Gareth Southgate has long acknowledged that selecting your squad is the hardest part of the Manager’s job. “Whenever you name a team… that is when you have to make the most difficult calls.” Selecting who’s in and who’s out shapes everything that follows on the pitch.
For CEOs, it’s no different, albeit with slightly less interference from the press and pundits! Getting the right people in the right roles is the single biggest lever for growth for a business. And it’s not just about individual brilliance; it’s approaching hiring with a whole squad mentality. Here are some key lessons we’ve learned from helping management teams get the best out of their people (and we’ve loosely tied it to football as we approach the eve of the 2026 World Cup).
1. Leaders grow people; they don’t manage them
The best football managers know that their role is to set the vision, build the environment, and trust their players to deliver. The same is true of top leadership, and Naz Dossa, CEO of Peoplesafe referenced the quote from Jack Welsh, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, to bring this to life: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” Great football managers leave no room for doubt on their expectations – the values and standards for the team – but it’s about inspiring them rather than managing them. As Alex Ferguson stated, “My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management.”
Often this is one of the more challenging lessons for CEOs, who might have been able to leverage manager skills to get a business to £10m EBITDA, but need to evolve those skills as it becomes a £30m+ EBITDA business. If your Board don’t feel empowered and trusted to make decisions and execute on a top-level vision rather than instructions, then it will find it hard to scale.
2. It’s a team sport, and a team trophy
No World Cup is won by an individual, and for every Mbappé golden boot highlight reel, there is a midfielder who did a lot more hard yards. It’s why managers focus on making sure every player in that squad knows their contribution mattered, not just the eleven who started the final or the striker who scored the winning goal.
It’s tempting in business too, to lionise the rainmaker in sales, or even to have a ‘what-the-founder-says-goes’ mentality. The best businesses are those where leadership recognises that brilliant team members excel at what they do best and success is celebrated across the business. This often is something that needs to be deliberately set up – if left to our own devices, we tend to celebrate the shiniest new logo wins and remember the loudest voices. We’ve seen companies deliver this through end-of-year internal awards covering not just commercial milestones but also personal goals. At Ciphr, Sion Lewis shares regular CEO Insights on Linkedin, communicating success and milestones from across the business, shining a light on what teams are doing and some of the great successes and challenges. As our keynote speaker at our ECI Unlocked Performance Summit highlighted: “Messages take a long time to land, so if you think you’re over-communicating, you’re probably at about the right level.” Doing this well boosts engagement, which leads to better collective results.
3. A great individual can still throw off a great team
For every story of a talisman taking their country to glory, there’s a cautionary tale of a world-class talent disrupting the dressing room. Think back to France in 2010, when an argument between striker Nicolas Anelka and manager Raymond Domenech led to his expulsion, and the whole team boycotting a training session in protest. Or a player who is phenomenal on the pitch but rubs players up the wrong way off them (Maradona might not be who you want around your Boardroom table). The conductor Phil Meadows touches on this when he talks about the conditions great teams need to perform, which translates across music, football and business: “When working with virtuoso musicians (or highly skilled teams), risk is accompanied by vulnerability. People open themselves up to criticism, putting their insecurities on display to develop their skill sets or contribute something new… People who feel secure in their risk-taking, are more likely to contribute groundbreaking ideas.” A single star who makes the rest of the orchestra feel they can’t speak up shuts that environment down, and the music suffers for it.
This can be one of the least discussed challenges of scaling a team. A brilliant hire who doesn’t fit well with the broader dynamic. At ECI, we look at psychometrics alongside hiring roles, as it’s not just what an individual can do, but how they will work alongside the team. In the book Mastering Uncertainty, Matt Watkinson and Csaba Konkoly highlight that CEOs need to be cognisant of this. “Surround yourself with people who have different skills and behaviours to you, rather than those who will support or replicate your own outlook.” The right question to ask of any standout candidate isn’t just “are they brilliant?” but “will they make everyone around them better?”
4. Build the pipeline
It isn’t just about who is in front of you today; top-performing teams think years ahead about their academy pipeline. Football Managers are all too aware of this dynamic, spotting and backing talent early, with the likes of Jude Bellingham progressing through the England age-group ranks from under-15 level upwards before stepping into the senior squad as a teenager.
Now, we’re not expecting CEOs to attend graduate fairs any more than Thomas Tuchel is going to go to your five-a-side game, but strong People functions in businesses should have good visibility of the high performers in their business with potential to progress into C-Suite roles. As Tamsin Webster, Head of People at ECI, comments, modern HR is about “unlocking human potential and creating a high-performance culture,” and a critical part of that is using data on engagement, performance and retention to spot who’s ready for the next step. Otherwise, a vacancy ends up forcing the question, and teams aren’t able to absorb the loss of a key hire without losing momentum. If you have credible next-generation talent, you have people stepping up who already have a solid understanding of your company, its culture and processes. Having a view of the roadmap also creates a better understanding of gaps and where teams need to invest.
