England managed to qualify for the second round of the 2010 football World Cup yesterday, helped it seems by having a beer together on the evening before the match, and I reckon there's some useful leadership lessons in that.
If you're a passionate, driven and experienced manager like Fabio Capello, it can be pretty frustrating when the team you've assembled doesn't perform in the way that you know they can. You've designed this team to fit together just-so; so why don't they just slot into place, do what they are capable of and deliver your vision!?The kind of leaders I work with often hit this problem. Because they are people of vision, who intuitively know how the sum of the parts can be so much greater than the whole, and because their passion and drive wants to move things along as quickly as possible. And because of that, they sometimes forget that even the star performers on their team are only human.
Generally, people need to get along together BEFORE they can deliver. As any kind of team leader or England manager, your brilliantly-crafted formation just will not be implemented if you haven't also helped people build the relationships, trust and understanding of each other first.
Whether it's a beer or a change of venue or a change in your style of briefing that does the job, will depend on the people involved and your own experience and preferences.
And the second lesson is, as Capello says in his inteview with the Guardian Newspaper: "They were allowed to drink beer before the game, you can ask them. It's true. I changed something and used my imagination."
"I changed something and used my imagination"... I love that, self-awareness and flexibility always wins.
He didn't change the formation in the end, it was still essentially 4-4-2, but he had the sense to change his approach, take them out of that dreary lecture-theatre/briefing room and let them bond in a familiar way in a non-threatening environment.
Germany in the second round...
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