Leading up, working down

My all time favourite footballer is Zinedine Zidane (Zizou) . That man was born to play the game. His skill level was sublime and he moved on the field as if the ball was glued to his feet. He also had a very good head butt, which unfortunately was used in the wrong context and ended his career on a low note.

Zidane is now coaching and I wonder if his experience as a player is what is helping him to be successful. Zizou is a past Ballon d’or, World Cup, UEFA Champions League and La Liga winner. In his coaching career he has already won the UEFA Champions League twice, a La Liga title and a FIFA World Club title twice. He has seen it all as a player and is delivering strong results as a manager.

It was extremely difficult to find managers currently in charge of elite league teams across the world who had not played the game professionally. Here is a link to some of them from the EPL. Many of these managers have had fleeting inconsistent success. It seems there is enough anecdotal observation to justify the opinion that players who played professionally, potentially make better managers.

Do the same rules apply in a corporate job I wonder? In retail and consumer goods it is common to find executives walking through stores to see how their product looks at shelf. Many of these executives would have started their careers actually packing shelves themselves.

Does this mean,therefore, that someone who has not grown up in an industry cannot lead a team in their new industry? Could a football coach become a rugby coach and make it work? Can a CEO of an aeronautical firm successfully run a fast food business? Or is all of this previous experience irrelevant?

My view on this is that we are living in a world where there is more value in transferable skills. There are some skills one needs regardless of industry if one is to excel. For example emotional intelligence, the ability to manage people and some level of skill in deploying capital can probably to transferred across industries. There is also a trend where people can hire in certain skills on a temporary or permanent basis if they do not possess them personally.

So I suppose the crux of it is that anything is possible. Even if you haven’t played football to the levels of someone like Zidane, you could manage a team and bring in suitable talent that has. If our lives were linear progressions of our past then I think we would all be doomed to be victims of the first skills and vocations we took on in our lives. While deep experience is extremely valuable, I think we are now in an era where one can still be successful without it.