Art of the crossover (and how it relates to talent development)
One of the reasons I love basketball terminology comes from how transferrable the language used is. When I took on the daunting task of trying to figure out what to name my firm, I was reminded of this and everything clicked.
The basketball crossover is the essense of a move within the game that can be easily understood by word itself. If you are unfamiliar with the game, the crossover takes place when a player dribbles the ball onto the court from one hand to the other. Its basic function is to create movement in another direction. It’s real purpose to me is more fascinating and has real world application to what we seek to do in careers, strategic work, relationships, amongst other common life threads. To make better sense of this, I wanted to write a bit about this to illustrate how I work and how I can help clients. A basketball crossover creates outcomes similarly to how I seek to help clients:
A crossover starts as a form of switching directions. Pivots or re-inventions are moments in career or organizational change that will inevitably happen to all of us. We can either stay stagnant and risk a lack of opporunity, or prepare for our next move.
The basketball crossover is commonly used to create a competitive advantage against the opposition. When done effectively, the player in possession of ball now has a better position to create options for themselves and their team.
What are the options? A player with the ball crossing over can continue with what is called “triple threat” - either dribbling to another space on the floor to create, pass to an open teammate, or shoot to score. This is a critical part of my work. I want to provide clients not just the ideas to use, but coach how to get to these options succesfully.
When a player can execute all of these actions off of a crossover, they are very hard to guard. If you are a hoop fan, think of your favorite players today or in NBA history (Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Allen Iverson to name a few). The ability to finish the play after the crossover is just as important as the move itself. At Crossover Performance Group, our goal is to finish the play with our clients.
I’m excited to work with more clients and tap into ways to help you all crossover into the next chapter of the next season of your talent development journey.
P.S. It goes beyond basketball!
Mike
