Expert Eye View - Turning a lack lustre performance into a winning way

Below are four observations on why this might happen.

1. Talk about the team spirit but promote the cult of the individual. Language and behaviour are important and must be consistent with the idea of all being `in it together’. All England interviews started with a comment about how good is the team spirit but then de-generated into a discussion about individuals.

A comment by another football journalist on England’s performance said: “It is the pomposity of the English nation acting as if it was owed some success if only one man (manager, referee, player…take your pick) had not made such a gigantic mess up.” The focus is always on the individual. For example it was Robert Green’s howler that cost England the game against the USA not the other ten players who failed to score more goals against an average side.

If we look to explain this pictorially then there are two contrasting images that illustrate this point well and the difference between a team in name and team in spirit. The first is of Robert Green (after having let in the memorable goal), a man alone, isolated from his team-mates. He was not visibly consoled by any member of his team when he made a mistake - the nearest player to him was around 40 yards away up the pitch.

The second is of John Mensah, the captain of Ghana consoling Asamoah Gyam who had just missed a penalty that would have taken his country into the semi-finals. It is worth remembering too that the Ghanaians got into a huddle at the beginning and end of each half out on the pitch.

2. Rationalise the results away and you fail to learn from mistakes. Writing about England’s humiliating defeat 4-1 by Germany, one journalist said: “The statistics show that it was not a crushing defeat and that a false history has been created”. (England had 63% of possession and 7 shots on goal - the same number as Germany). Perhaps this is why, when interviewed after the match the players felt that they were in control whereas the supporters clearly saw a different match.

To learn, a team and/or its supporters must be open and honest. You cannot learn if you are seeking someone or something to blame.

Learning takes time however and you must listen to every point of view. You must look at the facts however gruesome and think hard before reaching any conclusions.

One explanation that has been given for the higher German skill level is that Germany has more than 30,000 UEFA qualified coaches whilst England has less than 3,000. But if we take this at face value we ignore an important cultural difference between Nations. In Germany certification is a pre-requisite for nearly all tasks whereas this is not the case in the UK.

3. Leaders set the right direction but don’t create the right climate. There is no doubt that the England football team needed a directive style of leadership after the failure to qualify for Euro 2008.

The long-term effects, however, of a ‘command and control’ leadership style is a team without the ability to think for itself and unable to respond to the simplest unforeseen challenges. And if the leadership has not assessed the threats correctly and only practised one plan rather than a set of backups the result can be even worse as they can’t pass on a new set of directions.

It is not physical exhaustion after a long season or the pressure of expectation that does for teams like England’s. It is the climate of fear of backlash from the boss, to the glee of one’s colleagues that causes excellent professionals to leave their brains at the touchline and run for cover when things go wrong.

4. Not sure why are we doing this anyway? OK we want to win the World Cup. But why? We’ve already won the Champion’s League. We earn a fortune. We’re famous already and are adored by the Club following. What more do we need and want?

The best high performing teams have a high moral sense of purpose and everyone in the team can and does sign up to it. We don’t play for money or individual status. We play because we believe we are doing something important for our Nation, our company or even our fellow man.

In rowing, I am told, when the England coaches talk to the clubs, they draw a pyramid which shows the connection between the most junior novice and the Olympic team. They very quickly get across the message that the gold medals won by Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsett are won by every rower in the country. And the Gold medallists believe they are rowing for everyone in their sport and in their country.

So if England wants to win the World Cup in 2014, we need to develop a higher sense of purpose for the team. Maybe it is about setting an example to all young people about keeping fit, working hard to achieve personal goals, competing while maintaining a sense of fair play and humility.

The team needs to take time to learn and change with care . . . but change we must. Remember if you do the same things over and over you’ll get the same result over and over.

And above all we need to develop the team. We don’t need super heroes. We need effective team members.

Maybe if this comes to pass in four years (more like forty years because things like this take time) our Norwegian friend might be writing: “Realistic expectations, openness and honesty, team reward, learning from success and failure, rigorous follow up to check and adapt the plan has led to a culture of success and England’s progress towards what seemed like impossible goals just four years ago!”

The Tedium of Coaching

I wonder what the collective noun for a group of coaches should be? A posse? A gaggle? A coven? Perhaps a superfluity or an excess?

A 1980’s manager returning to her office (or more likely, hot-desk workstation) would not only find a ubiquitous water-cooler, over-priced coffee vending machine (Moccacino is my favourite), photocopier, bank of computers and servers, cluttering her way to the desk but also would need to elbow her way through a veritable army of coaches and mentors.

Stepping past the Executive Coach, or perhaps the Team Coach, the Change Coach, the Performance Coach, she may wander away to the Health Suite downstairs to find a Fitness Coach, visit the Styling Coach in Harvey Nichols, then dash home for her appointment with her Life-Coach. Will coaches eventually follow us to the grave? Ghastly realisation. They already do. Never forget the bereavement coach.

It prompts me to wonder, “Does anyone do anything anymore?” Or is everyone a coach feeding off others and already established as a service industry in its own right? How on earth did we manage before every junior, middle, and senior manager was accompanied through both work’s and life’s journey with the omnipresent coach?

So in a new era of training austerity surely we should revisit our coaching policy to question if there is real value providing quite so much to quite so many.

Where do coaches come from? It always amazed me how quickly the IT industry spawned legions of programmers, hardware and software designers, applications specialists, support teams, from nowhere at all. I suspect that it is from the same dark hole that coaches are created. We know so little about them, especially if they are an external resource, beyond of course the glowing biographies and testimonies from goodness-knows-who written goodness-knows-when.

This is still largely an industry with a low entry point on qualifications and experiences, no single system of accreditation, and with a range from the totally exceptional to the totally inept all under the one word ‘coach’.

Coaching starts well enough of course. First meetings usually do. A few moments of hope as the coaching relationship is formed. Hope springs from the well of eternity, perhaps it will not be so bad after all – “I liked them” is our considered assessment.

Then we move inevitably to diagnosis, our journey into the self and into the past. We love diagnosis. From the coachee position it is either a narcissistic self-indulgence or a relief that they are not quite as dysfunctional as they feared: for the coach it is the affirmation of their power and knowledge.

This preoccupation with diagnosis and looking back must stop. Harry Stack Sullivan working in the 1930’s in an America obsessed with self-examination of our past rather than a lively focus on our futures commented:

"The ultimate aim (of the psychiatric interview) is to help the patient change ... I am very much more interested in what can be done than what has happened.” Comprehensive Psychiatry Vol 23, Issue 6: Nov-Dec 1982 pp 545 - 551

So often the coaching process drives us through a number of sessions which appear to have some linear progression leading towards a pre-ordained conclusion. I blame Excel and PowerPoint for this. Both give us the structural templates first of all to put everything into a defined box within a fixed spreadsheet and secondly to suggest that coaching progress is simply a question of moving through an imaginary slide deck.

How I long for some stream of consciousness, for some wild, extravagant journey, through the unknown - whether it be Joyce’s Ulysses or the madcap adventures of Tristam Shandy - I want someone who makes me feel full of life, joyful, strong, capable and fun. I want to enjoy the unknown journey far more than I want to arrive safely at a pre-determined destination.

Coaching should excite, amuse, shock, challenge, strengthen and confirm the joy of life. It should be a rip-roaring adventure with the dangerous-to-know coach. Protect me, please, from the tedium of so much current coaching practice. (Present company excepted of course).