Business leadership lessons from Man City's Pep Guardiola

I was recently watching the Manchester City documentaries on Amazon Prime - I'm not a City fan, nor do I spend a huge amount of time on football these days, but I watched the documentaries because I really respect Pep Guardiola, his style of leadership, how he conducts himself, and frankly, he’s always looking pretty sharp! From my observations, I believe that many parts of his leadership style and behaviours are transferrable into our business world, either directly, or adapted to suit our needs, as business leaders. 

Like many here, I'm on my leadership journey - still in the early stages of this rollercoaster ride, combining a mixture of successes and mistakes, but certainly by throwing myself in at the deep end at the start of 2018 was the best thing I could have done. Where once impossible tasks are now possible, pulling together, motivating, and driving a team of individuals who have all achieved greater things than me, is so rewarding. As I said, its still early days. Below are some lessons I've noted from the legend, Pep Guardiola’s leadership style that I'm sure many of us can use or adapt to suit our own needs and situations. 

But firstly, a short introduction to Pep Guardiola. A proud Catalan, born in 1971 and spent the majority of his playing career with his beloved Barcelona. He was fortunate enough to play along side some of the Barca greats and guided by the Dutch wizard Johan Cruyff he moved into management with Barca for four years before taking over the reins at Bayern Munich. A few years later, he agreed to take over Manchester City, working with Sheikh Mansour (UAE)… and today (Sun 12 May 19) winning his second English Premiership title in his third year in charge of Man City. 

• The “Pep” tactics overview

Team tactics and Opponent Specifics- Pep goes into football details about every possible move the opposition could make. He presents this at a high level to the whole team, working through it at an incredible pace and describing moves that he and his back room team see visually. Collectively Pep and his leadership team then sit with each group of players (defenders, midfields, attackers) looking at more relevant details for their particular tasks in hand. 

My thoughts:

Absolutely makes sense to give the players a ‘global’ overview of the situation, the bigger picture. Manchester City, and some of the other top clubs (those with the financial resources) then take this a step further and apply some data science techniques to identify opportunities humans often miss. Many of you will have read the book, or seen the film, Moneyball, based the Oakland Athletics baseball team’s game-changing methods through the mid 2000’s. By crunching through a combination of statistics on every player and every game, the Oakland “A’s” gained the edge over far wealthier superstar sides and thus culminating in them winning the league. 

As our world changes and data science becomes easier to access, I'd like to see more of the Moneyball strategy implemented into football (especially Scottish football which is frankly so far behind the curve!). Each club should have a team of data science specialists analysing every area of the field, resulting in meaningful discussions with players about probabilities and patterns that their opposition play (as well as the pro's and con's of what their own team do!). 

Data analysis is a powerful new area, and is only being used in the very top tier of sport, and not nearly enough in sports beyond the top tier, largely due to lack of resources. Good use of data analysis can equip players with several likely scenarios their direct opponents could make during the game allowing the player to prepare counter-attacking strategies. Data can also used to spot opportunities to exploit the oppositions weaknesses - like two defenders standing too far apart '80% of the time' - ie, thus attackers can exploit that gap. We, as humans, can’t possibly analyse such huge volumes of data, or see some repetitive patterns, due to the surrounding ’noise’.. and that’s where data science (and machine learning can be useful). 

• A noisy dressing room- this shows team spirit and energy - I like it, especially as it can help to raise the teams performance. Pep likes his changing room to be noisy and energetic before the match, as this transfers into added adrenalin when going out onto the pitch. 

My thoughts:

In an office environment, whilst its largely unrealistic to create a noisy enviroment, we can create a certain energy within the room, and make it a positive, productive and happy environment in which to operate. 

However, we must also be aware of the energetic counterbalance - a chill out/ relaxing space. Nobody can operate at high intensity, in an effective manner, for long periods of time. Note a great example of this was in James Hewitt's book, "Exponential" where the formula one drivers were doing cross country ski training sessions. The session was split between bursts of intense training (a 400m circuit), followed by short sessions of complete rest. This pattern was proven to improve their performance. In the business world, we can emulate that athletic performance by switching our minds and bodies off every few hours, for maybe 5-15 minutes and taking part in mindfulness or a walk in nature before coming back to our desks to tackle a new problem, but feeling fully revitalised. Think of your day as a series of Sin waves, much like Hiit training (X minutes of intense focus/ work, followed by Y minutes of low intensity, followed by Z minutes work, etc, etc through the day.. )

• Display immense confidence and belief- Guardiola has been on record stating that "Sometimes when I'm in front of the guys and I don't know something, I have to act like I do... this creates/ shows confidence". 

My thoughts:

My first observation here is that, "GREAT - he's only human! He doesn't know everything, nor is he genuinely self-confident 100% of the time!!" As a leader its also important to really believe in yourself and the strategy. Often too, there's a bit of the Amy Cuddy "Power Poses” within this. The Power Pose is where the alpha male (with the broad shoulders commandingly asking lots of questions) more often than not has more success in a given situation, hence copying certain traits (the power pose) we can re-programme our minds through building a stronger pose that can perhaps give us that missing edge. Amy's pose has recently been discredited by some, but I, for one, am a believer - even if its only ever a placebo effect!  

As leaders, we need to show that we are sure of ourselves and the direction we are taking the team. A large amount of this surity comes from a combination of our own personal experiences and consulting those around us. Again, this is where we need to be challenging our beliefs and look beyond our own industries and own ‘types’ of people. It’s also key to have the best people around us. Importantly, "the best” are not people who think like us, but challenge us, are better than us in what they do, and are real value-adding team players.

I'll continue this blog post in part 2 next week..