Connection First

Two days earlier, Thomas Tuchel was the U19 coach.

Now, here he was coaching a senior team in the Bundesliga.

At age 35, having never played a Bundesliga match, and without having ever coached senior men, Tuchel was handed the reins to Mainz 05.

Tuchel’s promotion broke conventional wisdom at the time, and the situation he walked into was far from conventional as well.

The previous coach had been sacked on the eve of the new season, meaning Tuchel had just five days to prepare his team for their first league game. Mainz had already been eliminated from the German Cup, and he didn’t have an assistant coach.

“An ideal time for an absolute no name to enter the stage,” Tuchel joked.

A Crucial Observation

After training on day one, Tuchel held his first team meeting. If you’ve been a head coach, you know the chest-tightening dread that arrives a few minutes before addressing your team for the first time. No matter how experienced you are or how many times you’ve driven that first one-to-many presentation, I don’t think this unique anxiety ever goes away.

On a flip chart, Tuchel hand wrote the team rules that would expected would guide the team’s future, and act as a framework for their teamwork and cooperation.

However, in a keynote presentation about those rules, Tuchel explained that before he could implement his ideas, a new rule emerged. It turns out that it was an observation about the team’s eating habits that would form his first and most impactful intervention.

“I arrived ten minutes early to lunch, and as I walked in, there were already a few players leaving the dining hall,” he recalled. The players were eating at their own pace, either shovelling food into their mouth or piling it on their plate and escaping to their room.

The next day at training, Tuchel made a small request: “We start eating at 12:30. I’ll say ‘enjoy the meal’ and then we tuck in.” At the next meal, by the time Tuchel had finished his soup half the team had already disappeared, leaving an uneven smattering of players at the tables around the dining hall. “Now, the food was piled on their plates — starter, main course, desert had all been shoved in,” Tuchel recounted.

His initial attempt to get his point across had fallen on deaf ears. But Tuchel was determined to change their behaviour.

The next day, he brought the topic up again. “I’m sorry we need to address eating habits again, but I have another request,” he told the players. “I would like us to start on time, but in the future, we’re going to eat together for at least 20 minutes.”

“They just accepted it, and that was the start. The first rule,” Tuchel said with a smile. 

“Nowadays, it goes without saying that the team sit together for 40-45 minutes while eating. There’s always 9 players on a table, and the table only gets up when the last person has finished his dinner. This established itself without the coach’s instruction.”

High Standards =/= Low Emotional Intelligence

Flash forward to today, and Thomas Tuchel is widely regarded as a top-tier head coach, having won trophies with powerhouse clubs in Germany, France, and England.

He’s considered a tactical genius, a student of the game, and is well-known for his meticulous preparation and perfectionist expectations. Before his first training session with German giants Borussia Dortmund, Tuchel was filmed on hands and knees with a tape measure, ensuring the distances between the cones were centimeter perfect.

His obsessive nature isn’t to everyone’s taste, and he has been criticized for seeing players as Xs and Os, forgetting the human touch that is required when you work in the people business. But a coach having exacting standards does not mean they have low social coherence.

A coach with no emotional intelligence wouldn’t make their first rule about the team’s dining habits. Rather, a coach with no EQ would believe that teamwork is built entirely on the pitch, not over the dinner table.

I see this type of rushed judgment almost every day. I get warned off working with certain head coaches because they have a harder edge, or they have certain beliefs about winning, or they drive a particular standard of work.

But when I see them operate in their environment, the judgment is often an unfair assessment.

We need to be careful when we rush to label head coaches as being one thing or another. Particularly if your assumption is that they’ve risen to the top 20-30 in the world at their craft without any emotional intelligence.

Cody’s Notes

• Tuchel has shown his social awareness on other occasions, too. When greed forced his Borussia Dortmund team to play their Champions League game just one day after the team bus was bombed, Tuchel went in to bat for his players. Despite leading the team to an inspiring German Cup victory later that same year, Tuchel’s fractured relationship with club administrators over the Champions League debacle would cost him his job.

• Antonio Rüdiger recently told a story about his first encounter with Tuchel when the coach joined Chelsea: “He did something right away that I think a lot of managers could learn from. It had nothing to do with tactics. He just came up to me and he said, ‘Toni, tell me about yourself.’”

• There is perhaps no greater ‘team activity’ than taking the time to connect over food. It elicits a primal sense of belonging that can break down cultural, moral, and language barriers.

• Former Edmonton Oilers head coach Ralph Krueger told me about a rule he implemented when he was coaching the Swiss national team. He called it ‘The Table Fill Up Rule’: to avoid players sitting with each other along language lines, he made them take the spare seat on an empty table before anyone could start filling up the next table. This made new combinations sit together every meal, because the players would get to lunch at different times every day.