Teamwork

This is one of my favourite words and subjects. I love to read articles and books on the subject. One other thing I love to do to help me appreciate teamwork (besides entertainment) is to watch a soccer match. I love soccer - I loved it as a child and now as a fairly aged man. Despite my advanced age (although still much younger than Roger Milla in his last appearance in the World Cup) I can still do a few of those flicks here and there. Anybody would therefore be sure that I watched two of the many matches of the new season (2007/2008) in the English Barclays Premier League.

As a learning process facilitator, I love to use stories and analogies of everyday life events to help me make my point. The football analogy is my favourite one for explaining teamwork (the need for it, its benefits, its characteristics, its challenges, consequences of failure, management of failure, feedback, etc) especially to audiences that love / love to watch soccer.

In the build up to the matches that opened the league season in England, I read a column in one of our local newspapers and the writer accused one of the prominent clubs in that league as depending too much on a few key players and that once such individuals were absent, the club struggled and this is proof enough to him that the club plays not as a team but as individuals. Could this be an inadvertent lie or a blatant one or simply plain truth?

I could be wrong but I think this gentleman has probably not taken time to reflect on the lessons (about team characteristics and teamwork) that we can draw from the game of soccer. Whatever the outcome of a game, every side in the game of soccer plays as a team and demonstrates many characteristics of a team. The outcome of the match is no measure of the team characteristics. I also believe that in every team, skills, talents and abilities differ among the individuals hence their deployment in the different positions and the difference in roles and responsibilities. This is partly why they are called a team.

Stand-in substitutes may not perform as well as the position holders (first choice individuals) but teamwork prevails nevertheless. Rather than say there is no teamwork in the game of soccer, I would instead question the ability of the selected individuals (in a team) to work well as a high performance team - in soccer there is always a team, practising teamwork but their performance (outcome of the game) will depend on a number of factors including, among others, the emotional set-up and skills / talents of the individuals, and the team against which they play.

To me, therefore, there is nothing like lack of team/teamwork in the game of soccer. There will always be key individuals in certain key positions and who make key contributions / influences in the teamwork (whose absence would surely be felt). However, when such individuals are present, they would not do much without the collective synergistic efforts of the other allegedly 'weaker' individuals in the team.

I hope this piece provokes you who have read it to the end to reflect on the soccer game a bit more deeply and hopefully share your opinion on lessons that can be drawn from it.