Team building lessons from the struggling Manchester United

This is not a football article. Read on if you work with a team and are interested in discussions about team building.

In an organization, teams with highly skilled individuals may underperform and not function to their fullest potential due to the lack of certain team-building qualities. A real-time example is the current Manchester United team. Every player in United is a world-class talent who is unable to perform as a team. We can see the poor level of communication during the games, especially when the passes don’t connect. As a United fan, this disappoints me a lot. But I found that there’s an important lesson for all of us to learn here.

In a sport like football, penetrating through the opponent’s defense becomes tough when the players are not in sync. They may have world-class players and yet struggle to win games if they’re unable to communicate effectively with each other.

Many teams in various organizations are like Manchester United. They have highly skilled employees who are unable to perform in a team scenario. For an organization, it’s an absolute loss when they can’t make the most of their talents. Here are a few things we can learn from United and apply that within our teams to get better?

Holistic approach:

To start with, one must rethink their role, especially if they are in managerial and senior leadership roles. If your assignment is the goal, the first thing to do is understand the opponents, which in this case are the problem areas. Then think holistically as a team to deduce the individual contributions based on the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. This will ensure everyone working on the assignment is given the right directions and is aligned to the plan of action to play along.

Improve Interpersonal communication

Building an environment where members of the team can be vocal about their queries, shortcomings, and difficulties without the fear of being judged or left out. Such an environment is only possible when the team constantly interacts and functions together. No, your daily meetings don’t fall under this category. Effective brainstorming sessions, team activities, and one-one sessions help improve coordination within the team. It’s during these interactions you get to unearth information about your teammates that you thought you knew very well. When people lose the excitement of working together, there is no way you can get the best out of them.

Inculcating the culture of building together

The pandemic has led to more remote work where people are pretty much on their own. There is little space for discussing with a teammate personally, sitting together to finish a task, and analyzing what could be made better. That’s where a mundane task becomes interesting. Let’s say there are two people involved in an assignment. They split their work, begin working on it all by themselves, and decide to meet later with what they have. The recurring meetings will be full of contradictions and miscommunications that will only result in the assignment being delayed and the people working on it not finding it interesting anymore. Inculcating the culture of building together will improve coordination, making the team more confident to take on bigger projects.

Practicing Empathy

I once read that people who are highly empathetic and disciplined in an organization have a history of playing a team sport growing up. They naturally tend to think as a team and have already been through the process of shedding their ego and insecurities. Whereas for people whose only team experience is at the workplace, it gets slightly difficult for them to get the perspective right. For example, when a colleague is talking to you about some difficulty, the worst thing to do is bring up a similar personal experience and boast about it. It’s a common mistake, which will make the situation less about them and more about you. People generally don’t take a second chance after an experience like that. So trying to listen more and reading a bit about the basic psychology behind individuals and groups will help you handle such situations better.

They say that knowledge is complete only when shared. I believe that sharing knowledge with your team, discussing things with an open mind, and allowing your belief systems to be questioned during these discussions will make the team more passion-driven.

Let me know what other team-building qualities are needed for a team to achieve its fullest potential.