Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton

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СКАЧАТЬ probably his toughest ever. Mainz had sold three influential players – Zdenek Pospech, Nicolai Muller and Eric Choupo-Moting – and lost two more with long-term injuries. They signed ten new players who were still bedding in. They had a Europa League qualifier second leg away to Romanian side Gaz Metan Medias. Mainz dominated the game, with 46 shots to the opposition’s four, but lost on penalties.

      That night the team had an 11 p.m. flight back to Frankfurt, and would be starting a new Bundesliga season on the Saturday in a brand-new stadium against the previous season’s runner-up, Bayer Leverkusen. As they sat in the departure lounge, Tuchel looked around. ‘I’ve never seen a team more empty and more disappointed than my team in that moment,’ he told the society. ‘I’ll never forget the players’ faces. Everyone was just empty. We were awake for the entire flight, and the journey home, thinking, “What can we do here? The way everyone is feeling now, there’s no point in us turning up to play Leverkusen. It’s impossible for us to play.”’

      Tuchel broke one of his rules. He did not show video analysis of the Gaz Metan game, as he normally does after a match-day. Instead he gathered his players into the video-analysis room and put this quote on the big screen:

      ‘I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’

      Michael Jordan

      For the next five minutes, he showed footage of Jordan in action, featuring all his achievements and successes. The message was clear: ‘We will fail, we will be labelled failures and we’ll lose games and we’ll have the most disappointing moments in order to develop ourselves.’ The players understood and changed their frame of mind. They ended up beating Leverkusen 2–0. The lesson Tuchel wanted to give is one that we should all remember.

      His Mainz side was measured by what they achieved in his second season when they finished fifth. They beat every team they faced at least once. With Tuchel in charge, Mainz famously beat Bayern more often than they lost. That was what they were always judged against. The best moments. The over-achievement. That was a burden. Tuchel called it ‘a heavy load we have to bear’.

      Ending his talk, he proposed what he called a controversial theory. I don’t believe it is. Rather, it is something we should all carry with us in our everyday lives. He said: ‘It’s more important to forget and move on from the greatest, most unexpected success you might have than to forget and move on from the failures.’

      This attitude is right out of the Netflix playbook. Company founder Reed Hastings had the original idea to set up a video subscription after he was fined $40 for the late return of Apollo 13. He broke the rules of late fees, turning his company into a subscription-only service (subscribers could keep DVDs for as long as they wanted). That was a success in itself. But rather than stopping there, Hastings adapted; he recognised that broadband services would speed up and so launched Netflix as we know it, a company that breaks the rules in other ways: episodes can vary in length as they don’t need to fit into a schedule; dramas don’t need contrived cliff-hangers; and the company doesn’t release viewing figures, apparently to build ‘mystery and intrigue’. This is the equivalent of content trumping results, which is exactly how Tuchel wants it.4

      I ask Tuchel if he is still a rule-breaker, and he refers me to one of the valuable lessons we learned from Athletic sporting director José Maria Amorrortu in Chapter 1. How do you measure success?

      ‘Points are not the only way to judge my work, so how else can we judge it?’ asks Tuchel. I come up with some suggestions. For some people, it might be chances created and conceded; or the development of individual players; the joy felt by 80,000 fans every other week; the emotion conjured up when you think of the team; the spirit you feel when you come into the stadium. After all, the Dortmund team slogan is ‘Echte Liebe’ (True Love). ‘I never wanted to become a rule-breaker but we just did it this way,’ he adds.

      The genuine warmth of the greeting Tuchel gave to the restaurant owner when he walked in came as no surprise. The pair shook hands and hugged like old friends. Tuchel believes in the power of small rituals like this. In his first few days as a senior coach, it was one of his most important messages.

      It was back in 2009 and the circumstances were unique. Tuchel had been Under-19 coach at Mainz 05 for one year (beating Borussia Dortmund in the youth cup final), the first team had been promoted into the Bundesliga but coach Jorn Andersen had been sacked after falling out with the sporting director, Christian Heidel. Tuchel had never played in the Bundesliga before. His career was limited to eight appearances for second division side Stuttgart Kickers. He had never coached a senior team before. He was 35, younger than some of the players in his squad. And four days before the Bundesliga season was due to start, Heidel put him in charge.

      On his first day Tuchel outlined his most important rules, hand-written on a flipchart. Among them was that everyone greets each other with a handshake. It was to start with the coach, by looking each player in the eye and greeting them – not a cursory greeting but one that said, ‘I’m happy you’re here and I’m looking forward to training with you in a few minutes.’

      He soon realised that mealtimes were a problem. He noticed some players leave the table just as he sat down for his lunch. The next day, he asked them all to wait for him to say, ‘Enjoy your meal,’ before tucking in. The buffet on offer was plentiful: soup, meat, fish, fruit, three different desserts. As Tuchel put it: ‘Grilled this, poached that.’ But before he’d finished his soup, half the squad had left again. It really bothered him. So he addressed the squad at the end of training the following day. ‘Sorry guys, I’m embarrassed to speak about eating as a team again, but I have one more thing to ask. I’d like for us all to spend at least 20 minutes eating together.’ The players agreed. Very quickly, the mealtimes became a period to reflect and bond with each other. Eighteen players would sit for 45 minutes on two tables of nine, and no one would leave until the last person had finished eating. Tuchel did not ask them to spend that long together, but he was happy to establish what he saw as a basic principle of respect. The players got to know one another.5

      Tuchel wanted to create a ritual that reinforced the culture of the team; a ritual that says, ‘This is who we are and this is how we behave.’ The stronger those relationship ties are, the better the team will operate. Teams that perform small acts of kindness for and with each other shore up bonds and develop trust. There is egalitarianism in eating together. Tuchel is part of the same group, no one is better than anyone else: we are all in this together.

      I have been in offices where similar rules exist. A friend who works in a high-pressure TV news studio in Paris laughs that everyone in his office spends the first ten minutes of their day double-kissing their colleagues every morning. Even when he is on the phone to someone, a colleague waits to greet him in a formal way. But he accepts there is an atmosphere of respect, goodwill and collaboration.

      Mauricio Pochettino instigated a similar ritual when he took over at Tottenham Hotspur. The players shake hands with one another every day before they start work. ‘It is a small thing but it means a lot to create a real team. It shows you are interested in the people with whom you shake hands.’ That rule has now become a habit. When chairman Daniel Levy turned up at the training-ground canteen and every player greeted him with a handshake, he may have suspected it was a wind-up.

      In an office I visited in Zurich, everyone eats together and no one is allowed to eat alone at their desk. The team is multi-national and once you get past the punch-line potential – there was an Australian, a Spaniard and an Irishman all eating goulash overlooking Lake Zurich – the mealtimes are a small СКАЧАТЬ