Can’t Buy Me Success

As Manchester City changes hands again, from a very wealthy owner to a stupendously wealthy one, fans and impartial observers alike are thinking ahead to a Premier League that will be just a little different over the next few years. Manchester City has always had to look across the city to their more successful neighbours in red and wonder why it wasn’t happening for them.

Money has been cited as the reason in recent years with the spending power of Sir Alex Ferguson at key rivals Manchester United only rivalled at Chelsea. Yet as Chelsea have found, money doesn’t always buy success. Whatever the reasons behind Andrei Shevchenko’s lack of form at Chelsea, his term of employment was a spectacularly expensive failure.

Building a team of superstars only works if you can truly build a team rather than a group of people who are all hugely talented, but want their own opportunity to shine individually more than team success. The same holds true in the business world, mavericks that bring in successes at the expense of values, best practice and decent inter-personal behaviours may be attractive in the short term, but can leave a lasting negative impression on a team and organisation which takes a long time to heal.

When thinking through how you are going to build and manage your teams, it pays to think about balancing real-world team dynamics: how to develop and grow talent through coaching, how to recruit a balanced team, and how to motivate them.

The Objectivity of Indifference

The European Championships have been a delight to watch this year. With the absence of any of the home teams, people in the UK have been enjoying the football without the stress that comes from being emotionally involved. Watching games with friends and catching up with colleagues the talk has been of great skills, real endeavour, commitment and style.

I’ve even been involved in conversations about the high standard of refereeing, and the courage of a referee who isn’t afraid to change his mind when he’s made a mistake. That’s not something you hear from partisan fans.

Without the pressure of wanting a team to win, and without the pre-conceived ideas about who will play well, who will get booked and who should never have been selected, it’s easy to see beautiful football in action (now that France and Romania have gone home), when you’re watching sport when the results matter to you it’s far harder to be objective.

Managers can suffer from the same lack of objectivity when watching the performance of their own team and the individuals within it. When things are going well it’s easy to mistake mediocre performance delivered with style and charm as being outstanding, whilst when overall performance isn’t meeting expectations, it’s far easier to spot mistakes and inactivity. Personal performance and behaviour may not have changed or may have improved, but the overall mood can colour observations.

Taking time to add some emotional distance before assessing performance, and taking care to really observe behaviour rather than assume it makes a big difference to both appraising and developing people.