Five CEOs in Six Years

The issue:

Whether the government gets to decide the direction of the sports company?

Answer: Yes!

The conversation:

The nomination of a CEO of Trinidad & Tobago’s sport company claimed the heads of five successive chief executives in six years.
For most of this decade, the sport company has been unsure of its role and goals, while top managers spent much of their time fighting off internal challenges or legal troubles, and were thus unable to set and implement an overreaching strategy for the company and its semi-autonomous subsidiaries. 

What Does the Future Hold for the T&T Sports Company if it is to become efficient, effective and economically independent?

Further change in leadership.

The challenge of restructuring the sports culture of Trinidad & Tobago:

Hire or employ leaders with proven track record and with international experience to include the proven demonstrative ability to manage very complex corporate situations.

Development of an entity to reduce dept and return a profit.

Create a business plan with the ability to attract investors, shareholders and stakeholders.  

The analysis:

Musical chairs at the top

Five CEOs in six years is a lot for any company, and worse for Trinidad & Tobago  Sport Company,  because each tried to take the company in different directions without a plan. 

The CEO’s have been appointed with a clear mandate to clean up the company. This sparked off a long bout of infighting whose effects are still felt today. 

The CEO is brought in as a new broom. The Board of Directors is acting under the influence of the Minister of Sports. They fired much of the company’s top staff, replacing them with employees having little knowledge of the company, its purpose and function, or marketing its brand; to monitor or slashed costs, and absorbed its largely autonomous subsidiaries into a new “one company” to better directly control them. 
Restoring confidence 
Since there is no a business operative or understanding of a strategic plan, success in reducing costs and debt becomes mute. Therefore the company has to be restructured. It must become a business entity.

It must engage in marketing and sales efforts, cut back on senseless expenditure and encourage investments.

Facts:

1.    The Government is the sole sponsor of the Sportt Company

2.    The Sportt Company is a governmental, non-profit sport organization that, from 2004 to 2017,has been owned and operated by the existing government in power. 

3.    Minister of Sport Darryl Smith said the Ministry of Sport will set the example for the Sportt Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT) and national sporting organizations (NSOs) in how to conduct their affairs. 

4.    The Sportt Board reports to the Minister of Sport. 

5.    The Board is appointed by the Cabinet. 

6.    The line Ministry is the Ministry of Sport.

7.    They also report to the Ministry of Finance Investment Division.

8.    They also fall under the Company’s Act.  

9.     Cricketer Dinanath Ramnarine  nominated by the government as CEO of the state-controlled sport company.

10.The Sport Company has faced shake-up after shake-up, switching out 11 CEOs in 10 years and four chairmen in just two and a half.

Holdings:

“The Sports Company of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd. is the key sport implementation agency for the Ministry of Sport & Youth Affairs and its varied and comprehensive policies for the promotion, sustainable growth and development of sport in Trinidad and Tobago. The Ministry of Sport & Youth Affairs is the major stakeholder of the Sports Company and collectively the two entities have the overall responsibility for the implementation of the goals and the objectives of the National Sport Policy of Trinidad and Tobago, whose mission statement is to enrich our lives through total participation and quality training and excellence in sport.”

Rule:

“Whether you are managing and marketing sports organizations, products, events, or even the athletes themselves, you must be able to look beyond the games to keep them functioning seamlessly.”

Application:

At this stage, there are three immediate priorities for the incoming CEO:

1.    Restore employee morale;

2.    Choose and implement a clear corporate Policy;

3.    Win new business.

The three are interlinked, and none can make much progress without the others. 

Restructuring the sport company will include:

Improving efficiency; reducing operating costs;

Focusing on staff on higher value tasks’ flexibility;

Reducing risk.

Importantly however, is demographics of participants and spectators.

Conclusion:

The limited knowledge and experience of the corporate executives to now manage “international experience and his ability to manage very complex corporate situations” must be seriously considered.

This performance based management style that most of the departed personnel and the current staff as exist now lack. 
The Sportt Company has to learn to reduce debt and returned some form of profit.

Its revenues and orders must both have concern.
Observers note that the company has not done much to pursue investment markets, despite the fact that the budgets are growing very fast, and expenditures keep increasing.

The caretakers of the Company have got to learn to negotiate with a positive narrative assertion.

What next?
Need further reassuring about the Sport Company’s future strategy. 
The ultimate decision, however, rests with the Trinidad and Tobago government, which controls the company by virtue of its total revenue shareholding.

The government must now decide whether it wants to be a competitive, world-class technology group, or whether it simply wants to be known as having the best facilities in the Caribbean without a single clue about sports management policies and principles for future investments.

These positions are mutually exclusive, and require very different levels of investment and political support.

The Government of Trinidad & Tobago, however, frequent the change of CEOs, in a faulty system is responsible for appointments.

The hiring and firing by a different Government, each with its own agenda policy or lack thereof, leads to little stability, continuity, and data based management decisions making of long-term strategic planning difficult to implement. 
The government also needs to consider separation from the Sportt Company and decide whether they should continue to be the sole sponsor or whether it should simply continue to support a gangrene appendage.
Major decisions are imperative about how to effectively market the company’s brand.

Notice must be paid to cataclysms by top Executives, united with the lack of clear directives by executives, who do not know the business of sports management outside the parameters of the primary school recess playground and period would not be invigorating.
AT the end of the day; the Trinidad & Tobago  Government gets to decide the direction of the sports company?

Dr. Cliff Bertrand

Former NYC Board of Education Public School Supervisor