Be Who You Are, Olympics Edition: Summer of Soccer Thinking
Peter Loge
Director and associate professor, School of Media and Public Affairs at GW, senior fellow Agirre Lehedakaria Center, director Project on Ethics in Political Communication, strategic communication condottiere
“We came here to be who we are.” - US men's Olympics soccer coach, Marko Mitrovic.
In my last Summer of Soccer post I wrote about the importance of being who you are on the pitch and in the office. The importance of being who you are also applies to teams.
The US men's soccer team hasn't advanced to the knock out stages of the Olympics since before most of the team's players were born. Olympics men's soccer teams are allowed no more than three players over the age of 23. The US men last advanced at the Olympics 24 years ago with a team featuring Tim Howard, Landon Donovan and Ben Olsen.
Steven Goff of The Washington Post writes that this is a team that continues to learn how to play together, what each other needs and is looking for, and delivers as a team. Goff quotes Kevin Paredes (late of my beloved and beleaguered DC United) saying, “We’ve been together the past couple camps, really finding ourselves together like a brotherhood, each and every day, getting used to each other...We’re so happy to play together. In these past couple games, it really showed.”
The best teams have a personality, a way of playing and being. The best organizations do the same. Managers foster an environment that encourages the staff to have a shared identity beyond themselves. They hire staff who fit and foster that approach, they give leadership roles to those who encourage and lead that approach. That also means that managers, like coaches, let go staff who do not fit that identity or approach. Not everyone is a good fit for every team or organization, and that's OK. Some great athletes aren't great fits for every team, and some great staff aren't great fits for every organization.
The US men have done something at the Olympics that hasn't been done in most of their lifetimes, and they did it by being who they are. We can all learn from that lesson.
In addition to this being a good way for me to think out loud and attempt to justify the absurd amount of time I'm spending watching soccer, it's a way to plug my 2018 book, Soccer Thinking for Management Success: Lessons for organizations from the worlds game. Some of the people I quote have moved on - Ben Olsen now coaches the Houston Dynamo and not DC United, Michael Williamson went from Inter Milan, to Miami FC, to Wrexham (seriously). But I think the lessons hold up.