This year Integral Change sponsored the local, Under-16 football team, in which my son plays.   This is part of our effort to forge stronger links between our work and our local lives.

This squad of strapping 16-year old Wiltshire boys is a slightly ungainly and rather lovely mix of lads: different levels of physical and social maturity, different levels of football ‘mastery’, different schools, different life experiences etc.  The team’s record includes a number of impressive wins, intermingled with some dispiriting but seemingly undeserved losses.   They know they’ve got potential, but sense they’ve not quite cracked the secret to tapping it.  Sound familiar?

Engaging the team

Recently I spent a day with the team as we travelled to and from the last match of the season.  My organizational change work often involves supporting leaders to engage teams in particular challenges, despite myriad distractions and uncertainties in the wider system. So it was quite a treat to observe how the team coach managed to keep a team of variously preoccupied 16-year old boys 100% engaged (almost!) in an 80-minute endeavour.  Here’s what I noticed.

What gets in the way…?

Distractions and difficulties were many, including:-

• Some feeling slightly jaded, having stayed up partying the night before. (They are 16 after all!)
• Some not having had time for breakfast, so feeling hungry
• General hassle due to last-minute transport problems – a combination of teenage disorganization and parental lack of interest
• Various iphones and ipods on during the journey, leaving some in a hazy, internet fug on arrival (although my son claims this actually helps his focus)
• Pre-match chit-chat in the car for those paying attention, which included some rather bleak predictions about the match given current fitness levels
• Lack of substitutes (the opposition had 3!)
• An own goal half way through
• Small wind-ups and name-calling by the opposition during the match
• Some teammate to teammate sniping when things started getting tricky
• A gaggle of drunk-sounding women yelling dubious encouragements to both teams (!) from the rickety stand

Encouragement and support

During the match there were some nice touches from the team coach:-

• A ‘team-talk’ 5 minutes before the match began, helping them to see the nature of the challenge in context – a challenging cup match, with only 11 players available – and encouraging them to find a bit extra in themselves
• Plenty of simple instructions from the sidelines and lots of strong appreciation
• A quick and direct “Never mind.  Just forget about it.  Let’s keep focused…” to the player who scored an own goal, and the others around him
• Picking up on some good inter-play between various pockets of players and playing it back at half-time – “His  pass to you was inch-perfect, you looked up….”
• Reframing the match at half-time: “We’ve just got to get two goals – don’t worry about the score” (1-0 down)
• Deliberate and strong contact with two players at half-time who were getting distracted by some name-calling from the other team: “I need 100% of you, and I’m only getting 50%”
• Curbing little bits of intra-team bickering by saying “You leave the moaning to me.  You don’t need to do it to each other.  It’s my job to moan.”
• A good, fair post-match assessment:- what went well, what needs work.

And…of course there were plenty of flashes of brilliance from the team during the game, culminating in an elegantly snatched goal in the second half.  They lost 3-1 in the end, but it was a good, tense, well-fought match.

Future learning?

It struck me that this group of eleven boys with their distractions, their energy, their potential, and their lack of extra resource was a fine parallel for many of the teams that Nick and I find ourselves supporting clients to lead through considerable organizational change.*

However, I found myself wondering – given the fast-moving, fragmented and distracting world that we’re now living in - how young adults might be better supported to learn how to remain focused, grounded and present (containing their emotions productively in the process) even when there isn’t a capable, competent leader around.  Is this something that needs to be either learned in school, or might it become part of standard training schemes and professional learning programmes…?  Perhaps it already is.

And could such support and/or training at this early age help produce increasingly skilled team members and organisational leaders in future?!  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts…

*If you’d like to find out more about the skills required to lead teams through turbulent times, you may be interested in my recent blogpost Five essential skills for leading through uncertainty.

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