Yesterdays victory by Liverpool against Chelsea in the League Cup Final was quite remarkable considering they were missing 10 of their big stars through injury and had to fill their bench with young academy players. Towards the end of normal time Chelsea had the upper hand and Liverpool were tiring but Jurgen Klopp was brave enough to take off many of his established players and replace them with youngsters who had just a handful of games between them. Liverpool then dominated the extra time and finally snatched the win two minutes from the end.
There is something beautiful about watching a home grown player score a goal in front of their adoring fans or to see these young Liverpool lads beat a Chelsea side that cost 1 billion pounds to put together. It isn’t just about youth - the average age of the Chelsea team at the final whistle was actually younger than the Liverpool one - it is the fact that these players have grown up through the Liverpool system and you can see just how much the team means to them, unlike the expensively assembled disparate group of Chelsea players who are no doubt talented - but not a cohesive team.
I believe that the most successful global companies share this mindset for talent development and all business leaders can learn a lot from what Jurgen Klopp has done.
“This is the most special trophy I ever won….This tonight, if you find the same story with academy players coming on against a top top top side and still winning it…I never heard of it” (Jurgen Klopp post match press conference).
Here are the three takeaways I think we can apply to business
Over Invest in Early Careers Programs
In football the number of players who will make it to the first team of their premiership club versus the total number of players who join their academy is a very small percentage. However most successful clubs have big academies and the fact that Liverpool can win a trophy with a team packed with young home grown players shows the tremendous payback. In the business world I believe the benefits of hiring and nurturing a significant amount of young talent is of tremendous benefit to the health of the organisation and so all businesses should look to invest in broad early careers programs including apprenticeships, internships and graduate programs. This not only helps those business who invests but also provides a significant upskilling to the wider economy.
I was fortunate enough to come through a great graduate program and have also deployed similar things in organisations I have worked in. It builds an incredible bond between the employee and the company and a loyalty that cannot be achieved with an external experienced hire. The company has the ability to train up the right skills from the start while the employee is fresh to new ideas and can also shape the employees with the values that the company wants to encourage. By building cohorts for new joiners you create new communities within the company who gel together and form strong personal and working relationships that can last for decades and breed whole waves of future leaders. From a cost perspective early careers salaries are very affordable versus mid career or senior hires and for global companies you can hire scores of young graduates for the price of just one expatriate. Young talents can be deployed into roles where you need fresh thinking or you just have resource gaps which you would alternatively plug through agencies or temps. These young talents provide an affordable liquid workforce and a base for the future.
When you hire the best young talents in early careers programs you need to be ready to lose a large proportion through the first few years of the programs. This seems to deter some companies from implementing early careers programs but in my mind it just means you need to over-hire at the beginning and expect that when you hire the best you will lose some to others. If after 10 years you have populated your mid to senior management with talents who have grown through the organisation on merit it can only have been a good investment! Companies - like sports teams live and die on the quality of their people and in the battle for talent this is a worthily price to pay. Often standard company headcount budgets are very rigid and so I have found it useful that in the first couple of years it makes sense that the leadership team creates a separate protected headcount and budget for the early careers entrants. The resources are provided “free” to receiving departments and so there is a much more open minded approach to receive a young talent with limited experience. You can be sure that if that young talent prove themselves their managers will be more than willing to take on the costs when the initial period runs out!
There is nothing more rewarding than providing talented young people a start in a business. It is rewarding for the leader and can be tremendously beneficial for the company and the young person who you give a start to.
Build support structures for young talent
A balanced & diverse team is always best
As a final note it is probably somewhat ironic that Jurgen Klopp actually learned a lot about managing young talent from Mauricio Pochettino - who was his opposite number on Sunday in the Chelsea dugout. Klopp watched what Pochettino did earlier in his career at Southampton and Tottenham with his focus on investing in developing young players. Klopp brought a lot of this concept to Liverpool. He knew he couldn’t compete with the financial might of Manchester City, Manchester United or other Nation State funded clubs and so built a brilliant hybrid of a core of homegrown players and a select group of stars purchased from other clubs. His hit rate on transfers in terms of successful integrations of players is second to none in the premiership and that is because he is extremely careful when he goes outside to buy a big player - carefully considering the impact it will have on the whole team dynamics. He is surgical with his approach to hiring form outside and for his core team relies on his established and experienced players and his emerging young talent. I believe as business leaders we can all learn a lot from Jurgen Klopp about how to nurture young talent and build successful blended teams.
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