Winning On and Off the Pitch

This week, ESPN ran a fascinating article on the Manchester United football club. After winning 13 Premier League championships between 1993 and 2013 and never placing outside the top three teams in the league, the club has been on a decade-long decline that has seen no championships and eight managers.   

The decline is even more stark when you consider that the economics of professional football are such that the rich should get richer. Because the financial regulations require clubs to break even, those with massive brands have a systemic advantage over rivals because higher commercial revenue gives them more to spend on better (and more expensive) players and infrastructure.

This didn’t happen at United because they were bought in a leveraged buyout in 2005, and the new owners chose to receive dividends rather than reinvest in the team's success. The article quotes a staff member as saying the aspiration was only to be good enough to get into the most lucrative competitions. “Being in the Champions League was what mattered, rather than actually winning it.”

When club leaders focused on winning, they made tons of money. When the focus shifted to making lots of money, the club stopped winning.

That is a lesson on its own, but what sparked my interest was this line from the article: “The football team is the visible face that Manchester United projects to the world and what happens on the pitch — good, bad or indifferent — dictates the mood within Old Trafford [the organization as a whole].”

That line reminded me of conversations with two nonprofit leaders earlier in the week about why it is so important for teams to have robust conversations about goals and results. The main point: People want to be on a winning team, and results conversations help them know whether that is happening. 

If you work at a sports franchise, whether or not you’re on a winning team is obvious. The results are loud and accessible to everyone. 

But in most other organizations, that’s not the case. Businesses usually have a clear and measurable definition of success, but very few people in the organization regularly look at or even have access to the profit or sales data.  They only know if the team is winning when leaders provide that information and shape its meaning.

In the social sector, the need to show people they’re on a winning team is even more acute because employees are more likely to work on intractable problems, take on big systems, and come face-to-face with heartbreaking situations of poverty, hunger, violence, illness, and injustice. Employees are there for the mission, but if they don’t get a regular dose of “we’re making an impact” and “my effort matters,” they can easily lose motivation.

Regardless of sector, teams whose impact isn't easily captured in simple, quantifiable metrics face an additional challenge. On Monday, a nonprofit CEO told me that a few of her direct reports start conversations about results with “It’s complicated.” And when she tries to pin them down on specific commitments, they squirm like a 3-year-old who doesn’t want his parents to put on his shoes.

In this case, the “it’s complicated” response to measuring results is valid. However, when the difficulty of measuring success results in not defining success, it’s hard to hold others accountable to that standard and generate the emotional experience of winning. And it’s often the experience of winning that both binds us to the team and makes the effort worth it.

Leadership Wisdom

Michael Gregoire, former CEO of CA Technologies, in the NY Times: “If you’ve ever felt that, in sports or in business, to really work hard and be pushed up against your maximum and win, it’s addictive. You’ll do everything you can to get back in that ring, as ridiculous as it sounds. Why would you want to put yourself through that kind of pain, suffering and agony? But that, to me, is where the game is played, and you want to be in that game as much as you possibly can.”

Dolf van den Brink, CEO of Heineken, in the NY Times: “We were losing so much market share every month, and the problem seemed so big, but we started small. We focused on one neighborhood and tried to conquer 20 outlets rather than worrying about 20,000. We were able to do that, and that started to build our confidence. You have to make people believe that they can win again.”