Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2011. Its estimate about bosses in Spain dates from 2011 or earlier.
Coach Juan Carlos Cubeiro, author of the book Los mosqueteros de Guardiola (“Guardiola’s musketeers”), which applies FC Barcelona’s success to the business world, argues that 60% of a business’s productivity depends on having a good leader. In fact, by his calculations, in Spain there is only one good leader for every six bosses. In other words, only 16% of the people in leadership positions are good bosses. The rest are what Cubeiro calls “toxic bosses”.
For Cubeiro, a university degree and technical knowledge aren’t enough to run a company, because management means leading people, and universities rarely teach you that. He points out that 90% of what makes a leader is their emotional intelligence: the ability to manage emotions and build self-confidence in difficult moments. A leader who loses their temper and upsets the harmony of the company is of little use.
Bosses who lose control are usually the ones who don’t know where they’re heading themselves, so they can rarely show their employees the way. A leader who loses their temper can rarely call for calm when the company runs into trouble.
Teamwork
Any boss can have a team, but only a leader can build a team and get it working as one. That’s why Cubeiro draws a comparison with football teams that have no superstars or expensive signings, yet thanks to teamwork manage to beat teams full of genuine sports stars. According to Cubeiro, if we could carry these coaches’ mindset over to any kind of business, a small company could compete with a large corporation.
The five Vs of success
In Spanish, the five “V”s of success are valores, valentía, virtud, voluntad and vocación: values, courage, virtue, willpower and vocation. Bring together people with these five virtues in your team and you get the sixth V: victoria, or victory.
Further reading
- Key traits of a leader
- Mistakes to avoid when hiring a leader
- Mobbing: subtle and highly corrosive forms of workplace bullying
- A satisfied employee is an entrepreneur inside the company
Featured image: Christopher Johnson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
