For fans all over the world, football has always reserved shocking surprises: From the 1954 “Miracle of Bern” where Germany defeated then invincible Hungary to grab their first World Champion title, to Denmark winning the 1992 Euro Championship although being a late guest (they replaced Yugoslavia on short notice), to more recently, Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2016, fans are in no shortage of stunning results.

Even more stunning is the fact that teams built to win big have for the most part failed miserably at doing so. Most striking examples in Europe at the moment are Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain. Both clubs have invested billions of euros to purchase the most talented football players the world knowns, and are still failing to win the supreme title, the Champions League.

How come such stunning results can be produced? And how come teams that have the best players still fail big time? Surely, in some cases, teams succeed because they invest money massively. More often than not though, team success is driven by only one thing that cements the team: Strong leadership at the top.

In sport, the kind of leadership that builds high performing teams is not different from the corporate leadership that empowers teams to thrive and perform extremely well even within very competitive environments.

If you listen to what Phil Jackson – the legendary coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers in the 90’s and 00’s, winning a record 11 NBA titles – and Sir Alex Ferguson – Manchester United’s iconic coach from 1986 to 2013 winning 38 titles along the way – have to say about their leadership style, they focus on the exact same recipe as would successful corporate leaders.

From these 2 great coaches, I learned 5 things that they do to drive their teams to high performance.

1. They deal with toxic people, aka divas

No team can hope to succeed, be it in the corporate world or in sport, if toxic people are left unchallenged. You can have the most talented player or employee ever, if that person behaves like a diva, thinking everything is owed to them, and thinking they can go with any kind of behavior, then your team will not be cohesive and will lose.

Sir Alex Ferguson understood that. He explained that “You can’t ever lose control—not when you are dealing with 30 top professionals who are all millionaires.” The way he dealt with divas or toxic people on his team was to confront them and set clear expectations with them.

Once the expectations were set, if a player stepped out of line in a way that could undermine the team performance, Sir Alex would let them go. This happened to longtime captain Roy Keane, whose contract was terminated after he criticized the team. This also happened to Ruud van Nistelrooy, then Manchester United’s leading scorer, who complained about being on the bench.

Leadership Lesson: Never, ever cede on someone behaving like a diva. If you want to maintain high standards, you must act decisively when someone violates those standards. When you have high performers on your team and they behave like divas, you must ask yourself how this is affecting the team. If the team performance is affected, you must cut the cord. There is no other way. It doesn’t matter if that person on your team is the best salesman. The long-term performance and growth of your team is more important than short-term performance of your top sales guy.

2. They accept mistakes and failure but help the team learn from them

What Phil Jackson and Sir Alex Ferguson understood is that you cannot lead high performing teams by telling every player what they should do, how they should do it, and be annoyed with the team when it lost a game. Instead they focused on empowering their teams.

To do this, they created a culture where even though the ultimate goal was to win, they let people know that it was acceptable to lose a game and that the team should not be mad at losing a game. They should instead focus on why they lost the game, learn from the mistakes and talk as a team to ensure the mistakes were not repeated. Phil Jackson famously replied to a journalist who was asking him what he did after a win and a loss “I am doing the same, I go back home, have a beer, and eat the dinner my wife prepared for me. It is just a lost game, not the end.”

On that same topic, Sir Alex created a culture at Manchester United that instilled the idea that it was fine to take calculated risks, fail and learn from failure. One thing he did to create that culture was to completely change the team or its tactics at times when the team was strongly dominating the Premier League. In the season 1995/1996 for instance, he started with a completely new team, with many players aged 20 or less. Many predicted Ferguson would fail miserably. It turns out that new team became an even stronger power in the following 10 years.

Leadership Lesson: Even though the ultimate goal is to win, you cannot beat people for failing to produce results quickly. You have to let people make mistakes, lose games, and learn from these failures and mistakes. As Sir Alex put it “Believe in your abilities, take calculated risks and don’t be afraid of failure.”

3. They empower the team as a whole system

Both Phil Jackson and Sir Alex empowered their teams by creating trust within the team. That trust relies on a simple idea: Do not focus on the weaknesses of individual players in the team. Instead help the team understand how each one in the team is responsible to support the other players especially in their weakest areas. By allowing people on the team to support each other, this increases the cohesion of the entire team and makes the team more efficient.

A great example of how this was put into practice is Phil Jackson’s management of Michael Jordan when he started as the Chicago Bulls’ coach. Early on, despite having Michael Jordan – already an all-star player at the time – Chicago failed to reach the NBA finals, losing 3 years in a row in the play-off to Detroit Pistons. The reason Chicago lost: Detroit had created the “Jordan rules”, focusing on Jordan’s perceived weakness at the time of wanting to win all the games by himself. By tasking 3 players on Jordan at each game, they got him tired, kept him out of the paint, and he was much less effective.

Jackson changed all that. He convinced Jordan that he would not be able to win by keeping the ball and that he should help elevate his partners by passing the ball more often and therefore create new threats for the opposing team. Empowering the team this way resulted in the Bulls winning 6 championships in the following 8 years.

Leadership Lesson: It’s never about how good an individual in a team can be. It’s about how that individual and others will make everyone in the team shine and perform greatly. By trusting people, you end up empowering them, and when people repay that trust with performance, the team as a whole system becomes extremely productive and performing.

4. They build buy-in and clarity about the goals

Sir Alex Ferguson explained that he was always very clear with all the players about what the expectations for training, playing and winning were. He kept repeating them, never allowing for lack of clarity. He was also very adamant that goals should always be reset and that to continuously win, you had to expect constant challenge. All players bought in and demonstrated their commitment for these goals on the field.

A perfect example of how buy-in and clarity of goals is key in Manchester United’s culture is showed by what happened on the night Manchester United won the Champions League in 1999 to become the first and only treble winners in English football. On the occasion, Dwight Yorke said he had achieved everything he dreamed of in football. The captain, Roy Keane, told him that in that case he could leave because United needs players with the hunger to win.

Leadership Lesson: Never rest on your achievements and constantly challenge yourself to improve and grow, otherwise the competition will eat you up.

5. They are not afraid of change

Manchester United’s coach never shied away from changing things, even when the team was at peak performance. His results speak for themselves. In his tenure as coach, he had 4 different football teams of 4 different generations. Each single team continued delivering strong results, winning titles. What did he do to allow this to happen?

The key is that Ferguson evolved, identified risks for the future, recognized patterns and trends. He never hesitated to make drastic changes. In doing so, he was able to stay ahead of the game and competition.

For instance, in 2002, he revolutionized Manchester United’s game by bringing Portuguese Carlos Queroz on board. His idea was to bring the best tactical concepts from continental Europe to United. He also bought Juan Veron, a striker not suited to the game of Manchester United, and who promised to disrupt the alchemy of what was then considered one of the world’s best squads.

The results: Over the following 10 years, among other things, Manchester United reached the Champions League final 3 times, winning 1.

Leadership Lesson: Have the humility to accept that a particular strategy or plan is not working and needs to be changed. This does not mean that you are compromising on your goals & principles but that you are compromising for them. Don’t be afraid of change; rather, embrace it.

These 5 things can be applied to any corporate team and produce the same kind of successes and results. Will you dare be the Phil Jackson or Alex Ferguson of your company?

As a leader, what else would you rather copy from the best sport teams?

For comments or questions, please visit my website or contact me at pascal@p-m-coaching.com