“Teamwork makes the dream work” is a popular inspirational quote.
The fact that Germany won this year’s FIFA football world cup championship in Brazil proves that there is a lot of truth in the above saying. The main reason that Germany became world champion is that the whole team displayed great team spirit. It was a triumph of teamwork over individual brilliance.
A tweet during the world cup of Steven Gerrard, England’s team captain, says it all: “Portugal have Ronaldo, Brazil have Neymar, Argentina have Messi. Germany have a team!” These three are by many considered the best individual players in the world. Germany beat them all, mainly due to its great teamwork! Germany put the team rather than the individual player first.
It took Germany 24 years after their last football world cup win to succeed again in the most difficult task at a world cup: to select and blend a group of highly talented players into a team where everybody commits and contributes to the common goal of the team.
When Joachim Loew, Germany’s football head coach, was asked in an interview a few months before the world cup about his biggest challenge he answered: “I have only a few weeks to prepare the team for the world cup. The biggest challenge is to transform players (who are all super stars in their individual clubs) from “I-players” to “we-players”.
That mirrors what Phil Jackson, the most succesful professional U.S. basketball coach, wrote in his book “Eleven Rings”. His big challenge was to make Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the world, going beyond being a star and become what Jackson called a player “who surrenders the me for the we”.
Also in business, the most effective leaders don’t say “I”. They don’t think “I”. They think “we”; they think “team”. That creates trust and gets the task done.
One more crucial success factor for teams is the bonding of its team members. The German football association had paid particular attention to this aspect. For the first time ever, the German football team didn’t live in normal hotel rooms during the one month football world cup tournament. The 23 players resided in Brazil in four bungalows in a sports and nature resort called “Campo Bahia”. Six players each lived in three bungalows and the remaining five players in one more bungalow.
The bungalows were designed in a way that every player had his individual bedroom and his individual bathroom, but in the centre of the bungalow, there was a big “common room”. Like this, the players spent (by intention and by design) a lot of time together.
As a result, the players (who originate from different football clubs) got to know each other much better, great team bonding took place, relationships developed and even some deep friendships evolved. You could observe during the matches how the players helped each other. Even the substitute players on the bench supported the ones on the field strongly, displaying great team spirit without any envy towards their mates on the pitch.
Campo Bahia was a huge success and contributed immensely to the German world cup win.
Team bonding is also very important in the corporate world. I remember how much stronger our leadership team became after implementing quarterly two or three days off-site meetings. We got to know each other much better and our relationship strengthened a lot. Being aware of the positive effect, we came up with internal and external events across the whole organization. The highlight was always our annual three days take-off meeting outside of Bangkok where we combined business with leisure. It was an ideal opportunity for team bonding, sharing the company’s vision, mission, strategy and goals among all employees. It created alignment and the ever so important momentum which many teams and organizations lack.
Therefore, I encourage you to think about what you have done recently for your team and what else you should be doing to strengthen teamwork at your organization.
