What is sport for you? Just an industry, a business, a lucrative market? Or is sport a mission, a purpose? Do you live the business side of sports as a vehicle or a complement to its higher purpose, or do you twist or forget purpose to better fit financial and career interests?
A life empty of purpose lacks depth and thrill. We all understand our mission values differently, but whatever they are, they are the soul animating everything we do. Legacy Sport’s team has been working with the Olympic Games (for over 30 years in some cases) and thus the principles of Olympism have helped us articulate our mission and values.
If you work for sports and haven’t heard about Olympism, we highly suggest you read more about it. Its philosophy inspires the Olympic Movement and seeks to create a life that balances body, mind, and spirit. It celebrates the joy of effort, education through good examples, and the importance of social responsibility and international cooperation and respect.
There is extensive debate about how much the Olympic Movement can apply those principles concretely. However, here the focus is the importance of having a set of inspiring principles and goals that helps to keep our work in check. We can use them to evaluate what we are doing and question if we are taking care of what matters or getting out of track.
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) has defined three Olympic values: excellence, friendship, and respect. We situate our work in a much larger movement by affiliating our business to these values. We become part of a community looking in the same direction and wanting to do good together.
Olympism proposes using sports practice to seek personal excellence and not have power over others. In our case, we search to improve technology deployment in sports events not to beat the competition but to evolve our work and to elevate the athletes, the fans, and the people who work for sports. We want to bring the quality of the events to new heights.
The friendship that guides Olympism is based on international cooperation and creating long-lasting bonds. We translate that as having a sustainable culture in our team and with our clients and partners. A culture where people feel safe due to our honesty, transparency, and commitment to doing good work, and taken care of by our willingness to dialogue and be kind.
We have already discussed the importance of respect in this article series. As in Olympism, we believe that we need to break through our selfish impulses to validate and protect cultures, bodies, and existences that are different from ours. For that reason, conversations about diversity and inclusion are frequently part of our meeting agenda.
We are not just a tech company that works for sports events. We are a group of people who share the challenges of balancing personal and professional aspirations. We celebrate together the joys of our family lives. We value the passions that balance our body, mind, and spirit – including practicing our favourite sports, music, meditation, and much more.
A set of inspiring principles is like having a spiritually open approach to the world. As we make the body of our business grow and become stronger, we fuel it with the things that make this body want to go “faster, higher, stronger, together,” as in the Olympic ideal.
What values inspire and guide your work or business? How can you nurture them and keep them alive in your heart and the heart of your teams?
TEC – HEART – SPORT is our latest series of articles explaining the mission, vision, and culture that Legacy Sport shares with its community and the world. See below for a summary of each topic we will explore during the series.
Thrill
Expertise
Courage
Humanism
Empathy
Advocacy
Respect
Transparency
Sustainability
People
Olympism
Relationships
Transformation
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