The Barcelona Way (& 5 Models for Work Culture)
In 2007 as Barcelona were looking to replace their manager they were faced with a difficult challenge. They decided if they were to move on with a strong sense of sustainable success they needed to think about the culture they wanted to build.
They drew up a list of criteria for how they wanted to choose the manager. Interestingly most of the list didn’t mention football. Damian Hughes, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Alliance Manchester Business School goes on to explain the Barcelona approach to the challenges they faced.
Professor Hughes gives a 5 state model of culture. That was the work of James Baron and Michael Hannan at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Bosses are given a choice of building their cultures with one of five different blueprints. By understanding these we can change our approach to hiring, retention, motivation and more.
(1) The Star Model
Football example: Real Madrid
This model is focussed on hiring the best of the best, Real Madrid embodied it with their Galactico approach. Hughes also describes the Google approach of soaking up all of the best engineers every year as an example of this. In this model the company pays handsomely for top talent and hopes they produce something wonderful and surprising once they are in place.
(2) The Engineering Model
Football example: Dortmund under Klopp.
This structure hires talented, results focussed workers who like working under pressure and a clear plan. There’s a strong suggestion that this is the most common culture in Silicon Valley start-ups. Works well where there is enough certainty to have a clear plan.
(3) Commitment Model
Football example: Barcelona
This sets about trying to have a clear sense of what the organisation is cultural defined by – and then hiring employees who are able to square their own interests with that model. In the studies that have been conducted the firms that adapted to this model seemed to find success most quickly (going public faster). It didn’t necessarily correlate with the best success in the long-term.
(4) Bureaucracy Model
Football example: Liverpool (pre Klopp)
This is constructed on a disciplined, administrative system. There are clear rules to the organisation and most behaviours are governed by expected behaviours. Employees fit in to do a specific task and are expected to perform that task in a prescribed way. It can lead to predictable levels of success but is likely to be unappealing to the most free-thinking and creative of employees.
(5) Autocracy Model
Football example: Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson
This model (similar to the bureaucracy model) has very clear rules and guidelines for employees with very limited scope for anyone in the organisation to have an impact on the decision making process. Decision making is top down and workers are not expected to present challenges to the way the company works.
AI Transcript *HANDLE WITH CARE*
Bruce Daisley: It’s a podcast about making work better. What do we discuss in this podcast? Basically it’s just anyone who’s interested in improving work culture in terms of making their day-to-day jobs more enjoyable. We try and delve into some of the psychology and the evidence behind it, and there’s a real treat today.
We always look at how we can improve our jobs. Every episode tries to give some evidence on that, but we’ve never done a lot on sport. I was always concerned how applicable it really was. So we’ve done two episodes today that you should see in your feed. If you’re a subscriber on Apple Podcast, you’ll see that or on Spotify.
This episode is a discussion with Damien Hughes, who’s a professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School. He’s a professor into organizational psychology, and he’s written this remarkable book the Barcelona Way. Damien lives this admirable life. He helps advise the Scotland rugby team. He helps advise Premiership football teams.
He works across the whole realm of sport, helping teams be better and fantastically. He shares some of those moments today, so he tells us the process he goes through, he tells us a model that he uses. You’re gonna find this enjoyable. If you do like it, please share it. So please share it on LinkedIn if you tag me or if you tag eat, sleep, work, repeat on Twitter.
When you share it, you’ll have the opportunity to win some really nice gifts. These signed copies of Damien’s book, these copies of Daniel Coyle’s, the Culture Code, and these copies of my own book, the Joy of Work. If you are interested in this, the one thing that will really stand out about Damien’s discussion is something called the Barren Hannan, the Model.
And you’re gonna find more details about that if you are interested on the website, eat, sleep, work repeat.com. You’re gonna love this. I think a fantastic discussion, a delve into the detail behind the scenes of how Barcelona rebuilt their culture. If you’ve also listened to the Liverpool clock episode, Damien at the end goes into how he applies that model to Liverpool under lop.
So I’m delighted to join me. I always, the first thing I ask people to do is just explain who they are and what they do. Yeah, of
course. Okay, so my name’s Damien Hughes. It’s probably easier to explain what I do by, there’s a few different roles. So one of the roles I do is I’m a professor of organizational Psychology and change.
And then the second job I do is I work as a consultant. Where I work right across a wide range of organizations. So from education to business to at the moment quite a lot in elite sport, looking at creating high performing cultures and environments. And then the third job I do is I write, so I’ve done a few different books very much around these topics and trying to bring them into the mainstream and just get people to understand how some quite simple principles around organizational psychology can make a big difference to our families, our businesses, our social groups and about how to go about doing that.
And the reason why we’re talking today is ’cause of this wonderful book, the Barcelona Way. And I’ve never done a episode at all about sport until now. ’cause I’ve always been reluctant to, I’ve been cautious to draw comparisons, but I think you make a very strong case. Did you have any reticence about thinking how applicable sport is to real world?
Yeah,
definitely. I often get tired of the amount of metaphors that are drawn, especially in the corporate world, from the world of elite sport, because I think anyone that labors that metaphor of sport and business is either misleading you or doesn’t understand either of them. I’ve been lucky enough to work in both, and where I feel the metaphor of comparing sports teams falls down in the business world is on two principles.
The first one is. The kind of behaviors that can take place in a sporting environment just would not be tolerated within a corporate environment. For example, bullying can happen and it can often be excused as being part of the day to day
by coaches or by
players. Mainly by players. So what I would say is I’ve been in groups where say if I’ve got an issue with you, I’ll wait till training starts and then maybe smash you in training.
Okay. So you know why I’ve done it, right? But I can legitimize it by saying it was just a bad tackle or something. So that kind of bullying happens. More more readily than you might expect. The second thing as well is that from a that coaches wield far greater influence than corporate leaders do.
The punitive effect, I can get rid of you, I can drop you, I can sell you a lot easier in the sporting world than what employment law quite rightly allows to happen within business. So those two things I often feel walk the picture quite considerably, and that’s why I think the metaphors don’t help.
The way I reconciled it in my own head though, Bruce, was that I don’t work in sport. I work with people that sometimes happen to work in the industry of sport, and I feel the bit around the people side of it. It’s common regardless of the industry, whether we’re talking about sport, business, education, the people bit is consistent.
So that was the way that I reconciled in my head of choosing Barcelona.
And tell me this, ’cause I guess the one, one of the additional differences between sport and real work is that most of us struggling real work to actually measure whether someone’s doing a good job or not. And I guess in sport there’s a closer feedback loop, right?
Definitely. You say something to someone, definitely you move messy from the wing to, to the, upfront and you can see directly there’s an impact of it.
Yeah, it’s very immediate. That’s one thing. I think secondly as well, there’s a, there’s more transparency in sport than what business does.
So it was a old phrase that Kevin Keegan, the old England manager, used to say that he had, Alex Ferguson had 70,000 people turning up to his board meeting twice a twice a month. And they can see very well whether what he’s doing is working or not. So I think there’s a purity about sport that allows you to see that the winners are the winners and therefore when to one that’s been established, it’s easy to then delve a bit deeper and understand a little bit of why those that consistently win are doing.
So you’ve written this wonderful book, The Barcelona Way, which really is the pep gu story, right? Sort of what Barcelona did as a club before they appointed him, and then the actions he took.
Yeah. So the idea behind it was that I wanted to write a book around this topic of organizational culture and my publisher said, would you be interested in doing one for the lens of a sports team?
Now, the reality is an awful lot of sports teams pay lip service to this topic without ever really investing time and an understanding of it. So we narrowed it down to three teams that we felt had genuinely used the principles of organizational psychology as a guiding principle for. How they organized themselves.
One was the New Zealand Rugby Union team. One was the New England Patriots, and then the third one was FC Barcelona. Now I think it was airfare costs, while the publishers were keen on Barcelona but the reality was New Zealand’s been done quite a lot. New England Patriots. I don’t understand enough about it to immerse myself in that world.
So Barcelona seems to be the obvious one. So when we started to delve a bit deeper, what we saw is that back in 2006, they’d achieved the ultimate in European Club football. They won the European Champions League. It was the second time in their history. And then they said in their own words, they got complacent.
They thought that was gonna just continue. Rolling in, in the words of one of the board members I interviewed said the next two years were like watching a slow motion car crash take place. And the manager was Frank Reichard. Then Frank Reichard. Yeah. So they made the decision to dismiss. Reichard, but rather than do it and then just panic, they decided to do to investigate the concept of culture and how that could then influence who the next culture was gonna be and some of the higher and firing decisions that, so that they were gonna make.
So I wanted to jump in with the book at the start of that process of how they went about doing it and then try and unpick it in a little bit more detail.
Could you described this Baren ha Hannan culture model? Yeah. And were they intentional? Did they know that model or is that something that afterwards you applied to their thinking?
A a bit of both. So when I spoke to some of the people I interviewed, they were familiar with it, but I don’t think they were familiar with it at the time that they were making the decision. But they were, in hindsight,
so this is by two psychologists. Go on, explain what the model is.
This topic of organizational culture and being a competitive advantage is relatively under researched.
And there was a couple of guys from Stanford to Barron and Hannon that set out with this idea of, to prove that culture mattered an awful lot given the proximity of Stanford to Silicon Valley. It was almost like a greenhouse. Yeah. That they could go and test this theory. So they started what was intended to be a two year study, ended up lasting them 20 years, but they went and looked at startup businesses to see the types of cultures that emerge and how sustainable over the long term it is.
So the five types of cultures that they identify, unless this is harnessed, is that some culture’s good on the star route, which is like rail Madrid in football terms. Okay. Or Google in, in Silicon Valley terms where you get the brightest graduates, you pay ’em the highest salaries, you stick ’em in the room, give ’em the best facilities, and then you sit back and wait for all that talent to explode and deliver phenomenal things.
Now what the research says is when it works, it’s spectacular, but there’s far more frequent examples where it’ll crash and burn and the failure is equally spectacular. So Rail Madrid have adopted this as a policy, and this is part of the reason European football is a great metaphor. ’cause competing in the similar leagues, there are other different models to compare it against.
So Real Madrid have got a policy called the Galactic Home Model, which is about recruiting the world’s best players. Now in the period they’ve done it, they’ve had some periods of really quite Starling success. They’ve won three Champions Leagues on the tr. But equally in the 15 years since they’ve had it in place, they’ve only won the league title three times.
Right? Which is the longest barren period. One of the coaches of man called Diego Lopez had a great line for it. He said The trouble with the star culture is everyone wants to be the head waiter, but nobody wants to wash the dishes. So it’s often the back of house that will fail. Yeah. The second cultural model is the autocracy.
This is it’s driven by one or two powerful figures. And it tends to be their way or the highway. So Chelsea under Abramovich is a great example of,
okay, so genius with many helpers sort. Yeah,
yeah. Oh, like Steve Jobs. Okay. The first incarnation of Apple when he took, came off the board, the share price fell off for Cliff.
I think a really good person at example has been Manchester United, ’cause they’re relatively topical. But in 2005, the AM an American family, the Glazer’s bought Manchester United out, and Alex Ferguson became a seminal figure in that buyout. And I think you can start to see how the culture changes by Ferguson’s language.
So he used to have the famous phrase that there is nobody bigger than Manchester United after 2005, he starts to add the caveat that there’s nobody bigger than the manager of Manchester United. So one of his lines that he talks about in his own book is that when Wayne Rooney became the highest paid player at the club, he went to the board and said, I need to be the highest paid person.
And he said, in the time it’ll take you to listen to this sentence, they agreed that was the case.
So folks are wanting to earn more than Rooney. Yeah. So it gives you an
idea of the power that he wielded. Okay. So when he retired in 2013, the vacuum left by his absence has created all kinds of dysfunction in the six years since.
The third type culture you get is a bureaucratic culture. And this is where it is driven by middle management. So in, in the Barron and Hannan study, they say this is where there’s a powerful layer of middle managers. So decisions made via rules, regulations, policies, procedures. And they say that it’s almost like decision via committee.
So it’s a slow moving bureaucracy that that tends to take hold. And again, a great example of that is somewhere like Liverpool. So in the last 10 years since the Americans bought them out, John Henry and his Fenway group, they have a transfer committee in place that makes decisions on who they buy.
There was a period where they, in a five year period, they recruited 55 players to play for them. So the equivalent of a team a year, which gives you an idea of, but they were making decisions via a model called omics. So it was very much around stats rather than personality driven. Got it.
Sort of inspired by money balls.
Yeah. Very much. Yeah. By the Billy Bean stuff. So what’s interesting there is they’ve won the Champions League recently, but it’s been an 11 year journey to start to achieve this kind of success. Which shows you the, almost the slow, incremental culture that emerges around a bureaucratic culture. The full-time culture is an engineering model, and this is where you bring people in that have got a really deep knowledge of a technical skill.
But in a relatively narrow domain. So you hope that somebody’s looking at a bigger picture and adding up all this technical expertise to become greater than the sum of its parts. Now what you find is the big flaw with these cultures are people often make excuses for talent. So people might behave in a dysfunctional way, but because they’re brilliant at a certain set of aspects, people tend to excuse it.
So a great example of that is probably Arsenal in the last decade under Venga. So the fifth type of culture, gimme
an example from the real world of business for that one.
You probably look at tech companies there and things like that, that bring in people. Yeah. Okay. People that have got a very specialized knowledge in that regard.
And some of their behaviors can be dysfunctional or unacceptable Yeah. In a different type of culture. But because they’ve got that technical expertise, they often get excused and people just tolerate it. Yeah. For it. But then the fifth type of culture is a commitment model. So when we talk about high performing culture.
What it’s often a shorthand for is a commitment culture. And this is where a culture is driven by really powerful sense of purpose and some really clear, transparent set of behaviors that underpin it, non-negotiable behaviors.
So this is the bar what Barcelona adopted?
Yeah, very much it is interesting that in the, in, in the corporate world, organizations that go after commitment culture, one of their first hires will often be somebody to work in hr.
So it’s about putting people very close to the center of what you want to do. Now, the research from Barron and h said, out of all those five different types, the most successful is the commitment model. So they estimate on average it’s around 22% more successful than the other four types. There’s other research that said if you can get commitment cultures right, employee retention follows too.
So what did it look like in the real world if you are in so outside of football? Yeah. What would a commitment culture look like?
So this is where you start off with this idea of having a really clear sense of why do we exist? And it’s not just about making money. So if you so it’s this idea of what difference do we make?
So it might be that, for example, I work with a high street retail business that have this sense of purpose of we enrich people’s lives. Now, part of the product that they sell is about enriching people’s lives. Now the reason I’m reticent is just ’cause of a, an non-disclosure that I signed with them.
They talk about enriching people’s lives and then they do so by having two really clear behaviors, elegance and discretion. So one of the ways that they do this is they’re not ashamed of making money. They say it’s not about making money or enriching people’s lives. It’s both, and we can enrich people’s lives and make healthy profits.
But one of the ways they do it is that they take 10% of their profits every year. And give it to their staff with the instruction that they have to go and distribute it in their local communities and enrich the lives of people that are making a difference. It might be a women’s institute. It might be a Cub Scout group.
It might be the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. In the local community, you go and give the money to them, but using the trademark behaviors of discretion and elegance, you can’t tell ’em where it comes from. So you just have to make it as a private donation. Right now, what I’ve found working with this business is the levels of respect and loyalty and commitment that are engendered by the staff are through the roof.
It can often feel almost like cult-like when you go in as an outsider, they’re clear about what they’re doing and they’re clear about how they go about getting there. So then that transparency and consistency seems to give people that sense of safety and security, so then want to come and be themselves within that environment.
Okay so let’s, so Barcelona was sitting there and whether they imagined this before, or actually it made sense afterwards. Yeah. So they elected to, to go after this commitment culture. Yeah. And so did that, how did they set about choosing who was gonna replace Frank Reihart?
This was, they chose someone who’d had no experience top level at all, right?
Yeah, exactly, coach.
So they pulled together a five person shortlist. So rather than panic, when they decided to replace him, they let him finish out the end of the season. And during that season, they started to have a look around. So they pulled together a five person short list of who they considered to be the leader of this cultural revolution.
Now, the fifth most qualified candidate of the five that they interviewed was Pep Guardiola, who was the man that they ultimately decided upon. Now, 10 years later, the success he’s got, it almost looks like a no brainer. Whyt, you choose him. But at the time, he was a 37-year-old novice. That was a former player and had one year’s experience of coaching a reserve grade team.
So there was no guarantees that it was the right choice. But when they went and interviewed them, they applied a criteria that Warren Buffet advocates in the Berkshire Hathaway group, that he says, leaders should be assessed on three criteria. There were three things that you should really think about.
One is, do they have the energy to do the task? The second criteria is, are they intelligent enough to do the task? And then the third one is, can they role model with integrity the behaviors that you’re building your culture on? Now, in the case of, so when they applied those three criteria, Guardiola became the standout candidate because their view was that he was young enough and still had the energy, the integrity.
He’d been a player at the club for 20 years prior to this, that they knew his characteristics and how it was aligned to this Catalan identity. They had the third one around intelligence, they said. Maybe it that isn’t as high as the others, but they felt they could accelerate that process of game intelligence by giving him almost like a cottie of mentors, including the famous Dutch footballer, Johan Refe, that almost mentored him to speed up that process.
And what, in his playing career, wasn’t he famed for being a brainy player, not necessarily a gifted player?
Yeah, so there’s a great quote that when he first arrived at Barcelona’s Academy called the Laia, he arrived as a 10-year-old boy. And one of the coaches was supposed to have said what does he do?
He’s got, he’s not fast. He’s not particularly skillful. You know what what can he do when somebody’s supposed to have said, just look at his head. It’s his brain that will differentiate him. So he was an incredibly intelligent player. So this was a guy that, he was he was almost as well, quite worldly.
So he came from a working class family. In a town called San Pedro that was just outside of Barcelona. So his father was a builder. His mother was the was a housewife. But also, although he comes from fairly humble beginnings, he he was a guy that was quite well read. One of his best mates is a man called David True Ber, who’s a famous Catalan poet.
This was a guy that would go for dinner with Gary Kasparov the chess Grand Master. He was doing all this while he was still playing. So he was a man that wasn’t just consumed entirely by football. He knew that there was a world outside of it. He was constantly looking to ways to educate himself whilst working in that world.
‘
Cause one of the first people he appointed was a volleyball expert. So he
a water polo player. Yeah. Water polo.
So he’s now got the job. Yeah, he’s got the job. They, against all the odds, they’ve appointed him to this job. And he appoints a water polo expert.
Yeah. So one of his best mates is a man called men, LS, the art, who’s a fascinating character.
So his nickname was the Madonna of Water Polo. So he was regarded as the finest. Player of water polo ever. Him and gladiola were mates and he appoints him to come in with him. So he still has him now at Manchester City. And this guy is almost like gladiolas mentor, or his conciliary, the guy that sort of is in the shadows.
But what he also did at Barcelona was he became the defender of the behaviors. So he just became another set of eyes and ears of the way that people operate. So the famous story that he tells is that he used to sit on the substitutes bench and during games when everyone was distracted by the game, he would be focusing like a hawk on the bench.
So he was looking for who were the players that were emotionally invested in the game and cheering their teammates on. And who were the guys that were sulking and chatting and chewing gum? ’cause they hadn’t been picked. Because what he was looking for was, it doesn’t matter that you tell me you’re a team player, if you are not invested in that game, I can observe your behaviors and if you are sulking because you are not in on the field or in the team.
You’re not really a team player. So he would be there to observe these kind of behaviors and almost weed out those that were committed to the cause versus those that were a little bit lukewarm or otherwise to it.
So together they created this commitment culture. So I guess the question is what are they committing to?
Do they, did they have a set of values or, yeah. Yeah. So what are they committing to?
Barcelona’s got the geopolitical context of wanting to be represent the very best of Catalonia to, to both Spain and the world in the 17 hundreds, Spain subjugated Catalonia as a region. So it’s not without coincidence that I think it’s the 17th minute of nine and 19th, second of every game they play at home, chance for Catalan independence still go up.
So they have this sense of, this is why we exist. So they’re often referred to as the army of Catalonia. The football team at Barcelona. Now, what success looked like for them was only laid down relatively late in the 1970s. So when they recruited at the time the world’s best footballer, Yohan CR to come in, Rove quickly came in and diagnosed that as a club.
They suffered from Madrid. So he said, you’re constantly measuring yourself against Madrid. You are constantly assessing what Madrid are doing and reacting. And he diagnosed it. He said, you cannot be successful if you’ve got the mentality of a victim. So he came in and said, Barcelona, if we’re representing the best of Catalonia, we do so by representing the features of style flair, panache.
So again, it’s not just we win trophies or we play well, it’s not either or, it’s both. And we win trophies by playing with this stylish entertaining football. The bit that’s interesting though, is the, how you go about doing this. We’ve covered the why. The what? The how is the. That becomes really fascinating because what they did was he said, when we’re at our very best, what are the behaviors, the trademark behaviors that define us as as a team?
And they came up with three. The first one is humility. So they had this rule that said, don’t come in here showing off status, wealth, privilege, or previous successes. ’cause if you do that would indicate that you lack humility. If you lack humility, you don’t listen to others. If you don’t listen, you don’t learn.
If you don’t learn, you don’t get better. And if you don’t get better, you’ve got nothing to offer. So humility is the first one. The second one is hard work. They say you’ve got this far by working hard. This isn’t the end of the journey. This is just the end of the beginning of the journey. You continue to invest in your talent.
And then the third one as reflected in that example of the guy on the substitutes bench, is you put the team first. So if there’s ever a clash between what might be right for you as an individual, but what’s right for the team? Be under no illusions, choose the team option. So what they do is they go and communicate these three behaviors really clearly and then say you either commit to these and be part of this journey or you choose not to, and that’s fine as well, but you won’t be part of us as we advance on trajectory that we are planning.
What grad Olo was very good at doing was getting stories to reinforce, okay, the behaviors. So rather than just say put the team first, he would talk about in 2009, in his first year, they get to the Champions League final and they have an injury crisis in defense. So he goes to this guy, say, said, okay, cater who’s a midfielder?
And he says to him, you’re gonna play for the team, but you are gonna play it fullback because you are gonna help us in a crisis. And after a bit of reflection, this cater comes to Guardiola and says, I really appreciate your honesty. I appreciate you picking me. But I don’t think I’m your best option in that position.
I think there’s somebody else that would do a better job than what I think I can do now. Gladiola explains to him and says, listen, I appreciate your honesty, but if you are not prepared to play there, you won’t play at all. And this case goes, no, I understand that, but you need to do what’s right for the team.
Not it’s what? Not what’s right for me.
So this is
the biggest game of his life. Biggest game of his life. He is gonna lose out on it. But this is a guy genuinely bought into the sense of that I’m committing to these behaviors. So Guardiola talks about that almost became the gold standard. So for anyone else that sometimes behaves in a childish way, he’s got an example to say, Kate did it at the biggest moment of his career.
So if he can do it, that rule can apply to any of us.
The interesting thing is, I guess any of us, like you’ve got those rules, humility, hard work team, the team. But I guess the critical thing that any company finds and any culture finds is that if you’ve got someone who subverts those rules, then you’ve got a fundamental issue, right?
Yeah. And so Gradi has just been promoted from the B team manager to running, one of the most beloved teams in the world. If they weren’t necessarily the biggest in the world, then yeah, but he’s got this issue where, I guess there’s some players who are against that culture.
Yeah, very much so what’s interesting with this, and again, if we transfer it into the world of work, which I know is your area of Bruce, that I think there’s two big mistakes that often happen here and I’ll show you how they rectified this at Barcelona. But two mistakes is, first of all, people talk in the world of, in the corporate world, we often talk about our organizational values.
And I think that is a bear trap that we can fall into if you’re trying to do this. Because the term values is, by definition, an abstract term values on its own doesn’t mean a great deal. What you find in organizations is people can state that they adhere to a value without ever needing to do anything to back it up.
You might. Believe in your business of diversity is a value. That’s that’s to be really cherished. But say you have some people that have grown up with racist views or they’ve grown up in a household that have pejorative views. Now if they’re clever about it, they’re not siting that meeting, sharing those views publicly so they can sit in a room and nod when you talk about the value of diversity without ever having to behave in a way that genuinely does embrace diversity.
So I often say your behaviors should reflect your values in action anyway. So talk about behaviors because they’re visible and therefore can be observed and fed back on rather than values. So Barcelona spoke about this in terms of in, in very clear behaviors. The second one is as well, too many organizations have too many of them.
So you come up with a long shopping list of behaviors, which means that they’re either bland to the point of abstraction or they’re too un wheeled there to remember anyway. Whereas three is the perfect number. So what Barcelona had was those three behaviors. So one, they’re tangible and very evident, but secondly, they’re easy to remember.
So when it came to sharing it with their players and what they were basing them on as well, by the way, wasn’t anything that was absolute. So it wasn’t like created in a vacuum. They’d sat down and asked the question, when we’ve been good in our history, what are the behaviors that are constantly present?
So I sometimes talk about with teams success leaves clues. When you are good, why are you good? What are the behaviors that are consistently present when you are successful? So that’s how they’d come up with it. So those players that didn’t want to be a part of it, they were able to weed them out a lot quicker.
But you said that,
didn’t Ronald Dino win the ballon door? The, either that year or the year before? Yeah. And he was renowned at that time for not being hardworking.
Yeah. Ronald Dino’s an interesting one because he was their star player. So when he joined the club in 2003, he was this charismatic Brazilian that almost led them out of the wilderness years that had preceded it.
So for three years, he was regarded as by far as the world’s greatest player, and the success came with that. What happened after 2006, one of his teammates that I interviewed gave me a great line. He said he retired from playing football. He just forgot to tell anyone. So it was almost like he’d burnt himself out.
So he became increasingly distracted by living the life of a playboy. So he had been a hardworking player as well as being charismatic before this. And then after 2006 he started, there were stories of him coming to training direct from nightclubs. There was people excusing his behavior. There was stories of him in games when he felt he’d done enough, he would fake an injury so he could get off the field and rest up.
So these kind of practices started to become increasingly evident. Now, what was interesting was that culturally, the impact of this being allowed to go unchecked, that in the 18 months that he was allowed to do this. In the same time 10 out of the 23 players that sat in the dressing room separated our divorce from long-term partners.
Now, you could argue it was a coincidence, but there was incidents where players had been caught in compromising situations in his company. But because he was the best player, Andy was behaving like this and being allowed to get away with it, it almost created a unspoken permission. For others to follow his trend and they didn’t maybe have the same time.
It almost creating
a culture, it, it might not be the designed culture, but it’s creating a defacto culture. Yeah,
it’s an unspoken culture. Yeah. And then this is where you can see the danger of it going to the star model that we spoke about. Because then when people go, oh yeah, but he’s a good player.
Oh yeah, look what he’s won. Oh, look at his talent. And you start making excuses for that because of his superstar status. That’s where you’ve got an unhealthy culture that starts to emerge on the back of it. So
what did Quad do there?
So when Gladio came in, so when he was offered the role in the march before he took over in the due eye.
It. And this is a great lesson for any corporate leaders listening to this. You’re never more powerful than before you start your job. So when they’ve offered you the job, that’s when you can really wield some influence. So when he took over in the march, he asked that they got rid of those the three dysfunctional players were removed before he took over in the due July,
which were Ronald Dio
Deco and the African football called Samuel Leto.
Yeah. Those three guys, Gudo asked for them to be removed from the team so that when he came in, he could almost lay an imprint across. Now what was interesting was it, so when he did he was given permission to remove them. And the first two, deco and Ronald Dino, he got rid of right away.
The third one, ATTO got a 12 month stay of execution, and then he got rid of him. But what was interesting was he recruited four players. Now, two of them he brought up from the youth academy, and two, we recruited from outside. And I found a brilliant quote from him in the Catalan Press that really intrigued me, where he’d given a quote that part of his reason for the selection criteria for these four new recruits were that they didn’t have stupid haircuts, sleeve tattoos or earrings, which when you talk about the modern day football and when we talk about diversity, he go, that’s a busy, intriguing set of criteria.
Now, part of his rationale behind it was he says, I was looking for something about the identity of these four guys, and I wanted to have guys that were keen to fit in and assimilate to a group, not to stand out because of the experiences of what gone on. So these four guys were brought in. Now, I often think when he talks about this idea of identity, this leads us to another area that I talk about in the book, this development of cultural architects.
These are your leaders without title. Your cultural architects are effectively people that make decisions via identity as opposed to cost versus benefit. So what do I mean by that? Think about it in a, in a normal corporate environment, you imagine if you are walking past the corridor and you hear two colleagues slagging off somebody that’s not present, and you know that’s not what the culture is about.
It’s about being honest and open or transparent. So when you walk past them, there’s two criteria you will use to decide what to do next. Some psychologists will say, you’ll make a decision via cost versus benefit. So you’ll listen to what they say and you’ll do a very quick in inventory in your head that says, who are they?
Who are they talking about? Do I have the time? Do I have the energy to challenge these behaviors? And you do. And if it comes down on the side of the cost isn’t outweighed by the benefit, you probably walk past and ignore it. The other way that you would make a decision is you do things via a sense of identity.
And when you ask yourself, and when you do that, you ask yourself three questions. Who am I? What’s this situation I’m facing? What would somebody like me do in this situation? She’s, you’re not worried about the popularity, you worried about what you would consider to be acting in congruence and doing what’s right.
So what Ello was keen to do was he said, I didn’t need to change a whole dressing room, but what I did need to do was make sure I had five people and that were bought into what we were trying to do. Isn’t the danger there though,
don’t you cultural icons, you, your sort of talismanic figures need to be someone, you can’t just necessarily promote someone from the youth team.
They’re not gonna become the cultural icon.
Yeah. Yeah. Quite right. I think you mentioned
sort of an icon would be someone like you, you mentioned that Manchester United, that can now was the
Yeah. Yeah. These architects emerge via two criteria. Bruce, so often they will emerge via social or technical skills.
So they’re either the best at the job and everyone, when they have an opinion, everyone listens ’cause of their expertise or their socially gregarious, larger than life characters, charismatic people that when they speak, people tend to follow them or warm to them. So they tend to be the two. So a quick way that I often do it when I work with teams is once we’ve agreed the trademark behaviors, like the equivalent of humility hardware team, first I just get the players to vote privately.
Okay? Or I would do this in the workplace, get a team to vote privately, give them three votes and say, who are the three people that best represent those behaviors? What I like then is you can almost go to those people and they have a mandate to lead. So you can give them the evidence that says, you know what, 17 out of 20 people in that dressing room.
Respect you for these three behaviors. If you see somebody transgressing those behaviors and you were to say something, you have the credibility and the social capital. Oh, got it. To be listened to and respected. So then you give them, and then you can help them. With their influencing skills to reinforce and embed the behaviors you do want and challenge the ones that you don’t.
You’ve
got the cultural architects, but what do you do when someone’s just completely going against the culture, is La Vic was one of the ones you mentioned?
Yeah, so he’s a great example. So they’ve recruited this huge egotist. So for those listeners that are not aware, he was a Swedish football called La Ibrahimovic, who is an icon in European football, but he’s a huge egotist.
It’s fascinating though ’cause he was renowned as egotist. So to pick someone if the values were humility, hard work team. Yeah. It seems like how he there.
Yeah, exactly. And it’s a really good question and it’s a question I asked. The decision makers, what they said is that, and again, this is where the parallels of sport and business often fall down.
Your li your ability to interview and assess the characters of some of these guys is often limited because they’re contracted to another team. So they’d said that what they’d done is they had gone and spoke to Ibrahimovic during the 12 months that they were interested in signing him. And they’d been really clear about these three behaviors and he was adamant that they’d got him wrong and that he was prepared to adapt.
Classic interview.
Yeah. Yeah. Bs. Yeah. So they’ve told him exactly, he’s told them what they want to hear, but then what’s interesting is there’s little signs that, so when he eventually signs, he phones the club up and says, are you sending a private jet to collect me? And when they go, no, humility’s key, we don’t do that.
We’ll put, we’ll get you a seat on the next commercial airliner. So you see little signs of it and, but then for the first four months people often forget this ’cause of what followed for the first four months, it was classic induction. The territory. Yeah. He behaves himself. So he signs up to these behaviors and the Catalan press are saying, this guy’s the best ever non-Spanish footballer that’s joined us and is his debut.
Three months is incredible. And he scores really important goals and he plays really well. What’s interesting is when he hits adversity, so when things start to go wrong and it doesn’t get his own way, so he gets dropped, or when he gets injured, that’s when he reverts to type and starts behaving as an egotist.
Now what they did was they allowed him a couple of occasions where say he gets dropped for a game and he turns up for a car, a yellow, he turns up for training and a yellow Lamborghini to make a point that they can’t contain. There’s Latan and they
why? ’cause he’s not allowed normally to drive.
No. So one of the ways, so one of the behavioral traits that they use around humility is you can only drive a club car into training.
So everyone gets a black Audi. And part of the reason for that is they say he, because if you are driving in and you are showing off the latest supercar that you bought, that indicates a lack of humility and a lack of respect for the public. So when he gets dropped, he turns up in a yellow Lamborghini to make his point, and they immediately start getting worries about him.
He goes home to Northern Sweden at Christmas and he’s not allowed to drive a snowmobile in the mountains ’cause of insurance purposes. He does, and he injures himself. So he can’t work hard. But the tipping point comes from the play into Milan. So he’s been there now about seven months. You think he should have integrated into the culture?
They have an injury crisis and they ask him to help the team by playing in a slightly unusual position and he uses the immortal line to the coach. I’m a Ferrari, you are planning to drive me like a mafia. And he refuses to play unless he’s picked in the position that he’s best at, which shows that he’s putting his self interest above the teams.
And that was when Gladiola goes to the board, they have a really clear choice now they say if we back Ibrahim of age, we throw everything that we’ve done to develop a commitment called out the window and we go back to a star model that we felt would’ve eradicated by getting rid of Ronald Dino. So the board have a decision that we have to back the co-chair and get rid of the player.
So he’s only there 10 months when they lose 25 million pounds on him. So it’s painful for them, but they said. The cost of getting rid of him was huge. Culturally. Yeah. To the rest of the squad of realizing they weren’t, that they really were committed to this new approach.
So classic example of a principle’s, only a principle of it cost you money.
Bingo. Yeah. Exactly. I think you said based on, so omics the sort of the equivalent Yeah. The Cooper stuff. Yeah. The managers. The margin is more on the downside than on the upside.
Yeah. Massively. And I like quoting this in the corporate world as well as sporting world. There was two guys there, Stefan Semanski and Simon Cooper went and stood.
How important is the role of a coach when it comes to a team’s performance? What they found is, however talented, charismatic, or gifted they may be, they don’t impact on the team’s performance by anything more than around 10%. Now I like quoting that’s that ’cause they’ve replicated it in the corporate world and seen a similar equivalent.
And I’d like it for two reasons. One, I think it often infers a little bit of humility on leaders to go, it’s not all about you. But then secondly, it gives ’em a great, gives a leader a sense of control to say how are you gonna maximize your 10%? There was some other interesting work done in the study of Australian rules football.
So a 70 year study of the best coaches, how, in other words, coaches that maximize their 10%. And what they found is those coaches where there is a cultural fit, where they embody the culture that they’re asking the rest of the organization to do, tends to help to maximize more of that 10% that they can have.
So it’s about cultural compatibility. So if we go back to the Guardiola example that we’re talking about, they had plenty of examples of him. As a player and just as a person that was humble, hardworking, and constantly putting the team first. So I’ll give you an example from him. So when he’d been in place for about 18 months, he got an offer from a Catalan bank called Dale Bank to go and do a series of lectures to their staff and Guardi.
I accepted this contract and the Catalan Press accused him of being greedy, venal, and vain for doing it. Now, it’s never been revealed, but I’ve been told by a few sources, it was around three courses of a million euros he received for doing the job, and he went and did the job. He’d spoke at these lectures in these masterclasses.
Now, Gaudio has never responded to this, but what I was told by several people that had been part of his setup was that he then took the money and distributed it amongst all the backroom staff. So the cleaners, the canteen workers, the caretakers, the kit men, the masses. He gave them the money that he’d got.
Now I think in that one anecdote there, you’ve got a leader that is humble enough to recognize the role of other people around him, hardworking enough to do something beyond his job, to reward them, but then putting the team first by the way, that he then distributes. And do you think
that was you? He’s found himself in a difficult situation and he realizes the currency of culture is often the stories that people tell.
So maybe he’d accepted this thing and because it’s, that reminds me very much of your cantana Nick, but story Yeah. About the the story of, do you wanna explain that one?
Yeah. So there’s a great story. So Can is a cultural architect there at Manchester United. They basically had done a video and the royalties from the video were mounted to about 16,000 pounds.
So the senior players got together and said, you know what? It’s not that significant of money in their terms. So they said, why don’t if they divided it up, it’d be about 500 quid each. But they said, so what we’ll do is we’ll put all the money in a pot, 16,000 pounds, we’ll draw it out and whoever gets that can walk away with it.
So they all agreed to it. Apart from some of the younger players the youth team players, they say no, 500, 300 quid or whatever it is significant to you so you can take the money. But there’s two U team players, Nick Boat and Paul SKO that go no. Put our name in the hat as well. We weren’t a part of this.
And they were just kids really
at the time. They were kids like 17, 18 years of age. So they put them in and the player that ends up drawing the 16,000 pound winning ticket is Eric Cantana. So he takes it, and Roy Keen tells the story that the rest of the players go, you’re lucky, so and and things like that.
But the next day, Cantana comes in with a check for 8,000 pounds, two checks for 8,000 pounds, and gives them to Nicky. But, and Paul’s goals. And the reason he says to them is, you were prepared to gamble, to win big. Which is on and is, which is what Manchester United is about. We don’t play to not lose. We play to win at this club.
So he wanted to reward them for doing it now. It’s a great story. Yeah. And you’re right that I think we’re really good at reverse engineering this, but sometimes in cultural terms, that’s what we need to do. So like the, in Invar Kran, the guy that founded ikea, the stories about him would travel to the airport on public transport, or he would stay in budget hotels because he embodied this cultural idea that IKEA was about making products accessible for ordinary people.
Whether those stories are true or not.
Yeah. We get them at apparel though, don’t we like the importance of those iconic stories seems so important to us.
Yeah, very much. Yeah. And I think that’s what Al was doing. So whether we did get caught out and decide, oh, I’d better distribute this. I, it almost doesn’t matter.
The fact that he did then do it, and it becomes part of the currency, means that people buy into him as a bloke. So when he is asking that them, let’s sign up to this, let’s do this. He’s not asking you to do something that he’s not demonstrated evidence that he’s prepared to do as well.
Back with more Damon Hughes after this, today’s episode is brought to an association with Perk Box.
More and more firms are thinking about how they can improve the experience of work for their valued team members that might be showing more recognition or giving more reward, or even simple things like providing healthcare 24 7 for their employees. Perk Box is designed for exactly that. It’s designed to support the entire employee experience.
Perk Box helps employees live better in life and in work. Find out more@perkbox.com. Now back to Damien. The, I guess the fascinating thing is that having done all this at Barcelona and implemented it, he then went on to Man City. So how much do you think of what he’s done at Man City has been influenced by this model that he introduced at Barcelona?
It is, but I think he’s clever enough not just to try and lift and shift it. So having been into Manchester City now I’ll give you just one simple anecdote. So having been in there and been lucky enough to do some work. With some of the guys around there. You go into their staff car park, their player’s car park, and it his, and it is a high-end supercar showroom.
Okay. And the most expensive car of the lots is gladiolas. Oh, get out of here now. I think that’s quite interesting. Now, I haven’t asked him this, so this is my supposition on it. But I think humility isn’t one of the key behaviors they’re transferring through at Manchester City now, Barcelona. It’s almost
swagger in comparison.
Yeah,
exactly. Let’s be confident, right? Because they don’t have a track record of success, right? What they had at Barcelona. They don’t have so they’re not the biggest team in Manchester historically. So maybe he’s come in and diagnosed, we need you to stick your chest out. We need you to have that swagger, that little bit of arrogance about you.
So I think he’s been clever enough not just to come in and say what works at Barcelona can now be transplanted here. I think the principles are similar. But the but the execution is different because it’s a different Oh,
that’s interesting. It’s
a different place. Interest. And
how do you think you would discover, so say if you you work with sports teams so you’re trying to hit on what the three values, it’s all about three.
So whether it’s swagger or whatever it is at Manity, he’s got three different values and maybe some of them are shared and some of them aren’t. How would you as a sort of sports consultant, as a management consultant go in and help people try and find their values?
I do it. So one of the teams I work with at the moment is the Scotland Rugby Union team.
So I’ve been working with them for the last couple of years. So I can give you a bit of the background there. I I do it by working with the coaches to say to them, success leaves clues when we are good. Why are we good? So don’t attribute it to look or talent or. Conditions were good for us on the day.
’cause they’re all changeable things. What are the behaviors? So if you look at a consistent pattern of when you’ve been successful or when you’ve been at the best that you can, what are the behaviors that consistently emerge from that?
So stuff that’s already
there. Yeah. So on their best
day.
Yeah. So you’re not trying to, so you’re not trying to create something in the vacuum of what you don’t know is possible. What you’re trying to unearth is the concrete foundations of what’s already present. So I’ll give you a neat example
because I guess that’s critical, isn’t it? ’cause sometimes if we’re looking at the best of the best, some of these examples aren’t applicable.
But if we’re saying that the, you might not find yourself in the best company in your sector, but thinking about what you are good at.
Yeah. So the different, so I often think the difference between a great team is that gap between your best and worst days. A great team has bad days as well, but they can fix it a lot quicker.
Than what average teams do. Average teams let the gap widen. So I’ll give you a neat example. ’cause it, ’cause it’s relatively topical. The back in March the Scotland team went down to London to play England in the last game of the Six Nations at Twickenham. And we walked in at halftime and we were getting smashed 31 nil.
When we, when the game finished, it was a 38 hole draw. So it was, it still classed as the biggest turnaround in international rugby history. People have been intrigued enough to go What on earth happened? And assume it was some kind of like church Chilian speeches being delivered in the dressing room or were you
in the, were you, are you okay?
Fantastic
or vantage point, or people think how many teacups got smashed in a run? And the reality was it was none of them. A large part of what the coaches did, and they are really supremely talented guys that went and did it, but they execute, executed this brilliantly to watch them. They went and said, in that first half, have you demonstrated our trademark behaviors?
And we’ve got three behaviors we talk about. We do everything with high energy. We do. We are brave and we take risks and we stick together. And they said, have you demonstrated those three behaviors? And the players were self-aware enough to go, no, not really. So then we looked at the game plan, but said, can you execute the game plan and marry that up with the behaviors of what we’re like?
And the players were really clearly had identified and went, yes we can. They were clear about how they went and did it. Now, I’m not saying when they left that dressing room at half time we anticipated they were gonna turn it round, but we were clear that they knew. How to show themselves the best version of who they are.
Now, we could only do that by having spent time in advance of that, identifying what our best behaviors were like. So those players weren’t sat there thinking, they’re asking us to do a miracle here. We were just asking them to demonstrate behaviors that they were eminently capable of, because we’d evidenced them plenty of times previously.
Is it similar to the teacup thinking, the thinking correctly under pressure? The sort of the Clive Woodward thing is is it about that, that getting those ideas into people’s heads so you’re not leaving it to random chance?
Yes. Yeah, very much so stuff like that can only be done well in advance.
You can’t make it up in the moment because because. That’s almost like Hollywood fantasy. You have to be clear about what these behaviors are long before you are ever going to do them. And they have to be reinforced constantly so that they’re part of training, they’re part of selection, they’re part of recruitment, they’re part of how you exit people.
They have all been evidenced that when you do it, so when you are under pressure, it’s the old military saying you don’t rise to the performance, you descend dual level of training. And part of that is being clear about what are the behaviors that if we marry that up with the talent that we have, that is where culture starts to allow people to flourish.
I was really interested to the values there of the Scotland team. So what were they? High energy.
Do everything with high energy. We do, we take risks. So we are brave because the nature of what we’re asking people to do is to play on the edge. So by definition they’re gonna make mistakes. And that’s fine.
So it is not the mistake that’s the problem. It’s how you recover from the mistake to try it again and again. And then the third one is we stick together. So we remain as a resolute team. So there’s no splinters, there’s no cliques, there’s no divisions in what we try to do. So we’re really clear about those three behaviors and when we’ve shown up and demonstrated those behaviors, we’ve given some of the world’s best teams, a real run for the money.
So we played New Zealand 18 months ago and got beat by just a couple of points, but we like, we really gave them a run for the money, the world’s best team. ’cause we just showed up and demonstrated who we are when we’re our best. We weren’t sort to copy anyone. We’ve tried to impose our style.
Have you witnessed any of this in teams that are severely underperforming?
Because performers that are operating at their best, but what about when self-belief is low, when morale is low? Are those things applicable as
well? Yeah, very much are and again, I’ve done this in the corporate world as well but I, as you said earlier, if you use sport, it just gives you evidence of it a lot quicker.
I did some work a few years ago with the team in the Premier League that were really quite beleaguered. They’d sack two coaches. They had a caretaker coach in, they were in the bottom three, and I was asked if I would go and work with them. So when I got the playing group together, the question I asked was, are, is your lead position reflective of the talent that sits in this room?
In other words, are you as bad as your results indicate? And their answer was, no. We feel we’ve underperformed. So what we did there was I got the players to do a really simple exercise. I said let’s imagine you are the coach of the team. They were playing that weekend. Give his team, talk for him.
What’s he saying about you before he plays you and the players? What that’s great for doing is it gives them a sense of perspective and a sense, and you also find out who’s deluded versus who’s got high levels of self-awareness. So they gave a team talk based on their strength and weaknesses, and I said, are you happy with that as a reflection of who you are?
And they said, no. So what we’d ended, we say, what’s your best game you’ve played in the last 12 months? And they all collectively agreed one particular game. I said, give the team talk that the coach gave after that game. And out of that we identified three clear behaviors that they, when they showed up, they were in evidence.
So my question was, if we marry up. That your talent with those three behaviors after you played at your best, do you think you’ll get out trouble? And I can distinctly remember one of the players, he was like quite a loud, charismatic fallback when would’ve never been in eff in trouble if we’ve done that in the first place.
So my job then was just to focus relentlessly for the next three months on let’s do these three behaviors. So I’ll tell you what they were. They were sensible, hard work. They said, don’t do everyone’s job, just do your own job, but do it really well. The second one was resilience. They said, we won’t get it right first time, but we’ll keep persevering.
And then the third one was, we will stick together. So we said, let’s marry those three behaviors up. And what became really interesting was over the next three months, the players started to almost decide who was gonna be in the team or not. So they had a player that was in the squad on loan from a bigger club.
And this guy was a bit, there’s la a bit of an egotist. Yeah. Didn’t want to buy into it. The senior group of players went to the coaching staff and said, don’t pick him, because when he comes under pressure, he’s not resilient. He doesn’t stick to the game plan and he’s not doing sensible hard work. He’s doing stuff that’s about making him look good.
So the players rejected somebody who was supremely talented but wasn’t buying into the team ethic. They said we would rather have a younger player come in and do that job but guarantee us those behaviors than somebody that’s more talented, but less but more erratic as well. The reason Did they stay up?
Yes, they did. Yeah. With about two games to go. Right now there’s, so there’s a nice story about this that,
but that’s just quickly before you do the story. You say in the book that you know, actually if you’re trying to change if you’re trying to do anything, setting behavior targets rather than outcome targets is a better result.
So setting Yeah. Actions you’re gonna do. It might be we’re gonna meet every Monday at nine o’clock, or we’re all gonna get our documents done by Friday. Lunchtime. Setting those behavior targets seems to work more effectively than we’re gonna win each game. Yeah, exactly.
Because that’s the equivalent of like when somebody says to you, I wouldn’t lose weight, I wouldn’t lose a stone in weight.
And you go, cut your leg off then. ’cause if you’re only bothered about the outcome, do something like that. ’cause you’ll get there a lot quicker. You’ll cripple yourself in the process. Yeah. But you get the outcome if that’s what we’re focused on. But if you say, you know what, I’m gonna I’m going to eat a salad at lunchtime, I’m gonna go for a 20 minute walk three times a week.
They’re tangible things that will get you to the same outcome in a more sustainable, healthy, longer lasting way. So focusing on behavior. So one of the big things when we come under pressure, one of the things that we often that can often go missing for us is our sense of control. So think about when you play a game of chance, say like when you go round any casino and people playing dice games in a casino, and before they roll the dice, people will blow on the dice.
Now if you stop and think about it, you go, what difference is your breath gonna make on that dice? And the answer is none. But you’ll play the game of chance. So what you are showing is how your brain tries to mitigate. For when control isn’t there, you make up the illusion of control. So this is where we can often become busy fools when we come under real pressure because we the need to do something.
Whereas long before you come under that pressure, if you can align it to clearly define behaviors and targets that you do have that are within your control, within your remit, it keeps people a bit calmer and a lot more focused. Got it. On what it is they’re trying to tell.
Tell me the story that interrupted.
Yeah, sorry. So this team I was describing when you were saying about how do we keep it when I knew it now this sounds a bit in congress, but is relevant to their world. When I knew the culture was starting to be embedded was that they played one particular game against the team and if they won the game, they were guaranteed to stay up.
If they didn’t that it was still precarious and there was about three games left in the season and they were winning. Up until the last minute. And one of their players of an egotist that somebody that was demonstrating didn’t believe in this approach, did something outlandish and ended up conceding an equalizer.
Now what happened was in the dressing room, when he went back in, one of his teammates said to him, we keep giving you feedback every week against the behaviors, and every week you keep ignoring it. So the only feedback you are gonna understand is this, and then put a right hander on his jaw. Now, what was interesting was that’s not best practice.
No. That, and that’s certainly not advocating in the corporate world, and that’s why I say it’s relevant to that industry. But what I always find interesting is when moments of high drama like that occur, my job is almost stand back and see what happens around it. And what was interesting was nobody moved.
So in their own way, what they were saying is justice had been dispensed because they’d been trying to give this guy feedback. Through sort of formal channels. Some of the cultural architects had tried to informally take him under their wing that sought to do it in lots of different ways, and this guy just kept rejecting it.
Now they tolerated that until it started to impact on performance, and then in the end that was their way culturally of rejecting this guy and saying, you no longer have the right to be a part of this group that we’ve invited you in, you’ve spurned the chances and now you’re actually having a detrimental effect on us.
So it was quite an interesting, but, so it might sound a little bit barbaric or unpleasant for people to hear it, but from my point of view of observing it, I was like, this culture’s starting to take off. Yeah, absolutely. Because they’re finding their own ways of reinforcing and embedding it. For those that want to be a part of it, but equally rejecting those that consistently reject the culture.
Fantastic.
Look, the book’s thrilling and full of so many brilliant examples and I think, I’ve always been reticent to bring stuff from sport into to work, but I think this is the perfect example of often a lot of little things that people can do in their own work.
And like you, you’ve illustrated some of that, how you can bring very simple models into, to any workplace. Yeah.
If you’ve listened to the Liverpool episode, you might be interested what Damien’s opinion is of the culture at Liverpool. I asked him here to diagnose what he saw is the culture of Liverpool FC Under cop. One of the things that you talk about in your book the Barcelona Way, is you talk about there being five different cultural systems where star system, that.
Ralph Madrid might have autocracy, might have been like what? Alex Ferguson had bureaucracy. Who would be an example of bureaucracy?
Liverpool of hours. Yeah. Liverpool. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. And, but you mentioned an engineering culture, which is how you described Tand, which is where they’ve got a very specific system they play.
Yeah. Do you want to? Yeah. Yeah. So what culture has COP brought to Liverpool now?
I think clo, I think he came with that idea of that blueprint of how he likes his teams to play well. I think he’s introduced some of that into Liverpool, but he came into a culture where they have a transfer committee.
So they have six people that make decisions as to who they recruit,
hence the bureaucracy.
Yeah. Their criteria is using the Billy Bean Moneyball philosophy. So they call it omics. I think what K Club has done though is he’s come in as been like the most credible member of that committee. He’s very quickly been able to remove players from the club that don’t sign up to the philosophy.
So I think you’re seeing some evidence of what he’s doing a bit more down the commitment route. So for example, they had the defender Sacco that very quickly. Club moved him on from the club and there was a lot of consternation amongst Liverpool fans at the time because he was seen as their best defender.
But this was a guy that had publicly gone out and complained when he wasn’t picked in the team. His social media postings were all very much about him as an individual rather than the kind of behavior you’d expect of a respectful member of the team. So I think he got rid of him. I think his treatment of Daniel Storage has been illustrative of the way that he’s trying to build this team first ethic.
So when storage was seen to Soul Core show descent for not being part of the team, he was removed from the team. He was sent out on loan, and now that his contract’s finished is it hasn’t been removed. So I think club has come into this transfer committee and has wielded greater power than maybe other coaches previously because of his track record other clubs before this that they knew that he had a blueprint and a plan.
And they’ve almost bought into what he suggests.
Those two episodes for me are remarkable, fascinating, and I think lots of stuff that any of us can apply in our jobs. As I say, if you wanna win a copy of Damien’s brilliant book that’s signed, if you wanna win some copies of Daniel Coyle’s, the Culture Code. If you wanna win my UK book, the Joy of Work, then please share this episode.
Share it on Twitter tag, eat, sleep, work, repeat or tag me on LinkedIn. Bruce Daisy. Do those and I’ll be giving those gifts away in September. If you are interested in the Baren Hannon model, like I say, there’s a whole page on the website that’s eat, sleep, work repeat.com. As ever, the best way to stay in touch with eat, sleep, work, repeat is to subscribe on Apple Podcast.
You can leave a five star review, 500 other people have already done that and I always look forward to hearing from you. Thanks again to Damien Hughes. Fantastic discussion. See you next time.
If you’ve listened to the Liverpool episode, you might be interested what Damien’s opinion is of the culture at Liverpool. I asked him here to diagnose what he saw as the culture of Liverpool FC under cloth.
