Sport analogies that bleed into the business world tend to be dominated by testosterone fuelled cliches that are easily shared and as meaningless as the hack culture they help perpetuate.
The reality of building high performing teams is one of hard work, long term planning and careful implementation supported with constant evaluation.
It is an approach used across top level sports with legendary US coach Bill Walsh basing his leadership philosophy on the belief that “the score takes care of itself”.
The good news for us (and bad for the hack bros) is that psychologists studying employees in large organisations have found that lasting satisfaction comes with progress and a feeling that they are moving forward with meaningful work instead of a focus on achieving big, headline grabbing goals.
Yet there are lots of organisations who take a long-term approach. Lots of teams who constantly iterate a positive culture as part of doing meaningful work. But they don’t succeed as frequently as they might or reach the heights others do.
Playing for one of the world’s biggest football clubs there are big, headline grabbing goals every single season. The world’s top managers all talk about the intensity of modern football. Its relentlessness wearing even the strongest willed and thick skinned down eventually.
When Jurgen Klopp announced he was leaving the job of Liverpool manager earlier this year he admitted he was “running out of energy” and that he “cannot do the job again and again and again and again”.
It was a theme Klopp returned to in media interviews last week ahead of his final match as manager, how the team he led could go on to greater things with the addition of new energy. Signing off pitch side, surrounded by 60,000 adoring fans and millions more watching misty-eyed at home, Klopp summarised his own leadership philosophy, “you have to be the spark”.
Leadership should never be about coercion or control. Leadership should be about inspiration and igniting fires inside those you lead. It is about creating the right environment and the right moments for good things to happen.
If you focus on the moment, progress will follow, even if that moment could be classed at the time as a ‘failure’.
As a leader, how you are being the spark in that moment?
What can you do that creates the right circumstances so the whole equals far more than the sum of its parts?
Are you seeking to “be the spark” every single day or just waiting to lead in the big moments?
Because if you wait, the big moments probably will never come.
When Jurgen Klopp arrived in 2015, Liverpool had qualified for the Champions League once in six seasons and were without a league title in 25 years. Then he won it all.