Blog: Starting Line-up

How do you put a winning team together and how do you keep it going until you reach your goals?

When and where I was growing-up, street soccer was just what the boys did during the long summer days when school was out. The neighborhood kids would start showing up one by one around 9am and by the time we got the first game going, it would be around 10. A couple of hours later, kids would start disappearing one-by-one again because of the temperature and natural causes such as hunger; the same routine would start in the afternoon around 4pm. I can’t help but to remember the way we put the teams together which was probably the most critical phase and sometimes more intense than the match itself. Why? Because who got picked or who picked you to be on their team could determine the outcome of the game about 50% of the time. Why? Because better players could deliver better results.

Always having the better players on a team did not automatically bring a win or guarantee a positive outcome

The other 50% that played a crucial role in the outcome of the game was how well the kids who ended up on the same team got along with each other. Of course, every kid on the team wanted to score goals on their own and go home with the feeling of “we won because I scored”. But we would all learn in the process very quickly that it is not about one person scoring a goal, rather it is about the entire team’s performance. Therefore we had to pass the ball, let go of the ball, trust other team members and believe in their ability to perform, accept failures, and be ready to receive the ball when it was passed on to us.

Forty some years later, I can’t help but to notice those same principles apply in the business world. When I compare what we did back then to put a team together, decide who plays where, give instructions to each other during the game, yelling out  cover your man, run back, play offense, play defense, etc., there are astonishing similarities. With day-to-day business challenges, I cannot help but to think that perhaps my education in business started back then and I didn’t even know it.No matter when and where the education started, I did learn a few things even though I might have realized them years later. Always having the better players on a team did not automatically bring a win or a guarantee a positive outcome. Neither did having a team that socially got along well but could not focus their efforts towards the same goals. Having good players increased the chances of winning. Team members getting along socially also increased the chances of winning, however neither of them alone was enough. What almost guaranteed a positive outcome was having both and the key to a triumph seemed to be finding the right balance in any given situation. As there are no guarantees in life, there were times when everyone on the team felt good and knew we have both elements but we would still end up losing. Years later, I could still remember that somehow I even felt good about losing. Years later I learned to label those loses as experience and built upon them for the next game.

by: Ali Hoorsun, January 2020