WHAT CAN THE WORLD'S GREATEST SPORTS COACHES TEACH US ABOUT PERFORMANCE AND COMMUNICATIONS?
By Rob Liddiard (Co-founder CEO of Yapster) and Dom Williams (Regional Manager for Caffe Nero & Junior Academy Head Coach at Salford Red Devils)
We are fascinated by professional athletes and their coaches. For us, they are the purest source of information on what it takes to achieve elite performance and managerial success in human societies.
Business Leaders often get undue credit or criticism for factors other than our own brilliance or lack of. The average CEO of a monopoly business trouncing weak competition will look to many like a genius, whereas her more capable counterpart in a struggling sector or economy won’t look nearly so good. By contrast, in sport, rules are fixed and match conditions are equal. Skill and will primarily determine outcomes over time.
Of course, richer sports teams are generally able to field more skillful players but the key ingredients of success remain skill and will, not money per se. Take the story of Leicester City football club, a lowly rated (and financially disadvantaged) English football team that was able to win the mighty Premier League against all odds as recently as 2015/16. Manchester United, City, Arsenal, Liverpool and other top clubs who lost out that year could not credibly claim that Leicester had the benefit of any disruptive technological advantage or unearned tailwind propelling them forward.
One of your authors (Dom - pictured) has personal experience of the similarities and differences of managing business and sports performance. In 2021, Dom was surprised and humbled to be asked to take on the under 16s Head Coach role with the Salford Red Devils Foundation Rising Stars Development Academy team, part of the Salford Red Devils Rugby League Club player performance pathway for young athletes.
If someone had said this would have happened when Dom started his #rugbyleague coaching journey 9 years ago (at Folly Lane ARLFC), he’d have laughed at them! Whilst loving the challenge, Dom has found it hugely testing and stretching to plan, refine and deliver blocks of player development sessions, plus coaching fixtures against other Super League clubs.
SO WHAT SEPARATES GREAT COACHES FROM THE AVERAGE ONES?
Common values run through the team like a steel beam
Many leaders in business and sport dismiss values as trite, or soft and cuddly ‘HR nonsense’ but nothing could be further from the truth. According to John Wooden, a multi-title-winning basketball coach regarded by many in the sporting world as the greatest of all time, starting with a crisply defined and robustly enforced set of team values is the foundation of success.
Wooden felt so strongly about values that he created and published a comprehensive Pyramid of Success, which he expected every player and coach serving under him to live by. At the base of his pyramid he put his ‘cornerstone’ values of Industriousness and Enthusiasm, without which he believed no one could be truly successful. According to Wooden, winners love what they do and do everything they can.
Although Wooden retired in 1975, his approach to team values has underpinned the success of many championship winning coaches across a range of sports since. The latest up and coming coach to adopt Wooden’s approach is Sean McVay, the precocious (35 year old) chief of the NFL’s LA Rams.
Since arriving at the Rams, McVay has gone as far as making his players wear training t-shirts with his own Pyramid of Success printed on them! Like Wooden, McVay’s Pyramid also included two cornerstone values: character and communication.
Any player who does not exhibit these values simply will not get on (or stay on) McVay’s Rams. Everything the team does is built upon these foundations, poured in concrete.
Brutal focus on fielding the very best players available
The best coaches stuff their teams full of players who have:
the right values for the team,
incredible skill; and
unbreakable will.
They constantly evaluate every position and ask themselves if someone better (across the three measures) is available. If someone is, the coach recruits and plays them without hesitation. Whilst this might sound harsh to some, great coaches tend to care enormously towards their players and often their greatest affection is felt towards ‘back up’ players (who perhaps can’t hold a first team place on skill grounds, but hold their place on values and willpower grounds).
Obsessive and adaptive management and coaching staff
The only people elite coaches demand more from than their players are themselves. It is common for such individuals to have an almost professorial quality, so intense is their focus on learning and uncovering new ways to give their teams an edge. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Dave Brailsford, the celebrated (and multi Olympic medal winning) British Cycling coach.
Brailsford popularised the concept of marginal gains. “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together” he explained. This philosophy led him to almost absurd degrees of tinkering, such as custom designing the mattresses on his team’s bus to try to improve sleep between races.
Extremely high standards
Setting and then maintaining extremely high standards is a lot harder than it sounds, but the results are obvious when you watch a truly elite team compete. Our favourite example is Barcelona FC’s 6 second rule, implemented by Pep Guardiola.
Barcelona are widely regarded in football as a ‘flare’ team, keeping the ball for long periods of time and almost toying with their less-skilled opponents. However, whenever they do lose the ball their whole team must either retrieve the ball within six seconds of losing it or move back to defensive shape if time elapses or the ball moves out the pressured zone. This rule is applied across the team, with no exceptions.
Another example of high standards would be Clive Woodward’s insistence that his World Cup winning rugby team arrive to every team meeting early. On one level that has nothing to do with rugby but, on the other, instilling a culture of excellence has everything to do with winning rugby matches!
Relentless communication (giving clarity and motivation)
Every coach mentioned above adopted an evangelical style when it came to actively and consistently communicating their philosophies and expectations. When a coach is clear on what he or she stands for and expects and takes the time to communicate the same to every player and every other coach on the team, there is no confusion within the group. Provided the right people are ‘on the bus’ (see values and recruitment above), all that’s left is…
Correct strategy and tactics
Average coaches and leaders often start with strategy and tactics, whereas elite coaches never start here. The reason for this is that the correct strategy or tactics for a given situation in a game is often fairly obvious and rarely decisive other than in the final moments of a game. Whilst having the wrong strategy and tactics might well lose you a game, having the right strategy and tactics won’t necessarily deliver a win.
Teams with great culture and character tend to be able to figure out the right strategies and tactics for themselves, which is crucial in dynamic contests which cannot easily be ‘scripted’ in advance.
HOW DOM APPLIES COACHING PRINCIPLES TO BUSINESS
““There are more similarities than there are differences in leading business teams and coaching sports teams. If, as a business leader, you don’t feel that your job is to coach your team to maximise their potential, you may want to think again!”
“There are more similarities than there are differences in leading business teams and coaching sports teams. If, as a business leader, you don’t feel that your job is to coach your team to maximise their potential, you may want to think again!
My experiences of leadership with the Junior Academy team at Super League's Salford Red Devils and Regional Management with Caffe Nero bear this out. “Standard management skills” such as strategic planning, prioritising, people management, etc are fully transferable and worth their weight in gold, but without the passion to care for your team and enable them to reach their potential, you’re limiting your own potential - a leader’s job is to create other leaders, in the boardroom or on the field.
As former US President Teddy Roosevelt is said to have remarked, “People don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care” - we can be the best technical experts in whatever we do but if our teams don’t know we care about them as individuals….
The essence of coaching is to create an environment where your team can thrive.
Achieving this has many facets - getting buy-in to a shared goal, setting objectives over a period of time, agreeing set of key team behaviours, sticking to your principles, valuing great behaviours over talent.
Txiki Bergiristain (Director of Football at Manchester City and previously FC Barcelona) has worked hand in hand with Head Coach Pep Guardiola for many years and he illustrates my last point perfectly when he says, “Your talent earns you a place in our team - how you behave dictates how long you stay there”.
This is tough to do if your best player is a pain in the neck but the longer you ignore toxic behaviours in any team environment, the deeper the damage that is done.
It takes real bravery but Pep demonstrated this value perfectly in his early days at Barca by jettisoning the likes of Deco, Samuel Eto and Ronaldinho because how they acted didn’t fit what Pep wanted to build - would you remove your best salesperson if their behaviours were detrimental to the team or would you let it go because results are more important?
I really like the Tony Robbins quote that “Success Leaves Clues”, too. In a business setting particularly, but in sports too, we tend to focus on what hasn’t gone well - we pore over reports that tell us how poor we’ve done at any one stage, we pull the negative stats out, we even commission extra reports from the Finance Dept to confirm how badly something has gone! But how much time do we spend looking at reasons why something has gone particularly well?
If we haven’t identified the actions and behaviours that have led to a success, how can we possibly hope to replicate them again in the future? Was it the preparation, the buy-in from the group, the motivation to achieve it? We don’t know because we don’t interrogate success as deeply as we do failure - Success Leaves Clues! - equally vital in the white-hot arena of top level business leadership and elite sport.”
———————————————————
Dom Williams is Regional Manager for Caffe Nero & Junior Academy Head Coach at Salford Red Devils - reach him here.
Rob Liddiard is Co-founder CEO of Yapster - you can also reach him here or by emailing rob@yapster.co.uk.
