"You can learn to be a better leader with everyone. An orchestra can be studied. You can study a basketball team, a business, whatever."
Mike Krzewski, US Olympic basketball team coach
Sport offers a favorable environment to study teams and organizations functioning, for several reasons:
Many sports are team sports. Therefore, they require teamwork skills.
Sports teams quickly expose processes that in other contexts are more difficult to observe. For example, the leader's role emerges more easily as a scapegoat. This process may be similar in companies, but in sport, it happens at a high speed: a sequence of defeats in a short period of time may be enough to disqualify a coach. In contrast, in companies it may take several quarters - and in political life several years or electoral cycles.
Team members receive feedback explicitly and regularly. They don't need to wait for annual performance reviews. The performance metrics are very simple and clear: 1-X-2. This clarifies the cause-effect relationships.
The emotional component of the activity is often salient. Sport is a source of identification, catharsis, emotion. A sports fan, like a team member, can express emotions in an extreme way: shouting, dancing, cursing and gesturing.
In sports, it is desired that participants "wear the team's shirt". That is, that they identify themselves unconditionally with the organization.
Some of these teams have strong connections with an external entity that frames them and gives them meaning. This connection was visible in the flags spread throughout Portugal during Euro 2004, or in the identity of Barcelona as més que un club, a Catalonian flag. The 1995 Springbooks, portrayed in the movie Invictus, were the emblematic symbol of a new Republic of South Africa.
The best teams have a style, an idiosyncrasy - whether it be the harmonies of the Sporting dos Cinco Violinos, or whether it is Tiki Taka, the laced football of Pep Guardiola's Barcelona.
Good teams have a school. Barcelona's total football comes from the time of Cruyff, the legendary former player and Dutch coach of the Catalan emblem. The style is cultivated at the school in La Masia. Perhaps Jesus Correia, one of the violinos sportinguistas, was the first of a school of great extreme forwards - a lineage that continued with players like Futre, Simão, Figo, Quaresma, and Cristiano Ronaldo.
High-performance teams contain, paradoxically, a desire for change and a desire for continuity. Phil Jackson's Chicago Bulls had two winning streaks. Two players were in both series, ensuring the evolution in continuity.
In good teams, several captains coexist. Mano Menezes, coach of the Brazilian soccer team, explained the point: "A group needs many leaders. Wearing the armband is merely symbolic, in the sense that leadership must be exercised on the field by several group players, who by their technique will take on that role (because leadership is also technical at certain times)".
Music has been a source of inspiration for understanding organizational functioning: "The functioning of a big band or a small band raises challenges of participation, interactivity, and coordination that typically arise in the regular development of a market economy", explained António Pinto Barbosa, professor of economics at Nova SBE and musician of the Lisbon Swingers. In some cases, music has been used as a metaphor, whether it be the organization's vision as a symphony orchestra or a jazz combo or an analysis of the acting style of leaders like Miles Davis or conductor Claudio Abbado - described, respectively, as the "catalyst for innovation" and the "supreme facilitator".
As the musician, Tiago Bettencourt explained: "There must always be a leader in a band for a concert to have rhythm and consistency. On the other hand, we always have our moments of improvisation, where there is no leader at all and we trust each other's instincts to take music to places we didn't plan. " For this reason, musical leadership is a cornucopia for the study of organizational leadership.
Musical leadership is a shared, collective process. Without this leadership, there is no band, but a gang.
Management can be inspired by jazz to learn about the importance of minimal and heuristic structures.
Individuality and difference are a source of creativity. Both must be respected. A good band is a vehicle for individual expression, not an obstacle.
A lot of teamwork is prepared "backstage". A good musician plays with others, but he also practices individually to stand out for himself, and the band.
In a good team, everyone makes solos and everyone supports creates context.
A good team is one whose members do not stop listening to each other. This makes as much sense in music as it does in organizations.
A good team is one that takes risks and seeks a difference. The difference makes the difference.
Some groups swing; others don't.
Jon Katzenbach, the author of The Wisdom of Teams, considers elite military units to be excellent places to find real teams. The existence of a clear hierarchy is not an obstacle to the emergence of leaders when they are needed for specific tasks.
The decision to study teams in a military context was based on a simple observation: the Armed Forces are commonly presented as hierarchical, mechanistic and rigid organizations, but this metaphor is not always a fair description of reality. Certain units of the Armed Forces and security operations in theaters of enormous risk and unpredictability, circumstances that invalidate the mechanistic approach and require organicism, improvisation and even "disrespect" by the hierarchy. The need for military leaders to develop relational skills is equivalent (or even superior) to that needed in other organizations.
The obvious choice for learning from military teams that do not operate according to the traditional metaphor lies with the so-called special forces. These structures also require more, not less, empowerment. In other words, military teams can be a source of learning for other organizational contexts.
The feeling of being part of an elite body helps to connect pride within the team and the organization.
Hard training develops body spirit. It is not with "back pats" that collective resilience is acquired. And this is what can enable the team and the organization to turn the poison into medicine.
A sense of belonging to something wider infuses meaning (the Jaguar Warriors of the Aztec Empire were anointed by the supreme military chief Tlatoani).
The desire to overcome is necessary. In the BOPE case, the "aspiring cemetery" symbolizes the need for those who failed to enter that "elite troop" to try again.
Trust in comrades is critical: face-to-face shooting training in GOE is both an exercise in skill and confidence.
We sought to better understand successful teams by considering three domains: sport, music and elite military forces. Articulating the fields seems to make sense because teams in one domain are sometimes inspired by teams in other domains. Based on this discussion, it is important to extrapolate the teachings of each of these cases to the organizational context, for our teams.
This publication is based on the Applied Knowledge "Superteams: when the whole is much higher than the sum of the parts" by Miguel Pina e Cunha, Nadim Habib, Arménio Rego, António Abrantes, Pedro Almeida, Miguel Faro Viana, Patrícia Palma and Paula Lourenço Afonso, in collaboration with participants in the MSD Advanced Management Program.