FC Barcelona’s Teamwork is Dream Work

Sports and business have a lot in common. Building a successful and winning team is one big lesson for the corporate world to learn from the athlete world. This year’s UEFA Champions League will be remembered for a long time. Some dreams were destroyed and some dreams were re-ignited. No one believed that a win was possible, but FC Barcelona beat Paris Saint-Germain 6:1 to storm into the Champions League Quarter Finals. In the 38th minute of the second half, it seemed like it was over, some fans started leaving the stadium disappointed. FC Barcelona didn’t want to leave the fans disappointed and managed to score 3 goals in only 12 minutes. The world will remember how they achieved the impossible for a long time. As Tony Robbins says: ‘A breakthrough is a moment in time when impossible becomes possible’. This win reinforces three important factors corporate leaders can use to achieve team breakthroughs:

Belief

As Marissa Mayer said: “When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this’; and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.” In order to win, we need to believe that it’s possible. When no one believes in you, believe in yourself. Reinstating the confidence that your team can win even when the conditions aren’t favorable is crucial. Losers let things happen and winners make things happen. In the sports world, we’ve seen belief beating powerful opponents over and over again. When no one else believed that FC Barcelona could win, Luis Enrique and his team did.

Pressure

Positive pressure is a privilege, it can bring out the best qualities in people. Workplaces are full of pressure, so individuals and teams need to identify whether it’s the positive or the negative kind. Teams perform well under pressure if there is a common goal. FC Barcelona had a clear objective, they knew what they had to do to in order to win and they went for it under immense pressure. Leaders can use pressure to instil motivation and killer instinct into the team. Breaking Belief Barriers + Positive Pressure = a High Performing Team.

Team Work

Success is not guaranteed, even if you have an all-star team. Playing together and maximising individual strengths is the only thing that can get the team closer to a win. What if we have only 1 Messi in our team? We need the others to maximise their performance in order to achieve something. Leaders need to build systems, processes, and trainings which revolve around maximising the star’s potential and getting others to support them, that’s when they can create the breakthroughs. FC Barcelona showed us that we can break those belief barriers, perform under pressure and achieve high performance through teamwork.

Recruitment is a competitive and high-pressure business. At Loftus Bradford, our goal is to be the best executive search boutique (as FC Barcelona’s goal is to be the best team in the world). Two of our core values are clearly connected to sports:

 

‘Don’t accept anything but the best’

‘We never, ever, ever, give up’

 

Believe in that Remontada! Thank you, Barça!