I have recently enjoyed listening to the award winning BBC podcast ‘Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy’. In each episode, Former England cricketer Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff, Wales footballer Robbie Savage and Great Britain table tennis player and journalist Matthew Syed discuss and share their thoughts on a range of interesting topics – sporting or otherwise.

In a recent episode, Freddie Flintoff had this to say, on the topic of team spirit (and you can see the clip on this link):

“Team spirit – In my experience, absolute nonsense. There is no such thing. I played in successful  teams. I played for England from 2002 to 2005 where we beat everyone in the world, and everyone says the team spirit was unbelievable. It was born out of success. When you are winning, the team are close, the team are unified, the team enjoy it. When team spirit is tested, is when the chips are down, when your back’s against the wall. It’s fine when you’re doing well. You need team spirit when it’s not going well. What happens is human nature. People go off into their groups, they start back biting, they start looking after their own backs, pointing fingers at other people. There’s no such thing as team spirit”.

I get his point. Team spirit is all well and good when you are succeeding and things are going well, but as soon as the going gets tough and you are failing, or up against big challenges, that spirit can easily crumble and descend into a deeply damaging culture of blame, self protection and defensive behaviour. I do think he is right that deep seated human nature will kick in, which is to ensure your own survival and damn everyone else. The proverbial rats deserting a sinking ship syndrome.

The smallest niggles can very quickly and easily become yawning tears in the fabric of the team.

And sadly this is so often the case. Most teams just don’t spend any time preparing to answer the big ‘what if’ questions. What if thing’s don’t go well? What if we don’t hit our targets or win our games? What if we hit unforseen roadblocks or setbacks? So when these things do happen, and they find themselves under pressure, they are just not equipped to deal with it as a team.

They do not know how to turn things around, cracks appear and the kind of behaviour Freddie outlines happens. The smallest niggles can very quickly and easily become yawning tears in the fabric of the team. Gossip, infighting, politics and rumour bubble to the surface and become everyday features of life. Cliques form, morale nose dives, and everyone is looking over the shoulder waiting for the knife in the back. Crucially, trust – one of the keystones of good teamwork – breaks down.

What is astounding to me is to hear an international cricketer talk about this happening at that level of the sport. You expect this to happen in companies or amateur teams, but you think that, with all the money and resources available to them, elite sports teams would have planned for and been able to deal with this kind of thing. Admittedly Flintoff is talking about the England team of 13 years ago, and a lot has changed since then, but even for this to be the case if surprising.

The point is that even the most professional and best prepared teams are surprisingly vulnerable to a damaging erosion of team spirit. And this erosion is the highly likely default outcome for any team that doesn’t spend time and effort preparing for this eventuality. Failure to prepare is to prepare to fail, right? Too much time is spent on reaching for the stars, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about what we will do if the brown stuff hits the fan.

The answer is to prepare for failure. Have you ever, as a team, looked each other in the eye and asked that question –  what do we do if we fail? How do we react, how do we treat each other, what steps do we take to turn things around? But it’s more than that. The answers lie in the core nature and culture of your team and if you haven’t got that right from the get go, then you are doomed to Flintoff’s predictions of what happens when things don’t go well.

Here are three things to think about that can help a team where spirit is being eroded. These are not the only answers – but I want to give you three quick and easy to remember points to start with in this article – do have a read through some of my other articles for more advice and tips.

PEOPLE

It starts with ensuring you have the right people in the team in the first place. The people who buy into the concept of the team being greater than them, who will make personal sacrifices and who will give more effort to push things in the right direction when needs be. You have to have people who really believe in your purpose and what it is you are striving to achieve. People who will give that extra discretionary effort to get you out of a hole, who won’t down tools and enter into self protection mode. People who will circle the wagons and look for a collective solution.

PURPOSE

Given the right people in the first place, you have then to ensure you have a clear and simple purpose to why you are a team and what you are trying to achieve, and stick to it. It’s during the tough times that this becomes crucial. Under threat, teams simply have to stick to their big ‘why’. It has to be believable, tangible, and visible. Tough times mean extra effort, commitment and work, and if people are questioning why they should choose to take this burden on, then they simply won’t do it. The team has to know that what they are doing counts, for them to choose to do something about the problem.

PASSION

Finally, you have to have passion. The right people, with a clear view of why they should be doing it, who have the passion to want to turn things around. I remember in my (admittedly very amateur) days of playing rugby, turning up to training on very cold, dark and wet January night at Henley Rugby Club. One of the guys who was also there said ‘This is what makes or breaks our season. Who is willing to turn up now to put the effort in, when it’s miserable outside, rain lashing down, and freezing cold. Plenty of guys turn up at the beginning of the season in September, when it’s light and warm and the pitch is not a mud bath, but many don’t bother once the winter sets in. Here and now is where it really counts’.

Every team faces adversity at some point. And every team has a choice about how they react to that adversity. I agree with Flintoff in that a lot of teams – even one as professional as the England cricket team – will see its spirit fall away with alarming ease, when the team is failing. But I will disagree with him, meaning that I don’t think that it has to go that way. If you take the time to prepare for failure, and make sure you have the right people, purpose and passion in place.

I would go so far as to perversely say that you might want to welcome some adversity into your team. It’s astonishing to see what positives can be taken from a backs to the wall type of experience, if your response is right, and you don’t experience what Flintoff is talking about. Adversity can be the making of a team. Tough times can galvanise teams, can reveal some real grit and strength, and when you do dig yourselves out of the hole, leave you stronger and fitter than you were before.