Ben Lyttleton

Ben Lyttleton is a keynote speaker on the leadership lessons learnt from football, covering pressure, talent management, leadership and teamwork.

Author and football club owner Ben Lyttleton understands what we can learn about the most important aspects of work and life from the world’s most popular sport.

In his book Edge: Leadership Secrets of Football’s Top Thinkers, he interviewed some of football’s top coaches, including Thomas Tuchel and Graham Potter, to learn how they foster talent and build empathy within a team, help talents fulfil their potential, and find power in developing a social purpose.

Through extensive interviews with the biggest names in the game, and exclusive access to insiders at Liverpool and Chelsea, Ben has developed a comprehensive picture of leadership, teamwork and talent improvement. Ben has worked with football and NBA teams and their coaches to help them develop elite performance and discover their own competitive edge.

His first book Twelve Yards: The Art and Psychology of the Perfect Penalty examined how individuals understand and manage anxiety to perform at their best under pressure. Ben has advised Premier League and national teams on their penalty strategy.

Ben Lyttleton has distilled all his experiences, learnings and network from football and recently joined a consortium where he is a co-owner and board member at Akademisk Boldklub (known as AB), a professional football team in Denmark with a rich history in education (hence the name). Ben, like Ryan Reynolds of Welcome to Wrexham fame, is at the heart of the process to create a successful club with a clear purpose, a winning team, and an engaged community. The team is currently in the third division but is on the up: they recently beat a top-division side in the Danish Cup – on penalties, of course – to reach the Cup quarter-finals for the first time in over 20 years.

With his personal connection to some of the biggest names in football, Ben Lyttleton illustrates the surprising and insightful aspects of leadership and teamwork in football – focusing on cohesion, adaptability, resilience and communication – whilst making it relevant and enlightening even to those that aren’t fans of the beautiful game.

He is also the co-author of the best-selling children’s book series Football School, which uses football to open up the school curriculum and inspires children to develop a love of reading. The books have sold over 500,000 copies in the UK, and Ben works with the Premier League and FIFA in using football as a tool for education.

SPEAKING TOPICS

LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM FOOTBALL

Pressure:

How do we make decisions and execute tasks under pressure? Ben Lyttleton explores possibly one of the highest-pressure situations an individual can experience in team sport – the penalty shoot-out. Using a combination of sport and behavioural science, he explains the psychology of performing under pressure – and how we can all improve our performance when the heat is on.

Key lessons: how we cope with anxiety; challenging our reliance on individual superstars; the influence of body language and how just one extra breath can make all the difference.

Talent Management:

How do leaders get the maximum out of their teams? What role does communication play in building and maintaining a high-performing team? Ben has spent time with football’s most successful coaches discussing the secrets behind their winning management styles.

Key lessons: the language used around talent and the importance of listening; how successful coaches have redefined communication and management; the Champions’ League-winning coach who developed his own scales of motivation and measures of success.

Leadership:

What makes a great leader? Why do we find leaders fascinating? What can we learn from those leaders and how can we apply those lessons? Ben has interviewed and studied some of the most successful coaches and managers in football, including World Cup and Champions’ League winners in order to understand their approaches, ideas and methods.

Key lessons: finding new ways to measure motivation and success; how leaders get the best from their people; drawing together lessons in communication, resilience and decision-making; building cohesion, motivation and diversity.

Teamwork:

How can we build teams that get the best results? What unifies a team? What sets the most consistently high-performing teams apart? Ben has investigated the people and ideas behind some of the most successful and innovative clubs in football.

Key lessons: the connection between cohesion and performance in a team; why talented performers in one team may not excel elsewhere; the secrets of Radar Couples and collective functioning; how a team of over-achievers turned a global disadvantage into their competitive edge; the power of culture, comfort zones and why one football team performed Swan Lake to fans.

Resilience:

What is resilience and how can we build it? How can we best prepare for the tough times ahead? Ben has gone behind the scenes of football’s most successful clubs and spoken to sports scientists and coaches to find out how players are trained to develop resilience.

Key lessons: understanding our reactions to adversity; Chelsea’s Me? Always? Everything? method (or Intent/Frequency/Impact – am I the focus? Does this always happen? Does it affect everything?); the difference between Confidence 1 (the likelihood of something happening) and Confidence 2 (your reaction to it happening); the resilience of success; the difference between authentic or hubristic pride.