There is something I’ve always found fascinating about the very best sporting coaches.
They don’t score the goals. They don’t make the tackles. They don’t hit the winning shot, and when the game starts, their ability to directly influence what happens becomes surprisingly limited.
Yet somehow, the very best coaches build teams capable of performing at extraordinary levels – repeatedly.
I think there is an important lesson here for those of us involved in organisational transformation, because transformation leaders face much the same challenge.
We aren’t personally making every decision. We aren’t implementing every new process. We aren’t having every conversation with employees, and we certainly can’t be in every meeting.
Our job is different. Our job is to create the conditions in which thousands of other decisions and actions move the organisation in broadly the same direction.
Which is why I think transformation leaders can learn a great deal from the world’s best sporting coaches.
Not necessarily about motivation, but about systems, capability, standards, trust and performance.
1. Build the system, not just the team
Dave Brailsford became famous at British Cycling for what became known as the “aggregation of marginal gains”.
The basic idea was remarkably simple – instead of looking for one enormous breakthrough, the team examined the many different factors contributing to performance and looked for small improvements across them.
British Cycling describes the approach as examining every aspect of performance to extract small advantages which, collectively, could produce a decisive difference. Under Brailsford, the Great Britain Cycling Team went from sporadic Olympic success to sustained success at world and Olympic level.
The important point isn’t really the famous 1%. It’s the thinking behind it. Performance was treated as a system.
Equipment mattered, coaching mattered, nutrition mattered, psychology mattered, preparation mattered, talent development mattered. No single component explained success, and that should sound very familiar to anyone leading transformation.
One of the biggest mistakes I see organisations make is searching for the transformation equivalent of the breakthrough.
The new technology, the restructuring, the new operating model, the new methodology, the AI platform, the transformation office – but organisations don’t transform because one component is brilliant. They transform when the components work together.
Vision without an operating model doesn’t get you very far. Technology without people doesn’t transform anything. Governance without decision-making becomes bureaucracy. Culture without leadership behaviour becomes a poster on a wall.
Transformation is a system, and one of the most important jobs of the transformation leader is therefore to keep looking at the whole picture when everyone else is understandably concentrating on their particular piece.
2. Your biggest challenge may be getting your stars to trust the system
When Phil Jackson took charge of the Chicago Bulls, he inherited arguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
Michael Jordan could win games almost single-handedly, but winning games and building a championship team aren’t quite the same thing.
Jackson introduced Tex Winter’s triangle offence — a system designed to create opportunities across the team rather than simply putting the ball into Jordan’s hands.
Jordan wasn’t immediately convinced. Neither were some of his teammates, but something gradually changed. Scottie Pippen later reflected that Jordan came to appreciate his teammates and the system. Jackson himself described Jordan having to fit himself into a group and develop trust in the abilities of the people around him.
The Bulls won their first NBA championship in 1991. Eventually they won six. There is a wonderful transformation lesson buried in that story.
Heroics can get you far, but they are hard to scale.
I’ve seen this repeatedly in transformation.
There is often an outstanding programme director, CIO, COO, consultant or transformation leader at the centre of everything. They know everything. People come to them for decisions – they resolve the difficult issues, they navigate the politics, they hold everything together, and everyone congratulates themselves on having such a strong leader.
I sometimes see something rather different – a dependency – because what happens when that person isn’t there?
Great transformation leadership isn’t about becoming indispensable. It’s about creating an organisation that doesn’t require you to be.
Jackson didn’t need Jordan to become less talented. He needed Jordan’s extraordinary talent to operate within a system that made everybody else better too. That’s a very different leadership challenge.
3. Give people clarity – then trust them to perform
Think about the closing moments of the 1999 Champions League final. Manchester United were losing 1–0 to Bayern Munich as the game entered injury time.
Sir Alex Ferguson couldn’t run onto the pitch. He couldn’t take the corner; he couldn’t make the pass; he couldn’t score the goal. At that point, control had effectively passed to the players.
Teddy Sheringham equalised. Moments later, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the winner. Manchester United had completed an historic Treble.
It’s tempting to describe moments like that as extraordinary acts of individual brilliance, and of course they are, but they don’t happen in isolation. Ferguson had spent years creating the team, expectations, mentality and environment within which those players operated. The emergence of the Class of ’92 had been absorbed into a team that continued winning, and United’s own history describes Eric Cantona as an important influence on younger players such as David Beckham and Gary Neville.
By the time those players stepped onto the pitch in Barcelona, the real coaching had already happened.
That distinction matters enormously in transformation. We sometimes confuse leadership with control: More governance. More reporting. More approvals. More meetings. More escalation. More oversight, but there comes a point where the people closest to the action need to make decisions, and they can only do that confidently if we’ve done the work beforehand.
Do they understand what we’re trying to achieve?
Do they understand the principles behind it?
Do they know what good looks like?
Do they understand where they have freedom to act?
Do they trust one another?
If the answer to those questions is yes, leaders don’t need to control every decision, they have created the conditions for good decisions to happen without them. That’s capability.
4. Develop the squad, not simply the starting eleven
One of the things that characterised Ferguson’s Manchester United wasn’t simply that he built a great team.
He built several of them – Players aged, Stars left, Young players emerged, New players arrived, Tactics evolved. Yet the organisation remained competitive over an extraordinary period. Manchester United describes Ferguson’s tenure as successive cycles of rebuilding, from the emergence of the Class of ’92 through the Treble-winning side and eventually another generation that delivered his 13th Premier League title.
There is a profound difference between building a successful team and building the capability to keep producing successful teams. I think organisations frequently miss this distinction in transformation.
We assemble our best people, we bring in external specialists, we create a programme structure, we deliver the transformation, then we dismantle everything – The consultants leave. The programme team disperses. The knowledge disappears, and several years later we start again.
That isn’t organisational transformation capability; it’s temporary delivery capacity.
One of our core beliefs at The Transformation Leaders Hub is that transformation is a capability, not simply a programme.
Organisations are unlikely to stop transforming. Technology will continue changing, Customer expectations will change, Business models will need to evolve, AI will change how organisations operate, New regulations will be introduced, and competition will change, so perhaps the question shouldn’t simply be: “How do we deliver this transformation?”
Perhaps it should also be:“How much better at transformation will our organisation be when this is finished?” Those are very different questions.
5. Standards are built when nobody is watching
We tend to remember sporting coaches for the big moments. The team talk, the finals, the trophies, but elite performance is rarely created in those moments. It’s created on Tuesday morning when nobody is watching. Training. Preparation. Review. Repetition. Feedback. Small corrections.
The Chicago Bulls provide another useful example. Scottie Pippen recalled that their practices were intensely competitive and that the team worked heavily on defence as well as mastering the triangle offence.
The championship was visible. The thousands of hours that made it possible weren’t. Transformation is much the same. We understandably concentrate on milestones, Go-lives, Board approvals, Programme launches, Town halls et.c but transformation often drifts between those moments.
A decision gets deferred, an issue remains unresolved, a dependency isn’t challenged, a leadership behaviour contradicts the transformation narrative, a workaround quietly becomes normal practice, another initiative arrives and stretches the organisation a little further.
None of these events necessarily causes transformation to fail, but collectively they change its trajectory.
Transformations rarely collapse overnight. They drift.
Great transformation leadership therefore isn’t simply about responding brilliantly when something goes wrong. It’s about creating the routines, conversations, information and disciplines that allow us to spot drift early. Just as elite coaches don’t wait until the final to discover whether their team can perform.
6. The ultimate test is what happens when the coach isn’t there
This may be the lesson I find most interesting.
Brailsford’s legacy at British Cycling wasn’t simply medals. When he stepped down as performance director in 2014, British Cycling pointed specifically to the systems, succession planning and foundations that had been built over more than a decade. Brailsford himself talked about reaching a point where he could move on believing the team could continue to develop.
That’s an interesting way to think about leadership, because we often measure transformation leaders by what happens while they’re there. Perhaps we should also measure them by what happens afterwards.
Did the organisation learn? Did capability increase? Are leaders better equipped to navigate the next transformation? Are decision-making mechanisms stronger? Do people understand the organisation as a connected system? Can the organisation diagnose problems earlier? Has knowledge remained inside the business? Or did everything walk out of the door with the transformation team?
For me, that’s one of the biggest differences between delivering transformation and building transformation capability.
The transformation leader as coach
Perhaps we need to rethink our image of the transformation leader. Not the person standing at the front with all the answers or the hero who rescues the programme when things become difficult. Not even necessarily the person making the most decisions, but something closer to the coach. Someone who sees the whole system, who creates clarity, builds the environment and develops capability. Someone who challenges standards, who helps talented people perform together, and who gradually makes themselves less necessary.
That’s particularly important because transformation leadership can be an incredibly isolated role.
You’re often expected to have answers when there aren’t obvious answers. You’re making decisions with incomplete information. Different stakeholders see different parts of the picture. Politics inevitably plays a role, and everyone looks to you for direction.
The answer isn’t to become the hero – it’s to build the system around you. That’s ultimately what the greatest coaches understand.
Their job isn’t to win the game. Their job is to create a team capable of winning it.
And perhaps that’s a pretty good definition of transformation leadership too.
At The Transformation Leaders Hub, we’re building an ecosystem around exactly this idea: that transformation should become an organisational capability rather than something organisations repeatedly have to reinvent.
Through the Transformation Leaders Body of Knowledge, our assessment tools, Transforma-ai and the experience of our global community, we’re bringing together codified intelligence, machine intelligence and human intelligence to help transformation leaders diagnose what’s really happening, make better decisions, execute with greater confidence and continuously learn.
Because nobody has all the answers.
But nobody leading transformation should have to work them out alone.
