Leadership Relationships: Lessons from Jürgen Klopp

As a leader, you’re likely to have a group of leaders around you – perhaps even a leadership team. In this article, I’ll share some thoughts on how to maximise the relationships in your team.

As Peter Northouse defines it, leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. So dive in and leave your comments at the end!

Being a Liverpool fan, seeing your team become League champions again after 30 years is an amazing feeling. The wait has been long but since the arrival of Jürgen Klopp fans have felt a special connection to him, his coaching philosophy and his ability to turn the fans from “doubters to believers”. 

As soon as he arrived in 2015, Klopp noticed weaknesses in two key areas. The lack of breadth and depth in his ‘backroom staff’ – a common term in football referring to the manager’s assistants and leadership team – and gap in the leadership structure between him and the club’s owners. 

While the owners addressed the gap in leadership structure, Klopp focused on his ‘backroom staff’. Over time he increased the size of his team by bringing in psychologists, nutrition specialists, a director of analytics and even a ‘throw-in’ coach. At the last count, Klopp had assembled a team of 21 co-leaders around him to whom he has effectively delegated a range of responsibilities. His leadership team is large, broad and diverse.

Let's focus on 4 key factors that I believe have led to Liverpool’s recent success.

Alignment to a strong, compelling vision.

One of Klopp’s first tasks was to define his own vision for the club, “I believe in a playing philosophy that is very emotional, very fast and very strong,” he declared. Going further he made it clear that players must give their maximum in every game without leaving anything behind.

“I give everything. I expect my players to give everything. Then we see what we get. That creates the mentality of the team.”

By combining this with the club’s rich history (Between 1975 and 1990 they won 10 straight league titles), he has been able to connect everyone (leadership, staff and players) to the club’s values.

What does this mean for Leadership Relationships?

• With your leadership team, consider taking the time to work on a compelling shared vision
• A vision that is clear, challenging and consequential is one of five conditions that, when present, increase the probability of team effectiveness (research conducted by Dr Richard Hackman PhD) 
• Research also shows that leaders who are able to create a shared identity have been seen to motivate teams to greater performance

High trust and delegated decision making.

By building a leadership team with diverse specialist skills, Klopp understands the importance of trusting others to make key decisions. Klopp’s assistant, Pep Lijnders describes the environment best by saying, ‘We really feel that we are a team. We prepare together, we plan together, we act together, we coach together’. Adding that while he and others in Klopp’s leadership team have different responsibilities, it’s due to the trust from Klopp that such shared alignment can be achieved. 

There is a level of humility in Klopp’s approach. For him it’s acknowledging that as a leader it’s sufficient to be “really good at a few things, and that’s enough”. By creating space for those around him to grow he demonstrates empathy allowing him to get the most out of his team. Klopp summarised it best by saying,

“I want people around me to be happy. And as manager that also means having confidence in employees. I believe the greatest strength of strong personalities is to surround yourself with people who are stronger than you in certain areas.”

What does this mean for Leadership Relationships? 

• Understand the limit of your own abilities
• Create space for others to thrive
• Explore delegating responsibilities across your leadership team to reduce bottlenecks in decision making

Deep meaningful connections between each other.

The key to the success of the team has been the closeness that Klopp has between him and the players. For most football fans, it’s something we see in how he outwardly behaves on matchdays – huge hugs, fist bumps and big smiles. Scratch underneath the surface and there’s much more to it. For example, Klopp ensures that every one of his players knows the names and roles of all of every member of staff at their training facility (from cooks to cleaners). More than that he believes everyone is responsible for the atmosphere that they create. All of this results in greater connections between staff, players and coaches. The players understand the impact of being successful on the pitch to not just each other, but for all the staff at the club. This is how Klopp summarised the importance of relationships,

“All we do in life is about relationships. Otherwise, if you only want to be responsible for the things you do, then live in a forest alone.” 

What does this mean for Leadership Relationships?

• How do you show up to work? Showing empathy and bringing your whole self to work leads to better human connections
• As Klopp says, life is about relationships. The stronger you can make your leadership relationships the higher the chances you have of winning at what you do
• Close the gap between your leadership team and the employees they manage. Empathise and think about how you can get to know them better as humans

 A focus on mastery.

To effectively connect everyone to the vision, it’s vital that the players and staff around Klopp are willing to strive for excellence. According to Lee Richardson (Klopp appointee and the team’s performance psychologist), this focus on excellence is spread from the leadership structure through to individual players.

Lee says he has been impressed with the willingness of players to openly engage and share their performance concerns – something he calls a ‘mastery approach’ as he describes it:

“It involves a constant striving for excellence, for being as good as you can be and there’s a multiplication factor - as well as Liverpool’s overall mastery culture, it is also the culture of individuals within the squad.” 

What does this mean for Leadership Relationships? 

• Know that you’re not alone in being the best you can be, even world class footballers struggle too
• Just like a sports team, you’re dependent on the skills of your leadership team to be successful as a whole
• As a leadership team, consider taking an hour out of your time every few weeks to retrospect. Think about your ways of working, your relationships and even the work itself and brainstorm clear actions for improvement 

I'd like to leave you with a closing thought, which of these 4 key factors is the one that’s most important for you right now?

I hope you found this a useful and insightful article, if you're thinking of trying out any of the ideas I've shared please email me at [email protected]!