The stunningly different approaches to teams in business and football.
In football, we see very different levels of skills, maturity, professionalism, and available budget. In organizations, we see the same, but we treat the situations entirely differently. Business should learn a thing or two from football, to be honest.
Likeness
First of all, the relatedness. In football, you have a team of players put together based on skills and fitness for the job at hand. There is a coach that is supposed to make a successful team out of this group of players. In business, we see a similar process. A group of employees with certain skillsets and knowledge is put together to form a team, and a manager or coach is there to guide the team through the forming, storming, norming, and performing phases, as described by Bruce Tuckman.
Great Expectations
The differences lie in the context, and not only between the field and the office. It makes a whole lot of difference if a football team plays at Champions League level or is simply your local run-of-the-mill football team. Nobody expects the players of FC Local Team to perform like the best players in the world. Nor does anybody expect the coach of the local team to be able to lift it to the Champions League level. But in business, stupendously enough, that seems to be the case. Enter any large corporate and ask a C-level executive if their company is top-notch, and I’d be very surprised if they’d say, “Nah, we know we don’t have the best teams in the world, and we accept that we deliver so-so quality. Our customers know that, and they pay us accordingly.” On the contrary. In organizations, we seem to expect that any team can be a “high-performing team” — with the right training, of course.
Training to the top
And there you have another big difference: the belief in training and practice. Top football clubs will not hire just any idiot from the street and hope their superior training methods will make the idiot a top-tier player — no, they will hire only the best of the best and trust their training to get the most out of the talent they’ve been able to attract. On the other hand, businesses seem to think they can hire an average performer and make an excellent…
