport organizations can best support athletes in navigating social media.

Organizations deserve exemplary governance. 

And yet, few boards perform at this level. I believe every board wants to shape a meaningful future for the organization it is governing. If it is do this a board needs to achieve 3 outcomes through its governing system:  

This requires the board to be proactive, not reactive, and to be the initial authority, not the final authority. To function this way may mean a board needs to reset its traditional processes and practices.  

In a past blog, I wrote about the board’s need to differentiate its role of governing the organization from the CEO’s role of managing the organization. I wrote that “careful attention and precision in defining roles can help boards avoid the confusion and conflict that so often characterizes lack of role clarity.” 

The purpose of this blog is to delve a bit deeper into the work that boards need to do regarding role clarification. There are 2 key roles that report to the board: 

  1. The board chair or president 
  2. The CEO of the organization 

The relationship between these 2 roles and the relationship of each to the board can be the source of confusion and, sometimes, conflict. Either detracts from the board’s ability to govern effectively.  

Both roles exist to support the board in fulfilling its responsibilities. The board delegates authority to the CEO and the chair and holds each accountable for how that authority is exercised. Clarity depends on the board avoiding role overlap or role sharing and not allowing individuals to determine how to fulfill a role. It also depends on the board not delegating decisions to the chair or CEO which belong to the board as a whole to make. 

Unfortunately, boards often react to situations as they arise rather than being proactive and anticipatory. Frequently, board underperformance or conflict is caused by: 

If a board simply lets things work themselves out it is failing in its duty of oversight. Poor performance or absence of performance by one or either of the CEO or Chair lies at the feet of the board. 

How does a board get out front? Boards are used to writing policies that set direction for the organization or establish boundaries for prudent and ethical organizational activities. Less frequently does a board write policies that direct itself in how to do its job and fulfill its accountability to the membership. I am a strong advocate of writing a comprehensive set of board governance process policies and also regularly and systematically evaluating performance against these policies.  

Given that a board is responsible for its own job design, its own discipline, its own development, and its own performance, it needs to write policies that address the relevant elements of each of those 4 areas. By specifying the expected results of the Chair’s job in a policy, the board eliminates any fuzziness about its expectations. One of the characteristics of this policy is that it describes the Chair’s role in terms of the outcomes or results rather than a more traditional list of roles or activities. 

Following is an example policy for Role of the Chair. It addresses 2 common questions: What is the role of the Chair in supervising the CEO or Executive Director? What are the boundaries of the Chair’s decisions with external organizations? 

The Chair of the Board is a specially empowered member of the board who assures the integrity of the Board’s process and, secondarily, occasionally represents the Board to outside parties. 

1. The assigned result of the Chair’s job is that the Board behaves consistently with its own rules and those legitimately imposed upon it from outside the organization. 

2. The authority of the Chair consists in making decisions that fall within topics covered by Board policies on Governance Process and Board-Management Delegation, with the exception of (a) employment or termination of an Executive Director and (b) instances where the Board specifically delegates portions of this authority to others. The Chair is authorized to use any reasonable interpretation of the provisions in these policies. 

The policy makes explicit the board’s expectations for the role of the board chair as servant leader for the board. “The chair’s role is not to instruct the CEO, interpret board discussion for the CEO, or be the CEO’s advocate at the board table.” 

This is a first step in the area of job design. A board that is proactive about its own processes and responsibilities is taking one step in a journey to exemplary governance. At the end of day: “If a board cannot govern itself, it cannot govern an organization.” 

The board also needs to be proactive about avoiding ambiguity in the CEO’s role. It won’t surprise you that I recommend writing policies that define how the board will delegate authority and how it will require the CEO to be accountable for exercise of that authority. 

The board delegates to the CEO the authority to achieve the results it has specified that the organization produce within the boundaries of prudence and ethics it has determined are required to protect the organization from unacceptable risks. 

The CEO is accountable to the board as a whole. On a schedule determined by the board, the CEO needs to deliver evidence of achievement or progress towards achievement of board-determined results as well as evidence that all decisions and practices are within the predetermined boundaries. This seems pretty straightforward. But, again, it requires the board to be proactive: set clear directions, specify boundaries and set a timetable for monitoring. 

The board wants to avoid the temptation to manage management (final authority) rather than governing management (initial authority) on behalf of those to whom the board is accountable. In sport organizations, boards are governing on behalf of members. 

Boards should avoid inserting themselves into management. This happens when a board sets up committees in areas of responsibility that the board has delegated to the CEO, such as finance, human resources, or marketing. Such instances are a sure way to compromise clarity.  

Having terms of reference that permit the board chair, board committee or committee chair, or individual board member to advise or instruct the CEO (or even worse, the CEO’s direct reports), in addition to the directions provided by the board, are also unhelpful. This translates to a situation where the board can no longer hold the CEO accountable for the resulting outcome. How can the CEO be accountable when management decisions can be controlled by another entity?  

Finally, the board needs to be vigilant about avoiding situations where the CEO might “manage up” by determining or controlling the board’s agenda, asking the board to “approve” decisions for which the CEO already has authority, providing information to the chair or individual board members with the goal of influencing board decisions or deciding what information the board should receive. It is not unusual when there is a long-serving CEO that a board looks to the CEO for leadership, or that the CEO feels compelled to step in when leadership seems absent. 

The CEO and board are a leadership team. The CGO and CEO are parallel leaders empowered by the board. This only works as it should if the board is proactive, intentional, and disciplined. 

Terry Fox was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, a form of cancer, and lost his right leg to an above-the-knee amputation. Fox learned of the limited cancer research funding in Canada while seeking treatment, inspiring him to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He achieved his goal of raising $1 per Canadian, and money is still being raised through the Terry Fox Foundation today.