Leadership lessons from the Socceroos at the FIFA World Cup

Unified, clear and fair. On the eve of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, that’s how the Socceroos look by taking a stand against host country Qatar’s practices. Among others, the English, French and Norwegian national teams have also taken action.

Creating unity in an organisation is difficult. You can bet that the process for all teams was messy, fraught and involved a lot of compromises.

Any corporate leader’s job involves setting a vision and ensuring the company is unified behind it. After all, it is the employees (or, in sport, the players) upon whom you depend to execute the vision. The absence of unity is death to your vision, as Netball Australia and the Manly Sea Eagles discovered. In both cases, management set a vision and immediately lost the dressing room: their employees — the players — protested publicly, forced other decisions and leadership looked at best disorganised and at worst hubristic.

Just as no sport is bigger than its players, no leader is bigger than the team.

Sometimes a leader just needs to make a call. But more often, and especially when a leader is relying on the team to execute, a leader needs to consult, adjust, get alignment and then go public. Every time a leader consults, their fear is that it might result in failure to execute.

So it feels risky, doesn’t it? If you consult, it could bring up responses you don’t want to hear. And what would anyone else know about it? As a leader, you’ve got experience and pressure that your people can’t understand. It’s tempting for a leader to justify a unilateral vision setting.

Sure, go ahead then. Because that worked for Manly. Execution failure is just as likely when leaders don’t consult.

Consultation requires trust

From the outset, you’ll be in a much stronger position to consult if you’ve already built trust with your people. If you haven’t already done that, the game is lost before it begins.

Rarely, people will declare themselves open to forming a new opinion. When this happens, the answer is spirited debate and a learning experience for all.

More commonly, your audience will already have an opinion, based on personal beliefs. Often, particularly on questions of vision, you are dealing not with evidence and data but with beliefs. Most people’s beliefs are formed early and based on unique personal experience: an employee who has been doing the same role for 15 years on the ground will have a different experience of the organisation than a CEO. And most people don’t react well to having their beliefs dismantled.

You can’t change someone’s beliefs for them. People change their minds because they persuade themselves. So, deep canvassing is required: once you’ve suggested a proposed course of action, your job is to listen. Few leaders do this, or do it well. Listening to what someone is saying is actually listening to how they feel. Most of us listen to respond — to launch counter-arguments. If you do this, you’ll alienate people. Hearing the opposition should be uncomfortable because, well, you’re the boss. Isn’t it your job to get it right, all the time?

Here we arrive at the nub, as they say, of the problem. Are you confident enough to publicly acknowledge you’re missing something? Do you trust your people enough to believe that their views are as important as yours? Great leaders who build followership and long-term high performance do all of these things, all the time. The Socceroos themselves said they set out to “understand and learn”, acknowledging that they weren’t experts.

What you hear might alter your view. Perhaps you’ve seen it now from a different perspective and your original vision seems misguided. The feedback might push you to refine your approach, creating a better outcome. Maybe Netball Australia’s players, if consulted, would have found a way to support the Hancock deal if it had included, say, an acknowledgement of past wrongs and a financial commitment to a First Nations’ cause.

You might find your people change their own minds. Or perhaps they were with you all along but appreciated the time you took to hear from them anyway.

When all the returns are in the leader must unequivocally make the call and own it. We all get it wrong sometimes but it’s the trying, listening and adapting, that makes us great. A leader who thinks they know better than their people has lost the game before kick-off. If you’re brave enough to listen to your people, though, they might just save you from yourself.