Hughes has helped international football clubs develop and refine their internal cultures.

“Don’t talk about values – behaviours should reflect values,” urged Hughes in a talk to recruitment business group Elite Leaders last week in which he discussed his work with football club Barcelona FC (pictured).

Quoting Barcelona’s former director of football and retired footballer Txiki Begiristain, Hughes said: “Talent will get you in the dressing room. How you behave determines how long you remain there.”

The three “non-negotiable” behaviours expected of players when Hughes worked with them were humility, hard work and team first. The value of ‘humility’ would be reflected by the lack of posh cars in the club car park, for instance, and one example of the ‘team first’ ethos would be a player’s behaviour when he wasn’t chosen to play. When Barcelona won a major trophy, for instance, the leading player on the team brought from the sidelines two individuals who had not been able to play in the game and even for the season to receive the trophy with him and share in the glory.

Hughes identified five different types of organisational culture:

• Star model, in which the top performer gets the finest facilities to use and other perks. The flaw in this model, Hughes said, is “inequality will be a problem”.
• Autocratic – top-down rules, orders are given.
• Bureaucratic, in which there are strong levels of mid-management, everything is designed by consensus and commission, and “change happens, but slowly”, Hughes said.
• Engineering culture – people don’t necessarily share insights, putting to use individual skills.
• Commitment culture – which Hughes characterised as “the equivalent of winning the lottery”.

That last culture reflects the organisation’s commitment to working together to share, play to each other’s strengths, support one another and, according to research, can outperform other cultures by as much as 22%, Hughes said.

Hughes, owner and founder of Liquid Thinking, is a former HR director at Unilever and the author of several books.

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