Can't See The Wood For The Forest!

Nottingham Forest won again this weekend and are now joint second in the English Premier League.

At the end of last season they finished 17th just above the relegation places.

The football pundits, who are more often focused on what is going wrong rather than why things are going right, are looking to find an explanation as to why this team, largely made up of players who have been let go by other, ‘larger’ clubs, that last year was so poor, can now perform to such a high-level.

They seemingly cannot explain, in footballing terms, what is so clear when it comes to the perspective of teamwork!

We all know that people and teams perform at their best when they understand their role, how it fits into the overall, are playing to their strengths and also, very importantly and often missed, understand the strengths of their team mates.

There is no value in playing beautifully weighted passes to the weaker foot of your team mates and expecting them to handle it to the best of their ability!

You also need people in all the roles required in the team and value the contribution they bring to the overall.

As a result they have, balance! Balance is essential in any high performing team. Far too often at Powering Your Potential we see teams full of highly capable people underperforming due to a complete lack of balance.

We know that people surround themselves with people like themselves and corporate teams largely lack balance because of this. People that think differently and have a different view from the majority or their leaders are viewed negatively and are often excluded, when they are exactly the people you need on the team!

There is more to it than that though!

At Forest, there is no obvious superstar, there is however a new Manager and a style of play. A style of play that suits the players he has where everybody understands their roles and everybody has the skills to perform them.

Manchester United, take note. Please!!

They are also focused on playing in a certain way with a single objective, to win. They may not have huge amounts of possession of the ball but the objective of winning remains. Stay in the game and capitalise on their strengths in the vital moments. This is a very different approach to lots of teams who do not have a great deal of possession of the ball, very often their objective is simply to not get beat.

Again, too often, at PYP we see corporate teams who just want to compete, they don’t want to lose rather than playing to win, too often looking to be the same as the competition, rather than having the courage to differentiate, add real value, make a step change in their performance and truly beat the competition.

There is more!

When being interviewed after the game the scorer of one of the goals referenced the team, ‘off the pitch’, highlighting and recognising that the players, whilst undoubtedly currently a high performing team, are only part of the overall team required for success.

Wherever you are in the organisation and whatever role you perform you must understand and be aligned to the overall objective of the organisation. Play to your strengths and understand the strengths of those around you!

Interestingly Nottingham Forest are joint second with Arsenal, who, everyone agrees, need a striker.

Arsenal, man for man probably have better players than Nottingham Forest and as a result are being viewed as underperforming. This one glaring omission means as a result, they don’t have every element the team requires and therefore lack balance. A goal scorer, when goals win games, is like a business producing products without a sales team to sell them.

High performing teams in sport or business have balance, alignment, clear goals and objectives along with a strategy to achieve them.

If you are a leader of a team you need to be able to outline a clear strategy that will deliver the desired results, have the ability to utilise the appropriate people, some of whom may challenge you, yet bring the skills and capability to bring balance to your team.

Having all the elements and balance in a teams means you can very quickly perform to significantly higher level.

If you want to drive high performance in your teams and are prepared to make the tough decisions required to make it happen, PYP can help you do it!