Leadership Lessons We Can Learn From Gareth Southgate’s Managing Of The England World Cup Team

When it comes to sports, not many can boast the fandom that a football  team can have. It is one of the most popular sports in the world, and when it comes time for the World Cup, the fans go wild. Not only do sports teams provide great entertainment to their fans, but their coaches and managers can provide great learning lessons to not only their teams but also the rest of the world. And not only life lessons but also lessons that can be used by other businesses. Gareth Southgate of the 2018 England World Cup Team managed to lead a relatively novice team in to a winning team, surprising and delighting many. His leadership skills can be an inspiration to others, and is full of lessons we can learn from. A few lessons that can be learned are as follows:

• Ruthless yet compassionate

Gareth may have seemed like a quiet guy who was lacking strength, but he’s studied various other leaders in different settings for years and developed his own style. He has managed to make the hard decisions, such as dropping Wayne Rooney, and shown he can balance ruthlessness with compassion.

• Learn from both success and failure

Gareth’s own personal experience of missing the penalty shot in the 1996 Euro has helped to shape his philosophy of using both success and failure as learning experiences, and as also helped him to better prepare his team. Being able to discuss setbacks is liberating and helps them to better enjoy the competition without fear of failure.

• Focus on process, not outcome

Sports players are performers, and as such they cannot control the outcome. So instead of worrying about it, they should focus on preparation, mindset, communication, and collaboration. Whether it is business or sport, the main thing is executing strategy and skill, as they are what you can control. That preparedness helped build the courage of their “Winning Mindset.”

• Don’t leave things until the last minute

Gareth and his team practiced their penalty shots for months ahead of the Cup. To qoute him:

“In terms of penalties, we’ve been practising and going through strategies on them since March.

“We’ve done various different studies and had individual practice. We’ll obviously go through that in a little more detail now, but it would have been too late to start that now.”

• Build strong relationships

Having strong relationships with people is imperative. Build relationships with everyone, not just your senior staff. Know who all your players are. Knowing who they are, what their skills are, etc., can help  you get the best out of them, and they’ll reciproacte.

• Think outside the box

Gareth went to an NBA game prior to the Cup in order to study how they played and how the players managed to create space for each other in such a confined space. His outside-the-box research evidently paid off, as England managed to score more goals from dead-ball situations than any other team in the tournament.