Winning Team
Who is a winner or what defines a winning team? Is a winner the person who made a great presentation and won an award on behalf of his team? Is it the marketing manager who equipped his team members with useful tactics that eventually led to an increased turnover for their organization? He may not have done the actual work or shaken hands with the customers who paid for service. Nonetheless, he is recognised. Who is a winner? Could it be the team captain who led his fellow players to the clinching of the most coveted trophy in the sport? These things are really subjective. They depend on who is making the judgement and the basis of the person’s judgement.
Teams are groups of individuals who work together towards shared goals. They are communal. For that reason, a team must appreciate its leader and members and strengthen them in order for it to grow and achieve its desired goals. One should not write off a person or team simply because they missed the opportunity of winning a trophy or the grand prize for an event. Success typically occurs over a period of time; there is a progression leading to success. Failing to pay attention to the progression towards success can result in missing a very important point. In addition, a team captain cannot be singled out and awarded the champion of the year. The matter of success and productivity is something we all need to learn to appreciate better. Consider the following points:
- People are usually very emotive when it comes to calls for awarding those who have performed outstandingly. They often forget that the scale on which the performance of their adored person is judged is not perfect; ideally, the same scale should not be used to measure dissimilar items. Also, there are many people who have done greatly but the result of their efforts may not be visible or acknowledged because the eyes of those judging performance is firmly fixed on the final outcomes, such as number of sales made, revenue generated, number of clients gained, the final game scores, etc. Also, even where a person or team is awarded a prize for their performance, they have only proven to be the best in one specific area and that is the case for that period of time. Other people and teams may be winners in their own right in other areas. In addition, in subsequent competitions, the present winners may not make as good a mark as they previously did. The platform for judging performance is not perfect so the judgement for performance should be given conservatively.
- A team’s strength is the result of the combination of the strengths of individual members. Some people may stress the fact that a team captain helps boost the team morale, aligns and galvanises his fellow players for a game and encourages discipline within the team; yeah-yeah-yeah, I understand that. Yes, he may be a good central person around whom all members of the team rally but the importance of the whole team should not be underplayed. The boosting of the morale of his team is a part of the expectations of a team leader. If a team leader is able to achieve cohesion among members, he shows a good deal of leadership but he is not the team; he is the leader of the team and without the contributions of all the members, one way or another, he cannot succeed. “No man is an island” is a common saying and it is very true. Even where captains do a good job in trying to motivate their teams, sometimes it is not obvious because the team members may not accept their captain’s motivation. Looking deeply into the performance of a team, one would find that there are some external factors that may have some impact on it. They may be less important than practice, cohesion and skill but they play a key role in team psychology. The encouragement of the overall team manager and the cheers of their fans are examples of such. The team captain alone cannot lay claim to the glory of winning.
- One funny thing with team sports such as football is that fans tend to overlook many areas where their preferred clubs have made a lot of progress or recorded a good measure of success. They miss some very important points in their bid to pass across their points about their disappointment in their clubs’ team managers. Football is a competitive sport and that aspect of it is always put forward by the media but it is more than a sport; it is also a business and many club owners make very heavy investments in purchasing and running clubs. The situation with Arsenal Football Club is a great example. Arsene Wenger is now referred to as a loser by many who are disappointed at the fact that his team has failed to secure many important football tournament wins in recent times. Numerous calls have been made calling for his removal as the team manager. To analyse the justifiability of those people’s requests, let us consider the job of a football club manager. Beyond mere coaching, a football club manager is an administrator. He is a spokesperson for the football club. He needs to be temperate and unemotional to handle the requirements of communicating with media personalities on behalf of his club. He is responsible not only for the fitness of the players in the club and the winning strategy for tournaments but also for the financial side of the club’s purpose; the business of making money for the club’s owners. He needs to be able to think of and achieve financial profit for the football club.
Arsene Wenger has proven to be a great football club manager. Why are there so many calls for him to be sacked as the Arsenal Football Club manager? He has won several tournament titles for his club and is to date, the manager with the highest number of FA Cup wins. Correct me, if I am wrong. Arsene Wenger has several times maintained positions between first and fourth places for twenty years, a feat that no other manager has achieved consistently. He often makes profits in the purchase and sale of football players during the transfer season. That is beneficial to the club. The case of Nicolas Anelka is an example. Among his other achievements is the record of forty-nine football games, unbeaten. Arsene Wenger grooms young players from the academy and trains them from scratch. Those players become stars. You can count the number of successes he has recorded in that area. From the financial inflow into Arsenal FC, Wenger made it possible to build a stadium for his club. If with all these achievements, you still cannot appreciate Wenger as a success, the situation may be hopeless. I personally give Wenger a score of eighty-five percent on my chart, without thinking twice, because he is more than a coach; he is a manager. I was surprised to find he was not listed among the top twenty managers of all time. I pray he wins the league for the present season, including the UEFA Champions League cup, before he takes a bow in retirement. It might just be at that point that fans would open their eyes to consider the hero they have had under their noses all this time; the true manager that has always been in the game.
This is not about the negatively-minded Arsenal FC fans but about the attitudes many people have to life. It cuts across-the-board unto every facet of life, from what is considered cool to what is considered lame; from what is considered acceptable to what is considered otherwise; what is considered praiseworthy to what is considered not praiseworthy. Quite often, our judgement and the standards for them are faulty and they may leave people feeling inadequate for not meeting with our expectations. These people may need our encouragement. Is this a call to accept people’s careless mistakes and errors or their ill-preparedness? By no means! Rather, it is a call to probe for reasons for what is perceived as poor performance, to ask relevant questions, to give timely encouragement and to proffer solutions that would make success more likely. Anything other than that may only further promote bad results, whether in competitive sports, the business world or in other life endeavours.
Returning to the football club example, I would like to make my closing points. First, some club managers may win championships and win the admiration of the fans of the football club but they may be hurting the pockets of the club owners as a result of heavy expenses incurred towards winning, in one form or another. Those people may be good coaches but bad club managers. Second, one does not have to win all games in order to be the best. As a matter of fact, there are moments when it is helpful to let go of some initial opportunities for victories in order to secure more important victories in the end. The success and profitability of the English Premier League had nothing to do with the victories of the participating teams. As a matter of fact, its popularity and success soared in spite of game loses. That was because of the strategy that was implemented. The strategy helped to raise revenues far in excess of what they used to generate. Today, the league is so popular and attracts such a large number of people that there is even a high level of fanaticism. Many fans speak so passionately about games; they analyse them with so much zest but many of such fans do not know how to play the game themselves. Imagine a painter working. A passerby may shake his head in disappointment after seeing the first stroke of paint on a wall. He may walk past and miss out on the next series of strokes of the paint brush on the wall. Passersby who walk past later and those who wait longer would see the end result that would justify the painter’s efforts. If you are not adding value to anyone positively, please let them be; allow others who are devoting time and effort to continue to do that. Let them sow now. They will reap the result of their work later. In the words of PITA, an inspirational Nigeria musician, “You haven’t seen the best of me, so don’t write me off; I am falling but I am rising again.”
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