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This leadership thing is difficult isn’t it because you always want to be the nice guy.

You want to be friends with everyone, for life to be level, for no one to be upset and for progress to just continue.

But that’s not possible and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

So, not to give an example that has come from my business (that would be too close to the bone) but instead one from the football team that I look after because boys football and sport in general is a metaphor for life.

So, if you didn’t know my under 11’s football team are called the Mustangs and we now play 9 a-side football on a Sunday morning in the biggest youth league in the country for the biggest youth club in the country (West Bridgford Colts). This is the fourth season we’ve been together and it’s been quite an extraordinary journey for this young group of boys who are different in personnel and personality from when we first started.

We came together as a 5 a-side team when the boys were all under 8 with what is now known in football as ‘a mixed ability team’. A mixed ability team is a team of people, some who are really committed to being footballers who will listen, practice and try as hard as they can and some whose parents want them to be part of the team for the social environment.

It worked brilliantly through that 5 a-side season and was great fun, but it started to quickly become clear that the group separated into two.

The boys who were committed and the boys who were not so much.

For the parents of the boys who were not so committed this was easy for them because you just let them be in the team, you don’t worry about the results and you rotate the players and positions around so everybody gets the same.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

It’s not fair.

Not everyone wins a medal, not in real life anyway, and at some point (and I’m not sure where that point is) it’s important for people to realise that.

I can take the moral high ground here because I never got picked for the football team, and in fact got ridiculed by the boys who did, so I did something else.

The issue with the mixed ability team developed over time, to the point where the boys who were committed to football were annoyed at the mixed ability boys because we would lose games which we otherwise wouldn’t have lost if they had been more committed.

The mixed ability boys also knew they were getting put on the pitch when they shouldn’t; some of them were asking not to go on.

There was a famous game for the Mustangs were half the team didn’t go on after half time because it was too wet!

And so, you reach a dilemma. If you keep looking after the mixed ability group the committed players will leave and go to another team which is not mixed ability and then the team will fold, because when it rains the mixed ability boys will not play.

If, however, you look after the committed group the mixed ability group will leave because they won’t get the same time on the pitch. It will become ‘too serious’. It becomes an issue of communication. I tried from the outset to communicate the philosophy of what I thought was important for the team.

It’s me that gives up the time to look after the team and actually use quite a lot of resources to do so, so I am the leader and I get to choose (within reason). I am delighted to say that that approach worked out perfectly and in the end, at the end of last season, the last of the mixed ability boys decided to stop football because it had become too physical. That was always on the cards.

Everyone who has played or plays for this team are friends of ours and my sons and they completely understand the progression of football towards under 11’s (which becomes a pretty physically game). My son is not a hard man in any way, in fact he’s quite sensitive and I have had to manage him through the physical aspects of football, but he loves it and is hell bent on continuing to play.

We added boys into the team as boys left who were more committed and who understood the physical aspects. At 11am last Sunday morning on top of a hill in north Nottingham with the wind howling and no grass on the pitch we saw the foots of everything that Katy (my co-coach) and Louis had achieved over the last 4 years.

The boys were not playing well, particularly the last 10 minutes of the first 30-minute half. We had hit the post twice and had the ball cleared off the line but we were still 1-0 down and not competing in the middle of the pitch.

We were being a bit ‘middle class West Bridgford’.

It was tough love at half time, I asked them if anybody wanted to be a hero. They all put up their hands.

I told them that they had to take it in their own hands and be a hero if they wanted. I told them that this was as important as their SAT’s or GCSE’s that they will do in years to come. I sent them back onto the pitch and hardly opened my mouth in the second half. They won 2-1.

Leadership isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be hard. That’s why few people do it.

P.s the most important leadership is unpaid.

Blog post number: 1773