The World Cup Leadership Lesson Most Companies Still Miss
Every World Cup team has to answer two completely different questions: Who are our best players? And who should wear the captain’s armband? Most of us assume those answers should be the same. The USMNT doesn’t.
For this World Cup, the USMNT named Tim Ream as captain. The tournament ended earlier than any of us hoped after last night’s loss, but I don’t think that changes the leadership lesson. Christian Pulisic is the face of American soccer. Folarin Balogun is one of the team’s most dangerous attacking threats. If you asked fans to rank the roster by talent, marketability, or individual impact, many wouldn’t put Ream at the top. Yet he was the captain.
At first glance, that feels backwards. But only if you believe the captain’s job is to be the best player. It isn’t. The captain’s job is to make the team better.
Leadership decisions shouldn’t be judged solely by outcomes. If they were, every winning coach would be considered a genius and every losing coach a failure. We know leadership is more nuanced than that. The quality of a leadership decision is determined by the thinking behind it, not just the final score.
Leadership is one of the few professions where the most valuable work is often invisible. We measure goals, assists, expected goals, saves, and touches. We celebrate the players who create the highlight reel because those contributions are easy to see. What we rarely measure is the player who settles the team after conceding an early goal, who recognizes when emotions are taking over, who earns enough trust that teammates instinctively follow their lead, or who becomes the manager’s voice when the match starts slipping away.
Those moments rarely make SportsCenter. They still matter.
Business has the exact same blind spot. We measure output because output is easy to quantify. The best engineer ships the most features. The best salesperson closes the biggest deals. The best analyst produces the most insight. The highest performer becomes the obvious candidate for promotion because excellence is measurable. Leadership isn’t.
One of the most enduring concepts in management is the Peter Principle: organizations tend to promote people because they’re exceptional at their current role rather than because they’ve demonstrated the skills required for leadership. More recently, research highlighted by Harvard Business Review examined more than 50,000 employees across 214 companies and found that organizations consistently promoted their highest-performing salespeople into management, even though those same performance metrics did little to predict who would become an effective manager.
When you think about it, that’s a fascinating contrast. Imagine if the USMNT selected its captain by simply looking at who scored the most goals. Nobody would consider that a serious leadership strategy. Yet that’s remarkably close to how many organizations choose their managers.
We treat leadership as the next rung on the career ladder. A reward for exceptional individual performance. But leadership isn’t the next level of being an individual contributor. It’s a completely different profession.
In fact, the incentives often move in opposite directions. Great individual contributors maximize their own impact. Great leaders intentionally sacrifice some of their own output so they can multiply the output of everyone around them. One creates value directly. The other creates an environment where value compounds.
Those are different jobs requiring different strengths. The organizations that understand this build two equally respected career paths. They create opportunities for technical experts to continue growing without forcing them into management. They recognize that some of their best engineers should remain engineers. Some of their best architects should remain architects. Some of their best salespeople should keep selling.
And some of their best players shouldn’t wear the captain’s armband. Not because they aren’t exceptional. Because that’s not the job.
The World Cup forces every team to answer two different questions. Who is our best player? Who gives us the best chance to win?
Great organizations understand those aren’t always the same person. Too many companies still assume they are.
#Leadership #EngineeringLeadership #SoftwareEngineering #TechLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #OrganizationalDesign #PeopleFirst #WorldCup #USMNT #MichaelLongin
Reference
Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2018). Research: Do People Really Get Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-do-people-really-get-promoted-to-their-level-of-incompetence