Sunday 12 December 1999, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The time of hyper leadership is gone; now we have to learn how to share. Individuals should be a leader to themselves. They could be in line with an enterprise only if they build up a team with it. Based on some of these concepts, former football player Jorge Valdano displays his work to a group of businessmen.
He is neither acting as a personal trainer nor as a speaker to recall his football victories. He is trying to explain what a leader is and how leadership is exercised, a gift that many bring from babyhood and others, most people, have to develop throughout some time in order to manage a team.
As a former player of the Real Madrid and technical coach who has become a group motivator, he is keen to show managers and other businessmen that football is the best possible vehicle to introduce to the business world certain values, specially those related to the definition of a team.
Valdano, who lives in Spain, joined Juan Mateo, an expert in this area, and together they created “Make a team”, an enterprise the aim of which is to show that “sports are a shortcut to teach values to the business world”.
Likewise, Enrique Wolf, Carlos Bianchi or José Pekerman are involved in a similar experience in Argentina, and enterprises such as BankBoston, Master Card, Meta 4, Banco Rio, have already tried this experience successfully.
“One of the challenges at the turn of the century is the power that organizations hold to consolidate genuine working teams, contributing to promote and give a professional status to collective work”, says consultant Bibiana Crocitta, a specialist in this area.
A team is constituted from the need to achieve a goal or objective where each member should develop his or her own competences. In addition, each member should cooperate with his/her peers to attain the achievement of all the goals of the team. “Team work – says Crocitta – is not the addition of individualities but instead, the permanent interaction of its members; each member should perceive the importance of acting as a multi hat resource within the team, which in turn calls for the permanent learning and training of the different roles that each member develops”. And the same happens in football.