Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton
Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp joined Liverpool after the season had started. As the season went on, Leicester’s cohesion rating topped their rivals’. They had no injuries and coach Claudio Ranieri picked his best XI every week. He would also regularly play down the team’s ambition to win the title, saying it was not possible until the point at which it was almost impossible not to win it.
There was also the super-chicken factor. An evolutionary biologist called William Muir was interested in productivity, and he devised a study of chickens, assuming theirs would be easy to measure as you could just count their eggs. Chickens live in groups, and so he left one group of chickens for six generations and monitored their productivity. He then created a second group, taking only the most productive chickens from the first group. He called the second group a ‘super-flock’. He waited another six generations, and then compared the results.
The first group was getting along just fine. The chickens were plump and feathered and their egg production was up. The second group, the one with the ‘super-chickens’, was not so good: only three were alive. They had suppressed the productivity of the others and pecked them to death. ‘Most organisations and some societies are run along the super-chicken model,’ says Margaret Heffernan, an expert in corporate cohesion.11 ‘We’ve thought success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest … in the room and giving them all the power. The result has been exactly the same as in Muir’s experiment: aggression, dysfunction, and waste.’
Leicester’s win was a triumph of the collective over the individual, of the group chicken rather than the super-chicken model. Even the three best players – Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, and N’Golo Kante – always put the group first. Mahrez gave up his penalty-kicking duties against Watford in November to allow Vardy to score in a ninth successive game (he would go on to break Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record and score in 11 straight games).
And what about the slump that happened the following season? Because of their original low TWI, Leicester dropped back to their long-term Performance Capacity (remember, that’s skill multiplied by cohesion), while their runs in the FA Cup and Champions League diluted in-season cohesion because of the squad players being rotated in (having sole focus on the league in 2015–16 was a huge advantage).
So a team with a low TWI can have a good season, but Darwin’s data suggests that they cannot sustain it. The last team with a low TWI to win the Premier League was Blackburn Rovers in 1995. That side was relegated in 1999.
What makes one group more successful than another? A team from MIT tried to answer that question, bringing in 697 volunteers, putting them into groups and giving them hard problems to solve. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, one involving logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasised co-ordination, planning and moral reasoning. Overall, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others. Anita Woolley, one of the academics who conducted the study, identified the three characteristics that marked out the best teams.
‘First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group,’ Woolley explained. They also showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other.12 And thirdly, the teams with more women outperformed teams with more men.13 (Athletic Club de Bilbao understands that its policy is open to the charge of lacking in diversity, but the club has six women on the executive board, which is more than any other club in Spain.14 In Chapter 5 I will look at how one French club found an edge by appointing a female head coach.)
Woolley’s MIT experiment showed that social connectedness is key to performance. Heffernan visits companies that have banned coffee cups from desks because they want people to talk to each other around the coffee machine. Idexx, an American company specialising in diagnostics and IT solutions for animal health, built allotments on site so people from different areas of the business could meet each other. ‘What people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help,’ she says. ‘Companies don’t have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.’
When you put all of this together, you get just what Athletic have achieved in Bilbao: social capital. ‘Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust,’ says Heffernan. ‘The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candour and openness. And time is what builds value.’
The Athletic directors Amorrortu and Palacios-Huerta agree with Heffernan’s hypothesis. Social capital builds trust: that’s the Athletic way. Then there is that term ‘culture’. If something is happening in a group and we can’t see the explanation, it’s often put down to the culture. ‘Culture is an ambiguous word that can refer to many intangibles in sport,’ Darwin adds. But don’t confuse it with cohesion. For Darwin, culture cannot be measured; cohesion can.
HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by BEN DARWIN
1 Understand the state of an organisation so that decisions can be made (and expectations understood) in context.
2 The knowledge of success or failure must be held in the organisation, not in an individual.
3 Decisions with the short term in mind will impact long after in ways not envisaged.
ÖSTERSUNDS FK
Find your USP
The Solidarity Gala rap / Dangers of blame culture / Swap stress for bravery / Create your own distinction / Swan Lake and reindeer lasso / The Privilege Walk / What is art?
As one of the oldest clubs in Spain, it makes sense for Athletic Club de Bilbao to make tradition, history and community such a critical part of its USP. But what about the clubs who don’t have that kind of history, or a start-up looking to create an edge in the market: they cannot rely on a past, or even a point of distinction, that doesn’t yet exist. That was the conundrum that faced a genial young Englishman who found himself in a freezing part of northern Sweden with his wife and new-born son and a team that was under-achieving at all levels. As we will see, he worked on an identity. He developed cohesion. He found an edge. And the results followed.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen the football-playing, music-making, love-making, heart-breaking, booty-shaking, fist-pumping, legendary UHHH-EFFF-KOE!’
In September 2016, in Frösö Convention Centre, a former aircraft hangar in a small city in northern Sweden was packed to the rafters. Graham Potter, dressed all in black, was on the stage addressing a crowd of over 1,600 people. The audience was going wild. They had just seen players from their local football club, Östersunds FK, known as ÖFK, put on a show like no other. Potter was ÖFK coach.
This was the Solidarity Gala, and it was raising money for people driven from their homes by war. It began with Iraqi striker Brwa Nouri addressing the venue with a plea for community. ‘Solidarity is a collective that takes responsibility for something, without having any self-interest in it to look after the well-being of a group.’
Former ÖFK player and now marketing executive Jimi Eiremo then played a haunting tune on the näverhorn, a traditional Swedish instrument similar to a didgeridoo, made out of birch-bark. Around him, the team sang the melancholy regional anthem ‘Jämtlandssången’. Potter even sang a solo verse, as did Christine, one of the club cooks. Christine is a refugee from Congo who settled in Östersunds and is one of the most popular figures at the club. Her performance, given the context, was poignant.
Nouri, Sotte Papagianipolous (Greek/Swedish) and Saman Ghoddos (Swedish) then stepped forward to perform a brilliant rap based