What do sport, music and special forces teach us about successful teams?

You can learn to be a better leader from everyone. You can study an orchestra. You can study a basketball team, a business, whatever it is ."

Mike Krzewski, USA Olympic basketball team coach

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Sports Teams: 1-X-2

Sport offers a propitious terrain for studying the functioning of teams and organisations, for various reasons:

Many sports are team sports. They therefore require teamwork skills.

2. Sports teams quickly expose processes that in other contexts are more difficult to observe. For example, the role of the leader emerges more easily as a scapegoat. This process may be similar in companies, but in sport it occurs at high speed: a sequence of defeats in a short space of time may be enough to disqualify a coach. By contrast, in business it may take several quarters - and in political life several years or electoral cycles.

Team members receive regular and explicit feedback. They don't have to wait for annual performance reviews. Performance metrics are very simple and clear: 1-X-2. This clarifies cause-effect relationships.

4. The emotional component of the activity is often highlighted. Sport is a source of identification, of catharsis, of emotion. A sports fan, like a team member, can express emotions in extreme ways: shouting, dancing, swearing and gesticulating.

5. In sport, it is desired that the participants "wear the jersey". That is, that they identify unconditionally with the organisation.

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Cases: FC Barcelona, Sporting Five Violins, Phill Jackson's Chicago Bulls, 2004 Portuguese National Team and All Blacks

- Some of these teams have strong links with some external entity that frames them and gives them meaning. This connection was visible in the flags scattered around Portugal during Euro 2004, or in Barcelona's identity as més que un club, a flag of Catalonia. The Springbooks of 1995, portrayed in the film Invictus, were the emblematic symbol of a new Republic of South Africa.

- The best teams have a style, an idiosyncrasy - whether it's the harmonies of the Sporting Violin Quintet or the Tiki Taka, the lacy football of Pep Guardiola's Barcelona.

- Good teams have a school. Barcelona's total football comes from the time of Cruyff, the legendary former Dutch player and coach of the Catalan club. The style is cultivated in the school of La Masia. Jesus Correia, one of the Sporting violins will perhaps have been the first of a school of great extreme forwards - a lineage that continued with players like Futre, Simao, Figo, Quaresma and Cristiano Ronaldo.

- High-performing teams contain, paradoxically, a desire for change and a desire for continuity. Phil Jackson's Chicago Bulls had two winning streaks. Two players were in both series, ensuring evolution in continuity.

- In good teams, several captains coexist. Mano Menezes, coach of the Brazilian national football team, explained the point: "A group needs many leaders. Wearing the armband is merely symbolic, in the sense that leadership should be exercised on the pitch by various players in the group, who will assume that role because of their technique (because leadership is also technical at certain times)".

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Teams in Music: the difference that makes a difference

Music has been a source of inspiration for understanding organizational functioning: "The functioning of a big band or a small band raises challenges of participation, interactivity and coordination that typically arise in the regular development of a market economy," explained António Pinto Barbosa, professor of economics at Nova SBE and musician of the Lisbon Swingers. In some cases, music has been used as a metaphor, whether it's the vision of the organisation as a symphony orchestra or a jazz combo, or the analysis of the performance style of leaders such as Miles Davis or maestro Claudio Abbado - described, respectively, as the "catalyst of innovation" and the "supreme facilitator".

As musician Tiago Bettencourt explained: "There always has to be a leader in a band for a concert to have rhythm and coherence. On the other hand, we always have our moments of improvisation, where there isn't exactly any leader and we rely on each other's instincts to take the music to places we didn't plan." So musical leadership is a cornucopia for the study of organisational leadership.

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Cases: Smiths, Beatles, Queen, Xutos & Pontapés and U2

- Musical leadership is a shared, collective process. Without that leadership there is not a band, but a gang.

- Management can take inspiration from jazz to learn about the importance of minimal structures and heuristics.

- Individuality and difference are a source of creativity. Both must be respected. A good band is a vehicle for individual expression, not an obstacle.

- A lot of teamwork is prepared behind the scenes. A good musician plays with others, but also practices individually to make himself, and the band, stand out.

- In a good team, everyone solos and everyone supports, creates context.

- A good team is one whose members never stop listening to each other. This makes as much sense in music as it does in organisations.

- A good team is one that takes risks and seeks the difference. The difference makes the difference.

- Some groups swing; others don't.

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Elite forces: history never tells about the weak

Jon Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of Teams, believes that elite military units are excellent places to find true teams. The existence of a clear hierarchy is not an obstacle to the emergence of leaders when they are needed for specific tasks.

The decision to study teams in a military context was based on a simple observation: the Armed Forces are commonly presented as hierarchical, mechanistic and rigid organisations, but this metaphor is not always a fair description of reality. Certain units of the Armed Forces and security forces operate in theatres of enormous risk and unpredictability, circumstances which invalidate the mechanistic approach and require organicism, improvisation and even a "disrespect" for hierarchy. The need for military leaders to develop relational skills is equivalent (or even greater) than those required in other organisations.

The obvious choice for learning from military teams that do not operate according to the traditional metaphor lies with the so-called special forces. These structures also require more, not less, empowerment. In other words, military teams can be a source of learning for other organisational contexts.

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Cases: BOPE, GOE, Hashishin, Jaguar Warriors and Foreign Legion

- The feeling of being part of an elite corps helps cement pride in the team and the organisation.

- Tough training breeds a spirit of body. It is not with "hot pots" that you acquire collective resilience. And it is this resilience that can allow the team and the organisation to turn poison into medicine.

- A sense of belonging to something larger infuses meaning (the Jaguar Warriors of the Aztec Empire were anointed by the supreme military chief Tlatoani).

- The desire to overcome is necessary. In the case of BOPE, the "cemetery of the aspirants" symbolises the need for those who failed to enter that "elite troop" to try again.

- Trust in comrades is critical: face-to-face shooting training in the GOE is as much an exercise in skill as trust.

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In short and in conclusion

We sought to better understand successful teams by considering three domains: sports, music and elite military forces. Articulating the fields seems to make sense, because teams in one domain are sometimes inspired by teams in other domains. Starting from this discussion, it is important to extrapolate the lessons from each of these cases to the organisational context, to our teams.

This publication is based on Applied Knowledge " Superequipes: quando o todo é muito superior à soma das partes" by Miguel Pina e Cunha, Nadim Habib, Arménio Rego, António Abrantes, Pedro Almeida, Miguel Faro Viana, Patrícia Palma and Paula Lourenço Afonso, in collaboration with participants of the MSD Advanced Management Program.