The underdogs did it. Despite a sense of benign disbelief in the football world. From Brazil to Bahrain, from Birmingham to Bangkok, everybody’s second favourite team, Leicester City, triumphed against the odds to win the premier league.

We can look at sports help us to better understand organisational issues and skills development. There are four reasons why I think that this example may have some wider resonance for learning and development professionals looking to evaluate training.

Data Matters

Since the start of the Premiership, we have known that teams which average two points per game are competing for honours and those who manage one point per game or fewer will find themselves facing relegation. That simple data point leads us to our first lesson from Leicester City.

Successful teams rely on a significant amount of data to help them prepare. The sports science team at Leicester includes seven professionals who use a range of technology to analyse individual performance, fitness and conditioning to give each team member the best possible advice. This focus on data helps individuals understand exactly what good looks like. By focusing on specific performance measures which indicate good performance, each individual builds a holistic picture of the factors which can direct their effort and convert that effort into performance.

If we think about the learning and development team as performance consultants it would certainly change our relationship with the rest of the business.

Focus of Control

Having data at your disposal The data that Ranieri and his team have at their disposal enables teams to concentrate on doing the right things, right.

You rarely hear the Leicester manager or players talking about good or bad refereeing, good or bad luck, the rub of the green or the run of the ball. They know that external forces are outside their control. They can only do the things they can do and they concentrate on those, often quite small, things. How often do you hear a football manager blame a poor result on the referee or opposition foul play?

Concentrate on the things that can be controlled and make sure that everyone knows what they need to do and how their role impacts the team. Empower them to take responsibility for their own performance.

After our interventions, do people know exactly where their responsibility lies and what they need to do differently?

Focus on Performance

I’ve been impressed by listening to Ranieri in post-match interviews. Win, lose or draw he talks about the team’s performance rather than the result. After the recent loss to Arsenal, his most telling comment was “We lost but we are satisfied. We played the same level as against Manchester City. Then we won, today we lost. It is ok.”

The emphasis is on performance rather than the outcome. Interesting and ultimately this lies at the heart of the team’s success.

His embodiment of Kipling’s famous lines “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” is instructive for leaders, trainers and learners. We know sometimes people perform well and don’t achieve the results their performance or efforts deserve, at other times people do not perform especially well and yet achieve exceptional results.

Building skills is based on continuing to do the right things in the belief that positive results will follow. It takes confidence and an unswerving commitment.

In my experience, managers who don’t immediately see results improve may be quite eager to ditch the new ideas coming from learning and development in favour of the tried and tested. No matter how many times we explain that the definition of stupidity is doing the same things and expecting different results, we are rarely given the time and commitment required to improve capability.

Building a Team

I have no special insight into the workings of the Leicester dressing room, but if post-match comments are anything to go by, it would be difficult to imagine that the team weren’t dedicated to continuing to do the right things, right. The overwhelmingly positive assessment of his player’s performance and their contribution, both individual and as a team, is also a positive factor in building team spirit. When individuals are singled out for praise in interviews, Ranieri always acknowledges their contribution and then talks about the others who enabled them to achieve.

It’s commonly known that the Leicester City manager took over a team which had already started to turn the corner at the end of the previous season. In keeping with his belief in team integrity, Ranieri didn’t make wholesale changes but worked with the staff in place under the previous manager and maintained a healthy dialogue with the experienced members of his squad. He built on the green shoots of success rather than clearing the ground for his own ideas.

Whist other managers may have made wholesale changes to ‘make their mark’ Ranieri evolved the way the team works, he has stood by them. Of the most familiar starting 11, the player who has played least has played 27 of the possible 36 Premiership games over the course of the season.

Work often involves change and the learning and development team are often involved in helping change happen. Sometimes leaders need patience and perseverance to build, evolve and tirelessly implement proven approaches, despite occasional and inevitable setbacks.

Looking at these four factors in relation to our work, I can see direct parallels. I’m currently working with sales teams who are even more results orientated than Premiership football clubs.

I can see how identifying the individual behaviours which work and then having data about the adoption of these behaviours will lead to those individuals being better prepared.

I can see how encouraging team members to take responsibility for completing their part of each task rather than concentrating on those factors over which they exercise little control would lead to people owning their role and having greater goal clarity.

I can see how focusing on the minutiae of performance today and in the future, rather than historical results, would build capability. Being part of a successful team is based on acknowledgement of everyone’s contribution and clarity about how we win together but lose when we are divided.

Self-serving bias

When asked for reasons why the Scotland national football team failed to qualify for the World Cup; head coach Gordon Strachan replied that his side was “genetically behind”. After their defeat to Slovenia, Strachan suggested that their opponents were not necessarily technically superior, but they had the ‘height and strength’ that the Scots were unable to deal with. Some ex-professional footballers immediately described his comments as ‘nonsensical’.

After years of watching Strachan in interviews, I am not entirely convinced that even he genuinely believes his own comments. Regardless of whether he truly believes them or not, it does suggest a certain amount of self-serving bias.

Self-serving bias is the psychological tendency to attribute failure to external factors whilst attributing success to how fantastically awesome you are.

Self-scrutiny

Compare Strachan’s take on his own team’s shortcomings, forgive the pun, to those of top performing golf or tennis players for example. When they are interviewed after a losing a match or carding a poor score, they rarely blame the conditions, the course, the court because they understand that these are the same conditions in which their opponents are competing. They also recognise, and admit to the specific areas of their own performance that led to their failure. The picture is the same when they win. They have a very accurate perception of which skills and capabilities they used on that day that helped them succeed.

Narrowing the skills perception gap using coaching

Talented people like this of course don’t work alone. They have coaches who can objectively analyse and identify the areas of performance and skills that are effective in each situation. This provides the player with a very strong perception of their own skills and their effectiveness, so that they can deploy them at the right time. This means that the gap between what they believe to be effective, and what is effective is very narrow.

We see this happening in the same way with verbal communication. We have worked with many skilled communicators over the years who have a very strong perception of the behaviours that they believe to be effective in each context and how effective they actually are.

They have a narrow perception gap.

Perception versus reality

We also worked with many people who have a very wide perception gap. In other words, they use behaviours that they believe will be effective in a particularly context, but in fact are not. For example, there are many salespeople that we have observed who can talk eloquently; passionately and at great length about their products; yet we know from our research into successful selling that this is not an effective behavioural approach for persuading customers to buy.

There are of course those people who are very skilled at communicating, but cannot explain why they are effective – or if they do offer an explanation, it is usually inaccurate. It is also likely that they will also blame external factors when things go wrong because their perception gap is wide.

So how do we close the gap?

Firstly, unlike the earlier examples, don’t try and find the answer in genetics. Effective verbal behaviours can be learned. Here is some guidance on what can be done to help close the perception gap:

Identify behaviours that are likely to be effective in certain situations. E.g. selling, coaching, managing meetings, presentations. Look at behavioural research in the area you want to improve and find a model of success.

Plan to consciously use these behaviours in real life situations, but try and keep your focus to one behaviour at a time. A word of caution – if you are going to try something new – pick low risk situations.

Reflect on their effectiveness. Did it achieve the outcome you wanted it to? If not, why not?

Where you can, appoint a coach that can give you feedback on your performance. This is working on an assumption that they know what behaviours to look for and can give you objective developmental feedback.

What to avoid

Avoid a self-serving bias. If things go wrong, be willing to accept that this could be a result of your own behaviour, rather than immediately attributing it to an external influence.#