Manchester United's Head of Performance, Tony Strudwick, says “managing talent is an art”

There are a number of parallels between HR and sport, according to Manchester United’s Head of Performance.

Speaking to HR Grapevine, Tony Strudwick says: “HR, like sport, is about creating critical winning moments. Beyond that, it is about how you mitigate all that risk management strategy in creating winning moments.”

He uses the example of the club winning the Champions League Final in a penalty shootout – one of the highlights of his career. “That is clearly a pinnacle of anybody’s career, being involved in a team that wins.” However, he says: “It wasn’t necessarily the one-off event; it was the nature of how we won. We actually used an analytical approach to the penalty shootout.”

Strudwick, who will be speaking at HR Grapevine’s annual HR & Talent Management Conference this year, says HR can also draw parallels from sporting legends such as Sir Alex Ferguson. “It is his understanding of people. When you talk about his leadership approach, it is obviously to empower people to trust them to do the job. That is a critical area of leadership.”

He goes on to say: “It is marrying the art and the science of developing talent. The science bit is all the psychometric and physical tests that we can put in place to identify talent. But when you manage talent, it’s an art.

“Sir Alex Ferguson wasn’t a sports scientist, or a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but he was about the art of management. Science can give the guiding principles behind that, but at the critical end of it, it is about the art of managing talent.”

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