Business Is A Team Sport

And everyone has the ability to influence the game.

It’s a hot, humid night in southern Florida. We’re in the last minute of the match (soccer / football — you choose, don’t judge me). It’s all tied up. Who is going to make the difference?

On debut, a 36-year-old, heavily tattooed Argentinian stands over a free-kick. In the crowd, the camera pans across Kim Kardashian, LeBron James, Serena Williams and David Beckham. Everything stops and time seems to stand still.

Nah, he can’t do it again, can he? The fairytale water-well?must?have run dry by now.

Well, you probably know the rest — a 25-yard curling effort flies into the top corner at a rate of knots and the stadium erupts.

This was the moment Lionel Messi formally introduced himself to Inter Miami supporters and Major League Soccer (MLS) fans at large. What an entrance!

Regular readers of these blogs won’t be surprised to see me drawing parallels between the sporting and business worlds. And with Messi’s move to the MLS, I think we have another example in the making.

Let’s be honest, Messi is in the latter stage of his career — and in terms of football history, you would be hard pressed to find a starker contrast between the iconic status of Barcelona, founded in 1899 and where he made his name, and the fledging team that is Inter Miami, founded in 2018.

But hear me out. The Miami team is passionate, the sponsors have committed serious financial backing to bring Messi to the States, and the fans are all-in.

So, Messi has a choice. In the same way that every one of us has a choice, at any stage of our careers. He could just show up, jog around half-heartedly, maybe welcome a back injury resulting from too many bows…Or he could play hard, be a leader, and make a bigger impact — on the team, the city and the overall development of the game in the US.

It’s on a different scale of course, but I think the same fundamentals hold true across most industries, organizations and circumstances. In business, we can choose to just show up and do the bare minimum — or we can choose to think bigger than our individual role. There are structures and frameworks we all work within, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make an impact each day within your respective team or even across functions.

We’ve all heard about the butterfly effect: when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world it can eventually cause a hurricane in another. Or in other words, the tiniest of actions can have significant impacts down the line. That is particularly pertinent to my industry, and on multiple levels.

In my business, we primarily provide investment admin services — sometimes perceived as a bit hum-drum, a bit boring. But the truth is that every member of the team is playing a part in ensuring that — after putting in their own years of service and hard work — retired individuals are receiving their pensions. That really puts things in a different light.

It doesn’t matter whether you are inputting a trade, pricing an asset or fund, producing client reporting, or making sure queries are responded to promptly…you are directly contributing to whether a pensioner is receiving their income this month. But it’s not enough to have one star player. It’s the sum of the parts that truly makes a difference.

Just ask Drake Callender, Inter Miami’s goalkeeper, about the need for everyone to be on their game. Yes, Messi’s final goal sealed the deal, but as the match report notes,?“If it wasn’t for Callender stepping up from the first minutes, Miami would’ve been down at least two goals. He continued to make save after save in the second half.”?In other words, without Callender and everyone else on the field playing their part, there would have been no opportunity for Messi to create his moment of magic.

In my world, without everyone showing up every day and taking pride in what they do, it will soon translate to unhappy clients. And our Sales team can forget about closing deals and winning new business — it just won’t happen.

On another level, in any department — operational or client facing, it doesn’t matter — you might have an idea to make things better, to improve a process, to boost productivity. Imagine multiplying all of those marginal gains within individual teams across an entire business. That’s making a difference and having another type of impact.

Or you might be a manager, and everyone is taking their lead from you — watching how you engage, interact, and deal with different situations and challenges. Your attitude and actions ripple out, impacting your team and beyond. In fact, how you lead now is probably due in large part to how you were managed yourself — and will likely influence the development of future managers.

The good news is the ability to make an impact in almost any walk of life does not require Messi-like innate talent. Small actions can create big results. And we have the opportunity to choose to make an impact each and every day.

It’s early days for the Argentinian World Cup winner in Miami, but it already looks like he has come with the right attitude, and, perhaps more importantly, he seems to have bought into the team ethic and culture and recognizes he can’t do it on his own. There’s a lesson there for us all.