Written by Senior Performance Consultant, Jamie MacPherson.
As the European Football Championships progress into the knockout stages it’s another opportunity for international teams to duke it out in pursuit of being crowned the best country in Europe. Will it be an opportunity for a European heavy weight like France to continue to confirm its golden generation or perhaps Southgate’s England can finally bring home a top prize that eluded them last time round? Maybe we’ll see a big upset like the famous Greece side that won the competition very much against the odds in 2004? At such competitions its always interesting to me to understand what business leaders can learn from the leadership that is on display.
For all the teams it’s an especially interesting challenge as it comes at the end of an already stacked football season of both domestic and international club games. Feelings of ennui, tiredness, burnout are all factors that teams and their coaches will have to lead through alongside the normal challenges of playing for the country with teammates who for much of the year might well have been rival players on competing teams.
So, how do the top coaches weave together all these strands to produce winning performances?
There are many parallels between football and business. Football teams and their players are transitory – its more normal now for players to come and go from teams at quite a regular rate, pre-season, the January transfer window and at the end of a season. They are very much ‘guns for hire’ working out where their specific set of footballing skills will fit in teams across Europe.
Organisations often have change projects that require a multi-disciplinary team to come together for a relatively short period of time (months or maybe a year or so) to achieve a key objective to enable and develop the wider business. They are often put together with limited time to gel, and in our language to help achieve their Crazy Goal. Sometimes teams can click from the start, but often times they’re expected to get off the ground running with little prep.
Being able to quickly get behind a chosen strategy and build a culture to drive that success is a key skillset in modern sport and business life. How do football coaches do this either through a long season or in summer international competitions? What can we learn from them to take back into our own leadership that could benefit our own culture?
An intriguing story that might give some clues to the key ingredients has occurred this season. A lesser-known German team called Bayer Leverkusen had an outstanding season and for one final game this season went completely unbeaten and scooped up the German Bundesliga (league) and DFB Pokal (German Cup) double. Halfway through last season when their coach Xabi Alonso took over they were in the relegation zone in real danger of the drop. Eighteen months on he has led them to resounding success (and to be affectionately nicknamed by English social media as ‘Bayer Neverlusen’).
What has Alonso brought in terms of leadership and culture that has produced such success?
He has been described as calm yet very strict. He is friendly and personable yet not tolerant of players and people not giving 100% of themselves each day when serious training and work begins. Those who have observed him at work note that punctuality is key. The 100% drive and focus of training sessions is all about getting better at the skills of the team and of mastering the strategy they’ve selected for how they want to play.
Interestingly, culturally, Bayer Leverkusen has been seen as a comfortable but not top ‘top’ club. Essentially a good performer in the German League and more widely in Europe without securing any major trophies or league titles. Historically they have recruited players who often were seen as good but maybe not elite. This may have led to some players seeing it as a potential ‘holding place’ or at best ‘a stepping stone’ before finding another club.
No problem for Alonso though. He had brought a sense of urgency to the whole club about the need to win and win now but only through a relentless focus on what he describes as the shorter goals:
- Their possession levels
- Their ability to get the ball back from the opposition
- How well they create their own chances.
It’s never been about the unbeaten run or the number of consecutive victories just about working with a sharp focus to getting better at the things they can control (behaviours) that helps them to perform (executing their chosen strategy).
Alonso was interviewed before Christmas in the Guardian and said ‘the idea was only to get better’. That they had to ‘start with the basics and from there we started to be competitive, more than controlling (of the game)’. It is worth noting that this turnaround has been quick but not instantaneous. They only won one of their first five games under Alonso but slowly and surely they have improved.
He has been noted as someone who thinks a lot about how to use different players strengths to their maximum and continues to work on people understanding clearly their roles in the whole system of team play. Mid-season he said that what gave him most satisfaction was that by then ‘they have a clear idea how to play’ and had moved from a feeling as a squad of ‘let’s see what happens’ to ‘let’s try to make this happen’.
The run of victories became the ‘proof in the pudding’ that the strength of his ideas was working, which grew the team’s confidence in the culture and strategy and a growing sense of momentum. This belief in their ability to execute their strategy in games has led to a mind boggling sixteen goals being scored in the 90th minute or beyond. Twelve of these goals have changed defeats into draws or draws into wins. We often hear about the phrase ‘keep pushing’ and this goal return so late in the game is evidence of immense perseverance towards their goals.
Fast forward to the seasons end – two major trophies for Leverkusen after a 31-year drought, a first ever League title and breaking an eleven-year dominance of the German Bundesliga by rivals Bayern Munich. The one black spot was a defeat by Italian team Atalanta in the Europa League in May. This had Alonso stating that the defeat would make him a better manager in the future. An impressive show of humility by a transformational leader and coach.
What then are those ingredients then that might help International teams going into Euro 2024 but will also could be valuable to us in our business contexts:
- Set Team Rules for your teams: What are your team rules – the ‘basics’ to guide how we behave and perform in three areas; inside the room – where we discuss and make key decisions; outside the room – to make it easier to perform and thirdly how we support and care for each other – this is the glue that holds our high performance AND culture together.
- Use Team Rules to accelerate engagement in the goals you set: how you discuss and agree your goals and strategy (The Crazy Goal and layered goals that sit underneath it) builds engagement and commitment to those goals across the whole team. Alonso’s mantra was about 100% commitment to the training and learning the strategy which thus increased engagement in their chosen strategy.
- Sharpen focus on what you actually control individually and as a team: Alonso’s focus has been some of their shorter-term goals like playing stats like possession and winning the ball back. Encourage your teams to focus on the control layers of your strategy and work to get better on those things (be compassionately demanding about getting better) so you as a team can become more competitive to ‘make things happen’ in your marketplace.
- Capture evidence to support the link between the basics and positive results: Build belief through capturing evidence of the progress you are making so it creates a convincing bank of reasons that strengthen the teams view that the strategy and culture is working – build proof of concept. Leverkusen’s late goals built the belief in the basics feeding success.
- Know that we can keep getting better: Know finally that it’s not a game of perfect but a game of progress. Even after the big successes and especially after any setbacks embrace humility to know that there is learning here that can help us get even better. Alonso recognising with grace and humility that the European final defeat could allow him to improve further.