6 Ways Soccer Taught Me How To Manage People, Teams, and Businesses
Integrating soccer learnings into the business world
First, a little background. I’ve been playing soccer since I was about 6 and still play at age 39. While growing up I played non-stop all year in a soccer-rich area of upstate New York. I played in some very competitive leagues in NYC in my 20s and 30s and now in some more casual games in Los Angeles. I was a goalie for most of my years but also played defender, winger, and even some midfield. I’ve also coached AYSO teams and ran goalie clinics in the past. I’m a Tottenham/EPL/U.S. National Team fan and there probably isn’t a weekend where I don’t catch at least one game on television. In 2010 I took time away from working so I could watch every game of the World Cup with my newborn son. Yeah, you could say I like the game.
I work in the digital media space and have so for the past 15 years both at startups and big media companies. As my career has progressed and I’ve taken on larger responsibilities I’ve often found myself incorporating principles, memories, and methodology from my favorite sport and from some great coaches I’ve had in the past. In the vain notion that maybe this helps someone else I thought I would share…
Staying in your lanes
Anyone who has ever witnessed kids playing soccer for the first time knows what I’m talking about here. A swarm of sweaty kids wearing shirts too large for them all hovering within 5 feet of the ball as it moves around the field. No spacing… no positions… just chaos.
In my very early years I had a coach (thank you Mr. Koch) who told us about “staying in your lanes.” The principle is simple. If you are a left back, left midfielder, or left forward then stay on the left side of the field. Same principle if you are in the middle or on the right. What this did for us was get us to stop the swarm. Now occasionally it did backfire when a person on the other team went down the seam of a lane and neither person had the guts to “cross the lane line.” But it generally worked and pushed us to grasp our own and unique responsibilities on the field.
If you work in a company you know what can happen when people don’t stay in their lanes. While collaboration is great and driving solutions from different people is important we all know what backlash can occur.
That’s not his/her job! It’s mine.
A team is only as good as its parts. And an effective team is only as good as its understanding of function and responsibility. So while I encourage people to help I also encourage them to stay in their functional lanes. It reduces tension, encourages empowerment, and increases speed of execution.
For startups, where job descriptions generally don’t exist or get thrown out the window on Day 2 this can be a little tricky and not something you necessarily want to do at first. But for a startup to grow it has to mature and I believe that maturity necessitates lane adherence over time.
Recognition and response
When I started playing freshman soccer in the 7th grade I had another fantastic coach named Brian. Brian was in his 20s and had many new-agey ways of coaching and developing players.
I remember him taking us to see Dead Poets Society and furiously taking notes with a flashlight pen in the theatre. I also remember him giving us a scribbled Team Constitution which included, “You have the right to be boring but not to be bored.”
One technique Brian incorporated was getting us to memorize advertising slogans. As we would all dribble around the field during practice he would shout out “Snickers” and in unison we would all yell back “Really satisfies you!” For a bunch of 13 year olds this seemed pretty ridiculous. And it probably wasn’t until a few years later that I finally really got the point. That occurred on varsity. My teammate made a mistake in practice and when our coach asked him why he started, “I thought….” At which point the coach yelled, “Don’t think!”
What Brian was teaching us was simple recognition and response. We didn’t think about the answer to the all these products, we just shouted them out. When you play a game like soccer there are no huddles, no timeouts, no time to gather as a team and discuss your next play. It’s a bit like life in that there isn’t a lot of times you can hit pause. You have to constantly recognize situations in real-time and then react.
Pure instinct is great but instinct based on experience is better. Once you experience something the first time or two, being able to recognize and immediately react to it is hugely beneficial.
This is why in my working world we constantly try to look back on what we’ve done, what challenges we encountered and what we did or didn’t do about them. You may have heard of Agile Development and its use of retrospectives. Same thing whether you call them that, post-mortems, recaps, or anything else. Look at what you did so the next time something similar or the same happens you instantly know what to do.
Simplicity of the score
This is an easy one. At the end of 90 minutes it’s the score that counts. And the very clear end result a soccer team looks for should be the same end result that any working team does.
In a complicated business and when you are not only trying to grow a business but also a team and individuals it’s not always easy to figure out what winning is. But finding that simple way to gauge performance is critical.
We recently started using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) on my team to measure success one quarter at a time. If you haven’t tried using OKRs in your job I highly recommend you give it a shot. It’s a great tool to focus on what’s important, helps keep folks motivated, and drives constructive discussion and common belief.
OKRs are graded each quarter on a 0 to 1 scale based on whether or not the Key Results and therefore Objectives were met. They must be quantifiable. Making everything measurable is not always easy. But at the end of the day any OKR is a simple question. Did we win? In soccer, and any sport really, it always comes down to this one and final fact. The simplicity of a score is a great way to determine effectiveness. It removes the noise and let’s you know if the effort worked.
And to use an old cliché, winning ugly is still winning. Many times in work we find ourselves rolling up our sleeves and hacking a solution together just to get it done. Was it beautiful (aka joga bonito)? No, but did the team get it done? Yes. Don’t let yourself be afraid to do things the ugly way if it means sealing the victory.
Letting players play
As I mentioned above there aren’t many breaks in a soccer game. It’s continuous and besides a brief half-time and some sideline shouting there isn’t a ton of coaching input from the sideline that happens during a game.
I run my work teams like I did as a goalie, often seen as a coach on the field. In my current job I have a multi-disciplined team of technologists, product people, operations folks, and more. I see them as my forwards, my midfielders, and my backs. As their manager I can’t, and shouldn’t, control their every move. If the training has worked properly then they should understand their responsibilities (and lanes) and have the recognition and response skills they need to win. And more importantly they are empowered to win.
My job is to make sure they see the options and the threats. As a goalie you are constantly calling out people to mark, locations to play the ball, and perhaps most importantly congratulating them on their scores. At times both in soccer and in my role as a manager I have to make a save and protect our lead or just to keep us in the game. That’s my lane. I am the last line of defense.
Total football
A goalie trainer I once had called out an entire class in front of our parents because no one volunteered to demonstrate a skill — never be afraid to raise your hand and show them what you got was the gist.
In the 1960s/70s the Dutch invented a soccer style called Total Football. The general tactical theory is that any player, except the goalie, can play any position on the field. A defender may push up and play right midfield for a period of time or even a forward could drop back and play defense.
It was a style that displayed great creative fluidity and created some of the most beautiful soccer ever played. Holland’s star player of that era named Johan Cruyff is often voted as one of the top players in history.
A few years ago in a previous role I integrated a management structure called Orbits for a group of about a dozen Product Managers. In some ways it’s similar to Holocracy which is getting a lot of buzz right now because companies like Zappos and Medium are using it. In a lot of ways it’s my version of Total Football.
Rather than thinking of your team or organization as a standard and inflexible hierarchy, Orbits looks at the team members all as movable spheres that can form together around a common project, function, or objective. Those “hubs” could be big things that last for years or small things that only go a few weeks.
It encourages creativity and learning. And again it provides a strong sense of empowerment which is critical. But it also requires self-motivated and self-disciplined people. It requires people to raise their hands.
Encourage your team to raise their hand and try new things. Think about some little orbits you can make to get new people working together. Listen to your staff to hear what orbits they might think are important. I know this may seem to contradict the “lane philosophy” but it doesn’t so long as the lanes adjust with the orbits and are still understood by everyone.
Explode with the ball
When I was about 10 I got trained by another coach for a period of time who preached “exploding with the ball”. The idea was that as you dribble, slow your pace down as you approach a defender, then push the ball past and speed up. Use change of pace to your advantage. At that age you can beat most defenders just by doing this small thing.
Apple is great at exploding with the ball. They tinker with an idea for years and then burst into it. While this is hard to do right (there is only one Apple after all) I do encourage teams to explode with their product. Small, incremental changes are key to iterative product development but every once and awhile you need to explode with something big. It keeps users interested and can create distinct competitive advantage.
Finally make sure you and your team are having fun. I stopped playing soccer for a while because I had lost the fun in it. Now at 39 when I step on the field I smile immediately. I try to remember to do the same when I step into the office.
Josh Snow is a digital media executive at DIRECTV and a life-long soccer nut.
