Partner Article

Learning from the mistakes of Capello and company

Richard Nugent, leadership and confidence coach for premiership sporting clubs and businesses, explains the lessons that any team or business can take from England’s World Cup failure.

For England and its football team it’s a familiar and sorry state of affairs. Business is like football; there is competition and each player has their own objectives that support the overall team’s goal.

One main conclusion of such a poor result is that the England players really felt the pressure of being in a tournament situation rather than how they might play in a one off performance. We qualified well so why did we play so badly? Ultimately, players feel an immense amount of pressure to perform and found it even harder to adapt as a unit to a difficult situation.

Many businesses should also be aware of this team structure and performance pressure. We often see markets changing and organisations are not so flexible or adaptable to be able to change with that.

One thing that Capello brought in was to sort out some problems that had been around for the England team for a while. Such as who was the number one goalkeeper, and who to play on the left hand side of midfield – and now after the tournament we are still no clearer in these things. Likewise, in business, no function is more important you have to take every function along. You can’t spend more time on business development and forget about HR for example.

In business, we might take the best sales person and promote them to sales manager, and what you could end up with is someone who isn’t a great manager and you have effectively lost your best sales person. Organisations, especially when growing, must focus on getting the best from their staff and utilising their talents.

Goals for monetary success or market place targets won’t drive everyone in the same direction; vision and aspirations have to be attractive to all to pull in the same direction and achieve them.

As managers and coaches do at the end of each season, your business needs to set up a healthy schedule throughout the year where it can assess results of its decisions, measure that against expectation and strategically adapt the game plan to ensure the whole team is driving towards its ultimate goal.

Click here to visit Richard Nugent’s sports coaching website.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .