Note: this piece was first posted in summer 2022, written in the immediate glow of the Lionesses’ extraordinary Euro 2022 victory. The topical references are preserved as a time-stamp of that moment. The questions they raise about collective performance and the role of the maverick are as relevant now as they were then.
I’m still in a state of wonderment at the achievements, against all odds, of the English Lionesses. They played seamlessly as a team. Their secret sauce was perfectly blended, nurtured, and packaged by their genius coach, Sarina Wiegman.
Brilliant.
What Wiegman actually did #
The Lionesses went into Euro 2022 unbeaten in 19 consecutive games since Wiegman’s appointment in September 2021. They won all six of their tournament matches and were named BBC Sports Personality Team of the Year. The numbers are impressive. But the numbers are the consequence, not the cause.
Wiegman’s philosophy is that success for the team ultimately leads to success for each player: a collective-first approach that manifests in interviews with her players, who consistently speak about their teammates and give credit to others for their contributions. She strongly advocates player development through encouraged risk-taking and learning from mistakes, explicitly telling players she is not troubled by game mistakes. Coaching-focusHRD Connect
Perhaps most strikingly, Wiegman has said: “I actually hate rules. We are here to perform and be at our best, and if you use your common sense then you make the right decisions. Coaching is also about giving players responsibility, helping players make their own decisions.” bbci
That last observation is worth sitting with. The most successful international football coach of her generation, a coach who has now guided England to three consecutive major finals, explicitly rejects over-prescription in favour of cultivated autonomy. She builds a framework, instils a culture, and then empowers her players to think and act within it.
When the framework becomes a cage #
Which makes what follows all the more interesting.
Like many of us, I have experienced the highs and lows of following team sport. The 2022 England versus India One Day International cricket series was a case in point. After being thrashed by 10 wickets in the first match, England came storming back to win the next by 100 runs. The third match was closer, India clinched it to win the series 2-1. The wild inconsistency felt almost implausible. Of course it wasn’t manufactured, but the swings were so dramatic they invited the question: what was actually happening between matches?
And those English football supporters who dare to remember the summer of 2016 and the men’s team’s disastrous showing against Iceland; still smarting, perhaps — witnessed something similar. A group of technically accomplished players collectively unable to control or kick the ball under the simplest of pressures. The Icelandic team played a blinder. England were hopeless.
To an outsider, it seems as though teams can become so heavily drilled in their systems that individual players lose the capacity to think and act for themselves when the system breaks down. And when that happens; when the collective performance dips or the opposition raises their game, a kind of Collective Negativity descends. Each player’s anxiety feeds the next. Nobody decides to underperform. It simply happens, almost inevitably, through the feedback loops of emotional contagion that run invisibly through any group under pressure.
This is a phenomenon that appears in business teams as reliably as it does on a football pitch, as I’ve explored elsewhere in the Hub. The sales team that collectively loses its confidence in the same week. The project group that knows exactly what to do but can’t execute it when the stakes are highest. The knowing-doing gap, the disconnect between what a team understands and what it can access under pressure, is one of the most consistent patterns in collective performance, and it is rarely solved by more drilling.
The case for the Swashbuckling Maverick #
Which brings me to a question I have been turning over for some time: would it not be an idea to always include a few Swashbuckling Mavericks in a team; people who can pick a performance up by the scruff of its neck and turn things around when the collective has lost its way?
The word “maverick” has a pleasing origin. It derives from Samuel A. Maverick, a Texan lawyer and land baron who refused to brand his cattle, his theory being that if all other owners were branding theirs, those without a brand belonged to him. The maverick, from the very beginning, was someone who operated differently from the crowd, not out of contrariness, but out of a distinct strategic logic. ScienceDirect
Research shows that diverse teams which include non-conformist thinkers make better decisions and are more innovative. Mavericks are key to keeping teams fresh and preventing stagnation because they constantly introduce new ideas, perspectives, and challenges. Their inclination to challenge the norm is vital in preventing groupthink,where team members avoid conflict to maintain consensus, which can lead to poor decision-making as organisations become blind to alternative perspectives. Innovation One
Meredith Belbin’s foundational research on team roles reinforces this. Belbin demonstrated that a team missing even one of its core roles will, in the medium to long term, dip in performance and that as teams become familiar and norms become established, there is a risk of things becoming over-polite. Groupthink may emerge. It is at this stage that the mavericks in the team become essential. Because they are intrinsically goal-oriented and unafraid to challenge, mavericks are not happy to settle for a cosy consensus.
Crucially, RSA research into business mavericks found that mavericks highly value the team and its diversity, acknowledging that even though they might come up with the breakthrough idea, without a team of very different skills they would never actually build anything. The maverick is not a lone wolf. They are the catalyst that stops the collective from settling into comfortable mediocrity. ScienceDirect
Does Collective Negativity extend to business teams? #
I suspected then, and I am more convinced now, that it does. And that business teams would benefit from one or two Swashbuckling Mavericks just as much as sporting ones.
The challenge is not finding them, most organisations already have people with maverick instincts. The challenge is creating the conditions in which those instincts are welcomed rather than managed. Wiegman’s Lionesses succeeded partly because she built a culture in which risk-taking was explicitly encouraged and mistakes were not penalised. That psychological safety is what allowed individual brilliance to function within a collective framework rather than being suppressed by it.
The over-drilled team, in sport or business, is one that has traded autonomy for compliance. The result, under pressure, is collective paralysis rather than collective resilience. The antidote is not less structure, but structure that empowers rather than constrains and the occasional maverick who reminds everyone that the system is a tool, not a cage.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
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