It is a truth universally acknowledged, that I don’t have much interest in football, but I do work as part of a team. So there are things to learn from successful football teams and there would appear to be a load of them in the USA this summer because of the World Cup.
I heard a report on the news that someone with a lot of time on their hands, or who was paid (I presume handsomely) for it had calculated the speed that various players moved over the course of a football match. The player that moved the slowest was apparently Lionel Messi who was playing international tournament soccer at a pace slower than I walk to Swords Orthodontics every morning. In fact he was only slightly faster a goalkeeper.
Messi is also the highest scoring player in the history of World Cup football.
I mentioned this to the gang at Swords Ortho this morning and comments ranged from “lazy” to the more objective “he just stands there and everyone just passes to him”. I don’t know what the strategy is with his team but it sounds like that team has worked out what to do to score more goals than the opposition (a crucial part of winning matches, it appears) and whatever it is it doesn’t involve Messi running too far or too long. The fastest player was apparently Vladimir Darida. I have never heard of him.
My thought was that the speed of a successful player doesn’t necessarily equate to their effectiveness, it’s what they do in the position that they are in. And if they are in the right position, why would they move at all?
I have always been intrigued by the quote “skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been” usually attributed to Wayne Gretzky… or possibly his dad. Things work best when your current actions are connected to what’s going to happen next. In Swords Ortho I have seen teamwork at its best when things are done in a coordinated way with what other people are doing. It’s important for each member on our team to know what the others do and how they do it so that they can adjust their own activities to connect with each other effectively. It's not a group of people doing their work independently of the people around them, regardless of how well they do it.
I guess in a large organisation with a turnover of people and the new people have to be effective from the start, like on a ship or in an army or a large fast food chain, this is done by someone in charge having a clear idea of how everyone interacts and training them extensively before they go to work and giving instructions to be followed rigidly. With a small organisation it usually comes together organically as a combination of how we’ve worked out doing things up to now and what ideas people come up with when they do it – and we rotate the team around the different jobs so that they have an idea of what the other people do.
Though I don’t suppose they put Messi in goals for a game every now and again when Martinez is on holiday.