The Pyramid and the Funnel. Leadership at the World Cup
Jul 7th, 2010 by David Svet
Championship competitions are great for studying the microcosm of team cohesion. The World Cup may be the greatest study of all due to its global reach. This Cup’s German team is showing something very unique and I think reflective a change in how the world does business.
Teams have long been assembled like armies, with top down hierarchical leadership. It’s what we are all used to. There’s a manager, a coach and a captain with each player taking on a specific role. Soccer is a little different for Americans because the roles are less distinct, each player is expected to create and the captain’s role is extremely limited. Nonetheless, the structure is there.
The German national soccer team’s leader is Michael Ballack. Until he was injured it was anticipated that he would lead the team to the Cup as their captain. Without him the press buzzed about the possibilities for the very young German side. What would become of them without their leader? After all, the team revolves around Ballack’s remarkable skill and experience. Michael Ballack is the tip of the pyramid that is the German team. Therein lies the answer, and an interesting answer it is.
Michael Ballack is the tip of the pyramid. Without him there is no tip, no single point of focus, no leader with all others following. There is instead a highly connected network of remarkably skilled players who are improving with each match as the network connections grow. They are no longer constrained by a leader. They are free to create with one another and to empower one another without deference to a leader. The result is nothing short of remarkable. Germany is spanking the finest teams on earth.
Why is this working? Rather than being a pyramid with all efforts directed toward empowering the leader to lead, the Germans are giving and sharing. As each player gives more to his teammates their collective power grows. The pyramid is inverted and has become a funnel. With each act of sharing and cooperation the funnel grows larger and more consuming with goals coming out the other end.
Seth Godin’s book, Lynchpin, is about becoming indispensable by freely giving of yourself in an artful manner. Godin’s premise is that as you become indispensable you become a lynchpin that the organization cannot do without. I believe this is true. I also believe that Michael Ballack is/was a lynchpin. He is a shining example of how Seth Godin’s brilliant idea can go wrong. The German team operated in deference to their greatest lynchpin to the detriment of the team. Once he was inadvertently removed by a very unfortunate injury, each team member was able to assert himself as a lynchpin in his own right. This formed a network where the connections are more powerful than the nodes, a living manifestation of Reed’s Law, something I have previously mentioned in Spurspectives.
Reed’s Law states that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. It is what is powering the emergence of social media as a communications juggernaut and changing the nature of how business is done. I believe what we are witnessing is the transformation of a team from a top down hierarchical structure to a structure that is a social network. It is a network where individuals empower one another rather than follow a leader and it is working. Just as the social network is the new shape of communication and commerce, this may be the new shape of teams.
Photo by Katie Brady, shared under a Creative Commons license.
