Have you ever wondered what it takes to lead a team effectively, regardless of the industry? Whether it’s on the battlefield, in a factory, or even on a sports field, the skill of managing people remains essential. You would hear some eye-opening stories from a variety of industries that could inspire you to be a better manager in your day-to-day work.

I’ve always been fond of the term “losing the locker room”, a term that is almost exclusively used in sports but, in my opinion, can teach us valuable lessons. In the context of sports, when people start to say “this coach has lost the locker room”,

it refers to a situation where the team’s coach or manager has lost the support, respect, and trust of the players in the dressing room. This often happens when there is a breakdown in communication, a lack of alignment between the coach’s strategies and the players’ beliefs,

or when the team’s performance and results have been consistently poor and happiness becomes hard to find on the faces of the team.

One of the training sessions led by Carlo Ancelotti at Bayern Munich in 2016 — Source

This even happens at the best of their game

Carlo Ancelotti, one of the most decorated coaches the sport of football has ever seen, was dismissed from his position as head coach of the coaching staff at the German football club Bayern Munich in 2017. When we looked at the numbers he had during his time there, it seemed like a strange decision,

because having a win percentage of 75% from around 60 matches is a solid number! So what had happened back then that made the club management decided to let him go? The answer was simple and straightforward: he had lost the dressing room!

After a heavy 3–0 defeat against the French giants PSG, it looked like things were not going well for the team or for the 4-time UEFA Champions League winner as a head coach. The post-loss events showed severe friction between the coach and the key players of his team,

who had concerns about his tactical methods and decision-making approaches. Players have simply stopped showing support for their manager. Losing confidence and trust in the coach was the main reason that drove the club to announce that Carlo Ancelotti had been relieved of his duties as the head coach.

How does a manager lose his team’s locker room?

At its core, management is built upon multiple essential pillars, including effective communication, organization, decision-making, delivering results, leading and inspiring team members, holding oneself accountable and responsible, and many other traits. No one would be able to excel in all these pillars,

but maintaining a reasonable level of awareness and focus on them all is a must, and overlooking any of them could have risky consequences as well. This relates to the question of the day: Have you ever asked yourself why even good managers sometimes lose their team’s support? I have! So let’s look at some of the most common mistakes they make that lead to this.

Broken Promises and Absence of Transparency

Do you remember that word that your manager gave to your teammate, that he’d get the long-awaited vacation to spend with family once we delivered that important milestone that we had committed to with the customer?

Unfortunately, change requests kept coming, and for a whole three months until now, this promise hasn’t been fulfilled, and everyone can see how the morale and performance of that teammate have been declining day after day. Not only that, but everyone in the team now starts to take your manager’s words with a pinch of salt because, most probably, he won’t keep them.

Also, sometimes, for managers to avoid making any promises, they show little or no transparency with the team in regards to their plans, expectations, and what should be done and what shouldn’t, and this can lead to misunderstandings, mistrust,

and a sense of exclusion among team members. It prevents productive collaboration and keeps the manager as the sole owner of the decision-making process, meaning that everyone else is only required to comply with his or her orders.

Lack of Support and recognition

There are various ways to provide support to the team, including acknowledging and commending their successful efforts, offering both positive and negative feedback that can be transformed into actionable steps, and granting empowerment while guiding them,

particularly during conflicts and interactions with external parties. Taking joint responsibility in the event of unfavorable outcomes, rather than leaving them to face the consequences of a wrong decision, is crucial. Managers who do not have these as core responsibilities and a high priority will often miss many opportunities to get full support from their teams and unleash their potential.

Also, lack of recognition, keeping people in the dark, and taking the team credit are some of the main reasons to question the manager’s credibility and integrity, giving the team all the reasons to stop supporting their leadership.

Unrealistic asks and changes that drain everyone

We’ve all had a manager who wants everything done all at once and perfectly like everything has a high-priority label on it. Aside from the usual requests to get things done, it’s not easy for teams to adjust to new plans or different ways of doing things,

especially when they’ve been doing them the same way for a long time. Some managers initiate significant changes without thinking about how much the team can handle,

how they feel, or whether they have the right skills. They do this to make their bosses happy or to show they’re doing a good job. Even if these changes work or don’t work, the team doesn’t feel like they’re part of it and won’t be very motivated to make things work better.

Failure to address and tackle problems

There is a reason why people choose to become managers. They ought to be good listeners who allow everyone the opportunity to speak their minds and discuss their issues, worries, and concerns. However, just listening well was not enough because managers are there with the power to take action and improve their people’s lives.

The team will begin to wonder if their manager is truly taking their notes seriously and even working on solving them, making them feel ignored and undervalued in the team. Let alone that some managers have a tendency to downplay their team’s problems and question their worth.

A lack of empathy could also give the team the impression that their feelings are invalid. Failure to follow up on issues and deflect them due to outside factors is an act of a weak management style that doesn’t help its holder take his team forward. It’s important for any manager to avoid being a passive communicator in situations that require assertion or active communication because passiveness and avoidance quickly erode a manager’s credibility.

Favoritism

Favoritism involves treating certain individuals or groups more favorably than others. This can happen based on various factors such as personal relationships, gender, performance, shared beliefs, or social relevance. Within teams, favoritism becomes apparent when a manager provides special treatment to a specific team member,

perhaps due to recent accomplishments, resulting in a lower standard of accountability for their mistakes compared to others. This unequal treatment creates a lot of tension within the team and makes people feel angry and uncertain,

which disrupts team unity and cohesion while also raising doubts about the manager’s overall fairness, particularly in performance evaluations and compensation decisions.

What are the consequences of losing the locker room?

When a manager loses the trust and confidence of their team members, it doesn’t necessarily indicate immediate underperformance or the manager being fired for that particular reason. However, it can lead to major problems such as a toxic culture, demotivated team members, missed opportunities, and a slower pace.

One consequence of losing the locker room is having a team that mostly consists of followers, not leaders. Team members who once took initiative may become shy and less willing to openly share their thoughts and ideas or take responsibility. This can hinder the team’s momentum and pace,

leading to decreased efficiency and effectiveness in achieving goals. Additionally, a team that has lost trust in its manager often requires higher maintenance efforts. Managers may need to invest more time and energy into addressing conflicts, managing unhappy or frustrated team members, and even micromanaging the whole team!

This lack of trust can also contribute to high turnover rates, as team members who feel unsupported or undervalued are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere. This turnover disrupts team stability and growth. Resistance to change becomes a frequent matter because the team knows what would happen if things went south.

Lastly, when unfortunate events occur, a team that has lost trust in its manager is less likely to support and exert extra time and effort to help the manager get things back on track.

Final Thoughts

No matter how great a manager you are or how amazing your skills are, you will go nowhere without a team that trusts and supports you through thick and thin. I’ve seen many amazing managers fall into that trap of losing their teams’ locker rooms because of a series of wrong decisions or bad assessments of the situation. Having happy stakeholders is great;

committing to deadlines and delivering high-quality results is amazing; but nothing would beat a high-performing, motivated, and happy team on any given day.

This article was written by Muhammad Hani, Thndr’s Head of Engineering, who is passionate about building products that matter.

Pick your poison…

Mustard Skittles from the article of Thinking inside the box

Tomato Blood Ketchup from the article of Thinking inside the box

Two condiments, two limited edition holiday products. One of them works, the other is vomit-inducing (hint: it’s not the blood-themed ketchup).

So what went wrong here? Both ideas are clearly ‘outside the box’ – the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a marketing professional. Why does one work and the other flop? Before we can talk about thinking and boxes and thinking outside of boxes, let’s set a few things straight. First order of business…

What is a box?

It’s easy to picture a small and stuffy cardboard box as a metaphor for restricting your thoughts and creativity. But this isn’t how the famous saying came about. Thinking outside the box refers to a very literal 3×3 grid of dots.

The grid made one of its earliest appearances in “Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums” published in 1914.

The grid came with a simple challenge: Without lifting your pen from the paper, connect all the dots with as few lines as possible.

You can give the puzzle a go yourself and then check the solution linked here to see how well you did.

What is thinking?

Now that we’ve got the box covered, let’s move on to thinking. “Thinking outside the box” usually refers to creative thinking. To keep things simple here, let’s say that thinking is the act of creating new thoughts out of old ones.

What is thinking outside the box?

As elegantly illustrated with the 9 dots puzzle – thinking outside the box means breaking free of the arbitrary limits you’ve unconsciously set for yourself. This is also known as lateral thinking – a term popularized by psychologist Edward De Bono.

When thinking outside the box goes wrong

Once upon a time in the distant year of 1950, you could count the number of TV channels on one hand. Brands had an audience of millions to advertise to, and most importantly, they had their attention. Today, things look a little bit different. In the time that it took you to read this far into the article, over 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube.

Toss in another half dozen social media and streaming platforms and a high-speed connection to the cumulative knowledge of the human race in its entirety and you’ve got yourself an attention economy. More brands than ever are scrambling for the leftover scraps of attention nestled in between an Instagram post of your coworker’s wedding party and a video of a singing cat.

Here’s the secret sauce though: creativity captures attention. The desperate attempt to stand out in a hopelessly overcrowded market has led to an arms race of creativity that would give the scientists of the Cold War a run for their money. Thinking outside the box has become so valued that we’ve started going…

Creativity for the sake of creativity, is far removed from goals or purpose. The original 9-dot puzzle encouraged you to think outside the box to find a better, more efficient solution. It wasn’t about tossing the rules in the trash.

Mustard Skittles: A limited edition product created by the French for National Mustard Day. The brand went all out with a beautifully themed car and was reported on by several magazines. Is it out of the box? For sure. But what objective does it fulfill?

It captured attention… but then what? The flavor was universally hated and the partnership between the two brands adds no apparent value to either. The idea is ‘wild and crazy’ for the sake of being wild and crazy. You may as well duct tape a banana to a wall.

Tomato blood ketchup: A limited edition product created by Heinz for Halloween. Ketchup is a fun and playful condiment. A sweet unnaturally red goop that stands out in aisles of cream and brown. You can drizzle it all over your fries and burgers. Kids love ketchup. They like to play with it. So why not lean into the essence of ketchup? With a simple package redesign, an ordinary dinner is transformed into a gory ghoul feast.

Thinking inside the box

Tomato blood ketchup takes a product’s essence and boosts it unconventionally. Instead of following a linear path of thinking “What monster should we put on the packaging? What if we create an ad where vampires love ketchup?” Heinz broke free of regular thinking patterns – thinking outside the box – and temporarily renamed their hero product. Mustard Skittles on the other hand are a shallow cry for attention.

So when it comes to being creative – it sometimes pays to “think inside the box” a little. Get close and comfortable with the core of your brand, its unique selling points, and what makes it tick. Always keep your goals and objectives in mind.

Red Bull used to fill trash cans with empty cans to create the illusion that everyone was drinking it – an out-of-the-box execution of a very inside-the-box proposition (See: 9 out of 10 dentists recommend our toothpaste). Texas’s award-winning littering campaign “Don’t mess with Texas” started with them taking a step back to redefine their audience – the most basic of marketing exercises.

When they discovered that their audience was pickup-truck riding, beer-drinking, and gun-loving teens, thinking outside the box was easy. They pivoted from a tree-hugging angle to a “don’t mess with us” attitude.

Closer to home

Ramadan is ad season in the MENA region. The cost of running ads spikes as consumer attention plummets in an overcrowded space. So how could Thndr stand out?

Getting started with investing, as seamless as Thndr makes it, can take a bit of a learning curve – and having a close friend or family member introduce you can make getting started much easier. That’s why word of mouth can be a particularly effective channel for growth.

An insight we noticed is that during Ramadan, people meet with family and friends almost daily for iftar – the perfect opportunity for spreading through word of mouth. So instead of running ads, we took our referral bonus and doubled it for the entire month of Ramadan. We thought outside the box by first thinking inside the box.

This article was written by Danny Arafa – our in-house creative. From children’s books to food magazines, social media content, and now fintech – Danny loves testing the bounds of creativity with a business-oriented approach.

The On-Premise Infrastructure: Context and Challenges

Discovery

Why Kubernetes?

Choosing the Right Kubernetes Solution: Balancing Constraints and Expertise

The Way to K3s

What is K3s?

Why K3s?

K3s’s Architecture

Install k3s

Ansible

Supporting LoadBalancer Services in On-Prem Kubernetes Setups

Managing Storage in On-Prem Kubernetes with CSI Solutions

Unlocking New Advantages

Final Thoughts

This even happens at the best of their game

How does a manager lose his team’s locker room?

Broken Promises and Absence of Transparency

Lack of Support and recognition

Unrealistic asks and changes that drain everyone

Failure to address and tackle problems

Favoritism

What are the consequences of losing the locker room?

Final Thoughts

Pick your poison…

What is a box?

What is thinking?

What is thinking outside the box?

Closer to home