Four Tips from Top Soccer Clubs on How to Build Cohesive Teams
Whether
it’s sports or business, cohesion is a key ingredient for any successful team.
Groups with high cohesion possess traits that help them unite in the pursuit of
a common ambition — they communicate better, have higher levels of
participation, perform more efficiently, and have more trust in their
organization than less cohesive groups do. So whether it is a victory on the
pitch or delivering a pitch, scoring a goal or achieving a goal, a cohesive
team will have an advantage.
Cohesion
is so crucial to success that I devoted an entire chapter to it in my
book Edge:
Leadership Secrets from Football’s Top Thinkers. I found that in any endeavor that is reliant on the
collaboration of all those involved, it is the team’s leader who is responsible
for building the cohesion necessary to achieve results. In soccer, it falls to
the head coach or manager to develop that cohesion among all of the team’s
stakeholders: the players, but in some cases the backroom staff, team owner,
sponsors, and even fans.
Here are four tips from the soccer world that
businesses can use to achieve greater cohesion in their team pursuits.
1.
Have a social purpose.
In the
2017–18 season, Danish club FC Nordsjælland’s players had the
youngest average age across 31 soccer leagues in
Europe, yet the team managed to finish third in its country’s top
division. The players were drawn from two training academies, one in Ghana and
one in Denmark, a novel arrangement that started in 2016 when FC Nordsjælland was
bought by a group led by Tom Vernon, who had founded the African football
academy Right
to Dream in Ghana in 1999.
Vernon
challenges the academies to ask themselves what type of person they are aiming
to develop. “We need to give our kids the best chance of finding purpose beyond
football,” he told the podcast This
Football Life. “When they act on that purpose, it will
improve performance levels and will lead to them being happy too.” FC
Nordsjælland follows a similar tack; it was one of the first clubs in the
world to
appoint a head of character development.
In
both of the academies, players work on “give-back projects” appropriate to
their age. For example, a group of Danish 14-year-olds raised money to help a
homeless man they saw every day at the local bus stop. Right to Dream
graduate David
Accam, who plays for the Major League Soccer team
Philadelphia Union, helped fund an extension to the academy in Ghana; another
player contributed to the rebuilding of the mosque in his hometown. This shared
sense of purpose builds cohesion, even in young players.
Working
toward a bigger cause inspires a group and bonds it together — and with
something more meaningful than just the score line to play for, it’s possible
for a team to reach a higher level of performance. Businesses are no different:
Those that have a social purpose report improved relationships with
customers and better rates of talent retention.
In this sense, purpose can provide a competitive advantage.
2.
Invest in the individual.
Swedish club
Östersunds FK played in a fourth-tier division when
Graham Potter took over as coach in 2011; by the time he left in June 2018, the
team was in Sweden’s top division and had won the Swedish Cup. This
transformation came about because Potter gave the club an identity and made it
a destination for players who wanted to improve themselves. He ditched a blame
culture to focus on performance rather than results. And he built cohesion by
creating shared experiences outside of soccer, encouraging all staff to
leave their comfort zones. Together, they put
on an art exhibition, sang at a concert, learned ballet and danced Swan Lake in
front of a packed theater audience, and joined the same book club.
“By allowing players to venture into
situations they do not know and challenge their own fears, they grow as
individuals, and that gives them greater courage on the pitch,” explained
Östersunds’s chairman Daniel Kindberg. That mind-set is spreading beyond
Sweden. Potter is currently head coach of the Welsh team Swansea City. And
England’s national soccer coach, Gareth Southgate, took his players on a
military-style training
expedition to build character and cohesion in the
run-up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup, where the team reached the semifinals.
Encouraging
employees’ personal development builds loyalty and engagement and, if done right, creates a self-sustaining system in which people are
promoted from within. As Warren
Buffett said, “Invest in yourself. Nobody can take away
what you’ve got in yourself, and everybody has potential they haven't used
yet.” If businesses can help with that investment, it will add value for both
the organization and its employees.
3.
Bust the myth of portable talent.
New is
not always better. Every team is constructed around a system of relationships;
the more successful teams have better aligned relationships, and those relationships
lead to increased cohesion. This is one of the reasons tiny Iceland (population
330,000) overachieved and qualified for the last two major international
soccer tournaments, the 2016 European Championship and the 2018 World Cup. It
also helps explain the recent success of English Premier League team Tottenham
Hotspur, whose net
spend over the last four years is a fraction
of its rivals’: US$68 million (£50 million) compared to Manchester City’s $672
million (£496 million) and Manchester United’s $565 million (£417 million).
Instead of spending on new players who may or may not work out, “Spurs” improves the ones they already have.
Ben
Darwin believes that team performance is directly linked to the cohesion shared
by a well-aligned team. Darwin is the founder of Gain Line Analytics, a sports and management consultancy, and he told me
that every employee’s output is a product of the knowledge and understanding
that they have of those around them. He says it takes up to three years for a
new employee or player to hit peak performance. The lesson: Understand your
talent and nurture it.
4.
Connect emotionally and build trust.
It’s
the job of Thomas Tuchel, coach of the top professional soccer team in France,
Paris Saint-Germain, to motivate the most expensive forward line in the world
(based on both their cost and their wages): Brazil’s Neymar, Uruguay’s Edinson
Cavani, and France’s young superstar Kylian Mbappé. Tuchel uses what he calls
an ABC system to understand his players and to try to establish an emotional
connection with them.
A stands for aggressive and
represents the player who wants to be the star (Neymar); B is
for binding, the player who works for the good of the team
(Cavani); and C is for curious, the player on a
journey (Mbappé). Tuchel told me that he uses this classification to connect
with each of the players and to be able to press the right buttons to “bring
out the enthusiastic 12-year-old that exists inside everyone.”
At Grasshoppers Club Zürich, Timo Jankowski,
the head of coaching, told me how he developed an open line of communication
with sporting director Mathias Walther and with all of the team’s coaches. His
approach encourages a high-trust environment that allows for an honest exchange
of thoughts and ideas, and flattens the hierarchy so the best ideas can come
from anyone. The club has won more Swiss league titles than any other team and
is among the country’s most prolific producers of young soccer talent.
Research
supports the team’s approach — people work better and are more positive about
their efforts in environments where trust levels are high. This improves
performance and talent retention. Trust within an organization also improves the
bottom line.
All the clubs and coaches highlighted in this
article have found their own way to develop cohesion and help their teams win.
Your approach may be different, but as these teams show, whether it’s managing
star performers to do their best within a team or encouraging everyone to
perform to their highest individual abilities, cohesion is the binding
ingredient if you want to retain talent, improve relationships, and increase
value.
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