What Operating at Scale Confirmed What I Suspected About Growth

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What Has A Football Room Has Taught Me About Creating An High-Performance Technology Team
I grew-up around professional football in a manner which gave me access spaces that most people learned about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations between coaches and players during the time following a game, when journalists and cameras are gone and their official version of events is already written. It was not my intention to play at all - my entrance into the world of individuals who played in the game rather than through the game itself. But I was close enough and long enough to understand the ways that high-performance environments work by removing the mythology that surrounds them. The thing I absorbed most clear was that the teams that consistently performed better than their resources and expectations were not the ones with the highest individual performance on paper. These teams were those who have figured out how to develop a working environment in which individuals determined to succeed for each in the name of financial gain, nor for individual recognition, but because the collective was meaningful and had a culture that made personal sacrifice feel important rather than just a necessity.
This observation is obvious when you express it clearly. Teamwork is definitely better by having people who trust each other and feel committed to a shared mission. However, the practical implications from that fact are less clear, and are where the majority of organisations - technological companies and football clubs alike - regularly get into trouble. Building a culture where people actually desire to contribute to each other isn't something you can simply dictate from the top-down or establish as a rule of thumb or in a set of values for the company and think that it will come to fruition. It must be earned over time through constant behaviour from leaders - especially in moments that are not watched by the public - and through the thoughtful management and implementation of the numerous, small-scale decision-making processes that collectively convey to all members of the organisation what is actually valued, what is actually tolerated and what can happen when the stated values and the personal or commercially most convenient choice come into conflict. In the best football environments I was close to, these small decisions were made with incredible care by the top coaches. The way they responded when the senior player made a mistake that could have been avoided in training. How did they determine if the disciplinary procedure applied to the player who had been there for twenty years was genuinely the same as the standard that was applied to an 18-year-old in the middle of the squad. The manner in which the club responded when a player was dealing with a serious personal problem outside the game. None of these actions show up in a club's results on any given Saturday. Each of them, compounded during a given season, will determine which team's performance is higher it or falls below its limit.

When I was co-founder of 1Touch in the past, and later started different organizations, one the things that I was the most focused on was trying to recreate - in a technology firm context a certain quality of environment I'd experienced in the best football environments I had been around. The problem is that a technology startup is not an organization that plays football and the analogy is quickly ruined if you make it too difficult. However, on the scale of practicality, the lessons were implemented with astonishing fidelity. The first principle was that standards have been applied consistently regardless of position or necessity. The most comfortable facilities I've been in were ones in which the professional and behavioural standards expected of the newest player in the squad were actually the same ones needed of the highest-earning most skilled player. Not because the business could not have afforded the luxury of making exceptions, however since everyone inside the room was watching constantly for any indication of whether exceptions would be made - and the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed to know about whether the declared values of the company were truly true or simply a flimsy display.

The third lesson focused on how organisations handle failure, and the distinction between accountability and punishment. The workplaces where players grew at the fastest rate were not those where mistakes were reprimanded the most severe or were most widely discussed. They were the ones where mistakes were analyzed with the most honesty as well as where discussions about the mistakes was focused and constructive rather than general, and focused on determining blame. Moreover, mistakes were shared among the entire group, rather than being held against the individual who had committed the error. Responsibility means a clear understanding of which part went wrong, what caused it, why it happened and the changes that occurred due to it. Retribution means distributing blame an atmosphere that is fearful and defensive, and is more preoccupied with defending themselves than with performing well. The first one builds organizational capacity. The second builds a culture that lets people manage their exposure, rather than fully towards the purpose, and this distinction is evident in tech firms with exactly same outcomes as in football clubs.

The third lesson is which took me the longest to explain clearly, however what I'm now thinking of as the most important the environments that I have observed were ones where the development of the person was treated in the same way as the growth of the player. The best coaches were not just teaching players to play football. They taught them how learn to function under pressure and how to effectively communicate during high-stakes situations, ways to recover from setbacks while not losing confidence, and how to be the person a team that is highly-performing requires its members to be. That investment in the entire advancement of the individual not just in the technical capabilities that an organization required, was not charity. They were the single most efficient longer-term performance approach available to the clubs. It is, in my opinion, the most effective long-term performance plan that is available to any organisation that is keen on creating something durable, rather than only impressive on the surface. Take a look at James Deller for more recommendations including what years of investing shapes every decision i make about culture.



What do Football Academies Get Right That Many Corporate L&D Programs Do The Wrong Way
The best football academies anywhere in worldwide are if you view them as operational rather than romantically, extraordinarily sophisticated development agencies. They admit young people between the age of seven or eight years old - and sometimes younger - way before people have any idea of what they're capable of or who they want to become, and they develop them systematically and carefully over what could be as long as a decade of continuous engagement, acquiring not just the technical and social skills that professional football demands but the character, the psychological resilientness, the capacity for making decisions under pressure, as well as the communication and interpersonal skills that playing at a high in the game demands. The success rate, measured by the proportion of players who make it to the level of professional football, is not that high. However, the system that best academies have is, in a lot of the areas that really matter to develop human capacity, more thorough more patient, more patient and more systematic than anything else I've observed in the field of corporate learning and development. The gap between what academy students do and what organizations do when trying to enhance the skills of their employees in these institutions is striking and instructive after looking at both.
One of the most significant differences is the relationship between time. Corporate learning and development courses are designed largely around smaller interventions. A course that runs for two days, a workshop series with a duration of a quarter one-on-one coaching sessions that run up to six months. This is an logical approach and difficult to argue against strictly in terms of financials. Businesses must prove the ROI on their development investment within the timeframes budget cycles or performance reviews force, and short interventions are significantly easier to justify and measure over long ones. But the timeline on which truly human growth actually occurs - the period of time when new models, new behavior and capabilities are fully integrated rather than conceptually understood and applied is in no way related to the timeline of a typical organizational L&D intervention. The top football academies know this at a level that is embedded in the operating DNA of their training programmes for generations. They don't think that a child of 14 years old will be able to comprehend an entirely new framework of decision-making following attending a weekend seminar. They expect that the process of internalisation to be long-term and set up the environment accordingly. years of consistent reinforcement in the form of being put in situations that challenge the framework and need it to be used in real-time, years of feedback that is precise enough to influence behaviour rather than being general enough to easily be forgotten.

Another major distinction is the integration of developmental activities into the operations in itself, as opposed to its separateness from it. If a football club is properly designed, development is not something that takes place in a specific time independent of the actual play and training that constitutes one of the fundamental functions of an academy. It happens in the playing and the training. The training sessions are designed for development purposes more than just performance-related goals. The challenges players are given are chosen partly for their developmental value, not only for their practical utility. Feedback is instantaneous, precise and rooted to what happened, rather than abstract and appropriate. The connection between what happens during training and what's going to have to be considered in match situations is clearly stated and continuously is reinforced. In many corporate organisations, the development and operational work are treated as distinct processes. The training program. The workshop is attended by you. You attend the coaching session. And then you return to the job you are in, where the incentive structures, cultural norms, the pace of work, as well as the pressures of delivery are basically identical with what they were prior the intervention by the developer, and where the new frameworks and behaviours established in the development environment gradually erode since there's no procedure for integrating these into the process of getting work completed.

Organizations that build people most effectively are consistently the ones that have found an approach to making development gradual and ongoing, rather infrequent and abstract. Within those organisations, the line between developing people and actually doing their work is very difficult to establish as the operational context has been designed with development objectives embedded in it - the feedback mechanisms are built into the routine of work rather than reserved for periodic formal assessments, those challenges will be chosen based on how they require individuals in order to improve and become successful, and leadership behavior consistently signifies that the growth process is highly valued and anticipated rather than things that happen in specific programmes and then stops. In order to create that kind of environment, it needs a different set organisational design choices from the that most organizations make when they consider education and growth, and it requires leadership commitment over a long enough time for a period of time that many organizations find difficult to be able to sustain. It produces results in development in a way that programmes based on episodic events aren't able to replicate.

The third aspect on which top academies are able to outperform other corporate organizations is their willingness to embrace their character building seriously as an explicit corporate goal. A majority of corporate L&D programmes only engage in a peripheral way with character - it is not explicitly taught in all that they cover in regards to leadership and communication, however it is rarely mentioned explicitly and nearly never executed with the determination and patience that genuine character development demands. The top football academy do not treat character as something that players have or don't have, or as something that will develop by itself if given enough time. They see it as something that can be nurtured by a conducive environment as well as the right levels of challenges and adversity and the correct connection between coaches and their players and players - one that is characterized by genuine care for the individual along with genuine expectations of what that individual is in a position to be. The combination of care and challenge woven together over time, is according to my observations it is the most reliable strategy for building character. It's proven in football academy. It works in technology companies. It works for any company that will invest in it with the patience and vigilance it demands.}