A great leader can revitalize a whole organization and change its direction.
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At the beginning of this year, I was feeling pretty confident that Manchester United were doomed. Despite an excellent summer window, United weren’t living up to their potential. Their rebuild project, which looked so impressive from afar, seemed to have stalled. We were no longer terrible; we were just mediocre.
So what a breath of fresh air it has been since Michael Carrick took over from Ruben Amorim. It’s like watching a whole new team. We score more and defend better. And where did all those impressive passes and runs come from?
That’s what a great leader can accomplish. They can revitalize a whole organization and change its direction. Like Steve Jobs returning to Apple or Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, Carrick has come in and made a once-great company seem like a winner again.
Doing that requires a lot of skills (far too many for a single blog post), but there’s one quality all great leaders share: They know how to pick their best team.
Who Belongs in Your Starting XI?
I conclude my book, The Soccer of Success, with a chapter on building teams. The advice is simple: “Your success is not just about having a team; it’s about building the best team.”
I’m not coming up with this out of nowhere. McKinsey backs this up, while also pointing out just how difficult this can be.
That’s no reason to give up. I’ve discovered a clear roadmap to building better teams.
First, you have to get rid of the bad apples. As I like to put it, “a team is only as good as its worst attitude.” Carrick has been able to shine because United has done a very good job over the past year getting rid of the whole bushel of bad apples on the squad. Once the bad attitudes and lazy excuses were kicked out of the locker room, everyone improved.
That created potential for success. All they needed was a good leader to inspire them.
Moving Everyone Toward the Goal
If you have the right “players” on your team, I’ve found there are four keys to improving performance.
1) You have to create a common goal for everyone to aim for
This can often be so obvious that business leaders miss it completely. After all, doesn’t your team know the goal? Often, the answer is no. What is your top priority for them? Is it developing that new product offering? Is it increasing efficiency in the order process? Is it opening that new store location? If everything’s a priority, nothing is.
Carrick has told his players that the goal he wants them to shoot for is expressing themselves: playing fast and free soccer. The difference that goal has made is immense.
2) You must take action on what best moves your team toward that goal
For Carrick, that might be changing the shape and starting XI of the team. For you, it might be retraining everyone on AI so you can ideate more effectively on that new product.
3) To track your progress, you need to use scoreboards
There are scoreboards everywhere you look in soccer. There’s the score of an individual game, the league table, and all the individual stats that allow a manager like Carrick to track progress. Business teams need these scoreboards as well, whether it’s customer reviews or monthly sales numbers at the new store.
4) You need accountability
When United let the opposition get a late game-winning goal—like in a recent game against Newcastle—the next day, they review what went wrong and figure out how to avoid it happening again. A business can do the same thing by monitoring its scoreboards. When you see you’re falling short, you can work as a team to find the solution.
It can all seem so easy on paper, but if it were, Carrick wouldn’t be receiving the plaudits he is in the press, and every business would be a huge success. Still, these are the starting points, and if you get them right, you can build a team that can eventually win you a championship.