"Team spirit," said the former Spurs and Barcelona striker Steve Archibald, "is an illusion only glimpsed in victory.”

The same can probably be said of management best practices. It’s dangerous to infer too much into a particular philosophy or set of practices that brought about a championship victory (or successful project implementation).

Nonetheless, it is worth examining the particular set of principles on which Leicester City’s most unlikely of victories was built and whether or not there are any lessons that can be applied to team leadership in general and software development in particular.

Observe, Observe, Observe

When Claudio Ranieri took over Leicester city, he joined them at preseason camp in Austria last August, for the first week he did nothing but observe their workouts:

"When I was in Austria I watched what kind of group we had. I am very sensitive to understand the feeling between the players and the dressing room”

Although it’s very tempting to stamp your mark on a team (after all, a new broom wipes clean!), team leaders should also be ‘sensitive’ to understand how a team functions, members’ individual capabilities and how they work together. Taking a step back and observing the group and their interactions has been Ranieri’s approach.

…Then Leave Well Enough Alone

Once Ranieri had observed the team who came within a cat’s whisker of being relegated the previous year at work, the man who was once nicknamed ‘the Tinkerman’ because of his seemingly incessant changes in personnel and formation changed… well, not that much.

Aside from a few shrewd transfers and a change in formation that was to remain in place all season, Ranieri altered remarkably little. With his experience, he had seen enough to know that their team spirit and fitness were second to none and was content and brave enough to not make drastic changes when they may (to the outside at least) have appeared necessary.

Now, let’s imagine that in previous teams, you have do a ‘stand-up’ meeting every morning at 10am that has worked well. However, in the one you have joined, there is no such meeting.

Before you schedule a meeting, you should consider whether there is any need for one in the first place. Is it possible that team members are communicating the kind of information (and solving the kind of problems) in a stand-up meeting outside of the meeting e.g. over a coffee break? In which case, team members will see the meeting as an unnecessary imposition and resentful not only of the scheduling of the meeting but that you have tried to formalize and subvert their informal communication channels, which brings us to:

Play to Your Strengths (And Go Against the Grain if Necessary)

For years, the dominant thinking has been that the way to become to successful in football is to dominate possession of the ball, to ensure that everyone on the team (including the goalkeeper) is comfortable in possession and to play ‘tiki-taka’ football, effectively bamboozling your opponents with short, intricate passing and movement until they make a mistake, lose concentration or get tired and give you an opportunity to score.

It has worked for Barcelona and Bayern Munich in their domestic leagues and for Spain on the international stage.

However, Leicester’s defenders are not especially skilled in distribution, their possession statistics are amongst the lowest in the league and their statistics for pass accuracy are almost as bad. So how have they gone about this? They play to their strengths, which are physical defenders, an energetic midfield and a blend of skill and speed up front.

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about ‘black swan’ events, which are a surprise to the observer but which, rationalized by hindsight could have been expected. The idea is that, just like Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t know what we don’t know so why not go against the perceived wisdom, take a different approach and see what happens? It just might pay off… spectacularly!

Set Benchmarks

“The main target was to stay up,” Leicester City player Jeffrey Schlupp admitted before the match that secured their championship victory. “That was secured a little while ago. Then it became to finish as high as possible. Then Europe became a reality. We crossed that line and then it became top three, to get in the Champions League group stages. And now it’s not a secret anymore. We are 90 minutes away.”

Ranieri set the group a target of 40 points, which would all but secure their survival in the division. Achieving that gave them the confidence to go on and achieve even greater targets (they would eventually finish the season with 81 points) while insulating them from the pressure of sustaining a title push.

Setting realistic, achievable, significant goals and sharing them with your team can therefore be a significant motivating factor for them to work towards. Adjusting these goals in line with performance can be a powerful way to sustain momentum.

Set Micro-Goals

Everyone who has ever worked on a project team knows that ‘story points per sprint’ (or ‘velocity’) is the key metric when measuring progress. The only way we can be sure that we are on track to deliver a project is to ensure that we are achieving our target number of points per sprint.

However, too much focus on this can obscure other metrics, such as software quality or unit testing. So, how to combine the two? Ranieri provides an insight into how he focused the team’s attention on the micro-goal of keeping clean sheets (not conceding any ‘actual’ goals) while achieving the overall goal of winning games:

“The first nine games, we were winning, but we were giving up many goals. We had to score two or three goals to win every game. It concerned me very much. Before every game, I said, ‘Come on boys, come on. Clean sheet today.’ No clean sheet. I tried every motivation.
So finally, before the game against Crystal Palace, I said, ‘Come on boys, come on. I offer you a pizza if you get a clean sheet.’ Of course, my players made a clean sheet against Crystal Palace. One-nil.”

In the case of delivering software, these micro-goals might be number of defects found vs. resolved, code coverage – anything other than story points!

Prioritise Rest

If one of your team is working late into the night, on weekends, on days off, it’s tempting to think ‘great - I’m getting all this work for free’, but we know from research there is a price to be paid somewhere down the line in terms of decreased productivity and eventual burnout.

It seems like Ranieri intuits this – instead of using shooting practice to sharpen the finishing of his star striker, he uses it as a chance to give him a rest. So says Jamie Vardy:

"I don't really get the chance to practice that much on my finishing because we have our shooting drills early in the week when the gaffer's wanting me to rest my legs. So normally, when there's a bit of shooting, the gaffer tells me to go inside. I'll keep doing that if it means I'm saving my legs - and goals - for games."

Get Personal

One of the challenges for a team leader is knowing when and how much to keep your distance from the team. Showing up to one of their birthday party’s would certainly be over-stepping the mark.

Not so, it seems, according to Leicester City’s Christian Fuchs:

“Claudio came to my birthday… I couldn’t believe he was there – I don’t think there are too many managers that would show up. And he was smiling, enjoying the party, not worrying that I had one or two glasses of red wine.”

Even the aforementioned pizza ‘promise’ provided the group with a further opportunity to strengthen their team spirit, (importantly without recourse to alcohol). According to Ranieri:

“I stood by our deal and took my players to Peter Pizzeria in Leicester City Square. But I had a surprise for them when we got there. I said, ‘You have to work for everything. You work for your pizza, too. We will make our own.’”

Add to this Ranieri’s Christmas presents of bells to his squad ("From the beginning when something was wrong I've been saying: 'Dilly-ding, dilly-dong, wake up, wake up!' So on Christmas Day I bought for all the players and all the staff a little bell. It was just a joke.") and you have someone as far removed from the image of stern-faced technocrat who prizes tactical acumen and statistical analysis above all as it’s possible to be. Or as Vardy puts it:

“We’re always laughing. In training we’re always having a laugh and a joke. That’s just how we are, everyone’s relaxed – and the gaffer wants it to be like that. The good thing about this squad is we’re tight-knit. That’s how we’ve been from day one.”

It may not be quantifiable but that ‘team spirit’ can make all the difference in terms of the final outcome.

Don’t Dwell on Setbacks

With most pundits expecting their title push to hit the skids, it seemed that the inevitable finally happened on 10th February 2016 when Arsenal beat them 2-1 with an injury time winner.

Cue some much-needed soul-searching, detailed analysis of what went wrong and sprint ‘retrospectives’? Well, not exactly as the Leicester players were given 8 days off to go on holidays.

Vardy again:

“It gave us a break, a much-needed break to be honest. It let us recharge our batteries. It wasn’t a gamble at all.”

Given that the club had been involved in a very high-profile end-of-season scandal on a post-season tour to Thailand, it’s not true to say ‘it wasn’t a gamble at all’ but it was one that paid off handsomely, with the Foxes re-discovering the form that put them top of their table after their break.

This is not to say we should dispense with retrospectives altogether – after all, we need to learn from our mistakes to ensure they don’t happen again. But there may be a point where retrospectives become too introspective and we are in danger of ‘paralysis through analysis’ and losing sight of the bigger picture.

Sometimes the best thing to do to regain momentum is to rest and re-focus.

Of course, we could follow all of these principles and still end up unsuccessful but I think they are interesting to examine precisely because they go against what the ‘perceived’ wisdom is.

The idea of ‘rockstar’ programmers working with bleeding-edge technologies using Kanban boards and slack channels to deliver a project now looks as out of step to me as one of the bigger teams spending their way to the Premier League title.

That’s not to say that it won't be successful.  But in many cases it’s not even necessary.