How lessons from the playing field translate to success at work.
The definition of winning changes at every stage of a career. The costly mistake is to keep playing by a scoreboard that no longer applies.
Millions of working professionals grew up playing sports. They know how to prepare and how to take coaching.
Then work changes the rules. A boss isn’t always a coach, and doing your job well doesn’t necessarily earn the next promotion. Effort aimed at the wrong scoreboard goes unnoticed.
Scott Travasos learned this the hard way. His department beat its profit plan by millions, and he walked into his annual review expecting praise. His CEO took him to task for missing goals he had considered minor. He was keeping one scoreboard. She was keeping another.
What makes you successful in your first job won’t necessarily make you successful as a manager, an executive or a founder. Each stage keeps score differently.
Preparation and coachability travel well. Waiting for the coach to tell you what to do doesn’t. FieldWork sorts out which is which.
One tracks titles and salary. The other tracks relationships and the people you helped along the way. Both are being scored from the first job on.
FieldWork is the playbook no one handed you when your playing days ended.
Eight chapters in four quarters, from a rookie’s first job through executive leadership and entrepreneurship, and finally to what the career was for.
FieldWork is written for athletes moving from competitive sport into professional life, which makes it a natural fit for student-athlete development programs and career-readiness courses.
Speaking topics include the Talent Trap, the Identity Gap and the Two Scorecards. An academic edition with classroom exercises is in development.
For speaking or program inquiries, email scott@field2work.com.
Scott Travasos has played, coached, run a professional soccer team, served as a CFO and started companies. Even after years in business, he kept relearning habits that had made him successful on the field, because each new role changed what counted as a win.
In sport, he was Team President and General Manager of the Carolina Courage in the Women’s United Soccer Association, the first fully professional women’s soccer league in the United States. Led by U.S. National Team captain Carla Overbeck, the Courage went from worst to first in a single season and won the 2002 league championship. He co-founded and led GreaterGoal, a sports-based humanitarian nonprofit that took American teams to play the national teams of Yemen, Myanmar, Thailand and Northern Ireland, and served on the board of the Bay Area’s Olympic bid committee. Today he serves on the board of Champions United FC, which mentors children through soccer in Uganda.
In business, he was Chief Financial Officer of Blue Shield of California Foundation, where he was named CFO of the Year; CFO of the Foundation for California Community Colleges; and Chief Administrative Officer at Business for Social Responsibility. He has appeared on the cover of CFO Magazine.
He played soccer at Wheaton College in Illinois and holds an MBA from Wake Forest University. He lives in San Diego.