I grew up around elite football, in a way that allowed me to be in locations that most people heard about in books. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations that take place between players and coaching staff in the hours after an athletic event, when the cameras and the journalists have gone and the official account of events have already been written. Although I wasn't a participant in any way - my entrance into the world of sports was via those who were around the game rather than the actual game itself. But I was there enough, and for long enough, to understand the ways that high-performance environments work when you dismantle the mythology surrounding them. The thing that I learned most in the end was that teams that consistently performed better than their resources and expectations weren't the ones possessing the most impressive individual talent on paper. They were the ones that have figured out how to create an environment where all the members committed to performing for each their fellow members - not just for amount of money, not to gain individual reward, but because they believed that the collective was meaningful and had a culture that made personal sacrifice a worthwhile experience rather than the mere obligation.
It's a simple observation as you explain it clearly. Of course teams work better when everyone is able to trust one another and are able to believe in a shared mission. However, the practical implications of that observation are considerably less obvious, and they are the areas where many organisations - technological companies and football clubs alike are always in difficulties. Making a workplace where people will do what they can for each other isn't something that you can force from the top down, or make a statement of policy or articulate in a set of company values and then believe that it will happen. It has to be built with time, through continuous behaviour by the leadership - particularly during the times when they aren't watched and by the careful handling of the thousands of small decision-making processes that collectively convey to everyone involved in the company the value that is being placed on it and accepted as well as what happens when the stated values and the more financially or personally feasible option do not agree. In the most successful football environments I have been in, these decisions were taken with extraordinary intentionality by the best coaching staff. What they did when a senior player committed an unavoidable mistake during training. It was not clear if the disciplinary code used to deal with the veteran who was twenty years old was truly the same as what was expected of the young man of 18 who was left out of the squad. How the team responded when the player was facing some serious personal issues outside the field. The outcome of these decisions will not are recorded in a club's outcomes on a particular Saturday. They all, accumulated over a season, determine how well the team is performing above that or beneath its tech limit.
As I co-founded 1Touch as well as later establishing several other organizations, one of my priorities that I was most deliberate about was trying to recreate - in a technology workplace context - that same quality of the atmosphere I'd observed in the best football environments I was close to. However, not in the literal sense, as it's not a football team, and the analogy breaks down when you push it too hard. On the other hand, as an operation, the principles are interpreted with incredible fidelity. The first idea was that standardization needs to be applied consistently, regardless of seniority or perceived indispensability. The most comfortable locker rooms I've ever been in were those where the behavioural and professional expectations for the smallest players in the team were exactly the same standards are expected of the highest paid, most experienced player. Not because the organization could not have afforded to provide exceptions, but for the reason that everybody inside the room was always looking for signs that exceptions might be made - and the answer to that question told the players everything they needed to be aware of whether the stated values of the organisation are real or just an excuse for a show of pizazz.
The second lesson was about how organisations handle failure, and the distinction between accountability and punishment. The workplaces where players grew at the fastest rate were not those in which errors were punished the least and harshly, or the most openly. They were in the areas where mistakes were examined with the utmost honesty while discussing what went wrong was focused and constructive instead of generalizing and assigning blame. Additionally, lessons learned were shared with the entire group, rather than being held against the individual who committed the mistake. Accountability refers to being clear about what went wrong, why it happened and the consequences because of it. In the case of punishment, it is about distributing blame in an approach that causes people to be fearful and defensive, and is more focused on protecting themselves rather than being focused on performing. The first builds organisational capability. The second creates a culture that allows people to manage their own exposure, rather than fully in the pursuit of the goal. this is the case with technology firms with precisely the same consequences it plays out at football teams.
The 3rd lesson is the ones that I had to take the longest to formulate clearly, but it is the most important of all the environments that I have seen were those in which the evolution of the person was viewed with the same importance as the growth of the player. The most effective coaches weren't only teaching players to play football. They were also teaching them how you think when under pressure and how to effectively communicate in high-risk situations, how to overcome setbacks without dropping confidence, as well as how to become the type of person a team that is highly-performing is required to have. The decision to invest in the full person's development, rather than merely in the technical capabilities the organisation immediately required, was not charitable. This was by far the most efficient longer-term performance approach available to the clubs. It can be, if I'm honest, the most effective longer-term performance approach available to any company that is keen on creating something durable, rather than only impressive in the short-term. See the James Deller for blog info including why growing up around the game deepened my conviction about people about culture.
What do Football Academies Get Right That Most Corporate L&D Programmes Get What's Wrong
The top football academies around the world are, if you look at them operationally instead of romantically, extremely sophisticated development agencies. They admit young people between the age of seven or eight - sometimes older - before these persons have any clarity of what they're capable of or what they desire to be. they coach them in a systematic and thoughtfully over what can be 10 years or more that is continuous, developing not just the technical expertise required by professional football, but the personality, the mental toughness, the ability to take decisions under pressure, and the interpersonal and communication skills that performing at the highest levels of the game requires. The success rate, determined by the percentage of players who make it to the level of professional football, is very low. The methodology the most effective academies apply is with regard to many of the areas that matter in the development of humans, more rigorous as well as patient, and more focused than anything I have encountered in corporate learning and development. The distinction between the work that these Academies are doing and what organisations do when they attempt to improve the capabilities of their employees within their own academies is quite striking and instructive once you have spent time researching both.
The most fundamental distinction is how time is viewed. The corporate learning and development programs are generally designed around brief interventions, such as a course that runs for two days, a series of workshops with a duration of a quarter and a coaching contract that runs for six months. The reasoning behind it is understandable, and difficult to argue against on a strictly financial basis. Organizations must demonstrate the return on their investment in development within the timeframes that budget cycles and performance reviews demand short interventions are considerably easier in terms of justifying and evaluating as opposed to long ones. But the time-frame upon which real human development takes place - - the time-frame when new models, new behavior, and new capabilities become truly internalised, not just intangibly understood and subsequently used and then discarded - has no relation with the timeframe for an ordinary company L&D intervention. The top football academy schools understand the importance of this at a level that has been integrated into the fundamental DNA of their program of development for generations. They don't expect a child to fully comprehend an entirely new framework of decision-making following a weekend of workshops. They expect the process to be gradual and set up the environment accordingly. years of consistent reinforcement in the form of being put in situations that test the framework and have it applied under pressure, and years in feedback precise enough to shape behavior instead of being generic enough to be immediately forgotten.
Another major distinction is the incorporation of development into the operating environment instead of its separateness from it. At a properly designed football academy, development is not something that is carried out in separate sessions separate from the actual playing or training that forms what is the essence of the institution. The process is carried out through the play and training. Sessions are planned for development purposes as well as performance goals. The questions that players are asked to answer have been selected in part based on their ability to develop, not just for their utility. In the moment, feedback will be precise, and contextually grounded in the event that occurred, instead of abstract and suitable. The connection between what occurs in training and the information that will be required in match situations is always made clear and to be reinforced. In most companies, the development and operational work are seen as distinct functions. You enroll in the learning programme. You take part in the workshop. Participants participate in the coach session. And then you return to the job you are in, where the incentive structures, culture norms, the speed of work, as well as the pressures of delivery are nearly identical to how they were prior the intervention by the developer, and where the new rules and frameworks implemented in the development setting gradually erode due to the lack of a mechanism for integrating them into the way work actually gets done.
The companies that train their people best are ones that have discovered methods to make learning continual and contextual instead of infrequent and abstract. In those companies the distinction between educating individuals and doing the work is extremely difficult to define since the operating environment was created with development targets in place - feedback mechanisms are integrated in the daily rhythm of work rather than reserved for periodic formal assessments, and the challenges presented to employees are chosen partly for what they'll demand people to master and develop into in the future, and leadership behaviour that consistently ensures that growth is sought after and expected, not something that happens through designated programmes and then stops. Setting up this kind environment requires a distinct set of designs for the organisation, different from the ones most companies make when they think about the development of their employees, and it requires leadership commitment over a time to be difficult to manage. It produces results in development unlike the episodic approach to programme design that do not replicate.
The third factor in which the most successful academies surpass corporate organisations is in their ability to take personal development very seriously, as an explicit purpose of the organisation. The majority of corporate L&D programmes engage only peripherally with character. It's evident in the things they teach on leadership and communication, however it is seldom explicitly addressed and is almost never executed with the determination and perseverance that a genuine character development demands. The most effective football academies do not regard character as something that players or do not have, or as something that will develop by itself if given enough time. They consider it to be something which can be developed in the right context and the correct types of challenge and adversity, and the proper the relationship between players and coaches - - a relationship marked by genuine concern for each player and genuinely high expectations of what the player is at the point of. This mixture of care and challenge, which is sustained through time - is to my knowledge it is the most reliable strategy for building character that exists. It's working in football academies. It is also used in tech companies. It's a great fit in any organization that is willing to invest in it and have the patience and commitment it requires.}
