Written by Natalia Mank, Executive Coach
On Consistency, Trust, and Leadership That Outlasts You
If you lead a team, pull a team member aside and ask whether they know what you actually want from them long term. How closely does their answer match yours?
My own view, after years coaching leaders through uncertainty, is that the clearest marker of effective leadership is how consistent a message stays while everything else moves around it. Spain’s World Cup win offers three lessons in exactly this: a coach who held firm structure and swift adaptability at once, a culture that trusted people to do their own work, and a team that played for something longer than the result in front of them.
Holding the Polarity
Brian Emerson and Kelly Lewis, in Navigating Polarities, argue a polarity is not a problem to solve but rather a tension to be held continuously. When held alone, it exhausts a leader, who may grip the plan too tightly or let it go altogether under pressure. This balancing act becomes sustainable only when the team performs it together.
This is precisely the polarity Spain’s coach held throughout the World Cup tournament. Luis de la Fuente managed the team for nearly four years with a consistent approach. After the final, captain Rodri described the win as the result of a long, slow process, built on trust the coach had placed in the team from the start. De la Fuente had embedded the team’s structure so deeply that the players carried it without him and gave them total freedom to adapt within it. This is exactly what let a substitute, Ferran Torres, come off the bench and score the winning goal in an entirely unscripted passage of play.
Iberdrola, for instance, runs a tightly regulated ship, and inside that discipline, it has moved early into renewables, ahead of most utility peers. The inner structure gave it the backbone, resilience and breathing space to seize new market segment opportunities..
Enabling, Not Delivering
This principle also applies to communication. Ana Botín has led Santander for over a decade of constant digital and cultural change. Throughout it, she has held to one fixed purpose, ‘to help people and businesses prosper’. The methods to deliver on this premise have certainly changed. But the message has not. The leader’s role is to be so consistent in their messaging that it becomes embedded within the people, who come to feel co-responsible for it, well beyond any one individual’s reach.
Consistency only works if people trust it enough to act on it. This is what Spain’s coach did, extending trust to the players themselves. I saw the same principle directly on an international leadership programme with Sonnedix, the renewable energy group rooted in Spain. Leaders who stepped back and let talented people find their own way, rather than directing every step, got their best work in return. Liz Wiseman calls this a Multiplier. The opposite, a Diminisher, holds a team back without meaning to, by staying too involved in decisions that were never theirs to make. The team still turns up, but stops offering its best thinking, since nobody asked for it.
Consistency in your message is what holds a team together when the plan changes. Trust is what lets them carry it without you.
Playing for Those Who Come Next
Simon Sinek argues, in The Infinite Game, that leaders should play to remain worthy of the next round, beyond just winning the one in front of them.
I would push this further. By the hundred and sixth minute, extra time had gone on long enough for some viewers to reconsider their life choices. It genuinely felt infinite. But Spain were not simply trying to stay in it. They were fully aware that being on that pitch was a privilege built by everyone before them, and that how they played was a gift forward to whoever comes next. It is worth asking how often we extend that thinking to our own work. Being trusted with a team, or a business built by those before you, is a privilege, not something owed to you. Leading with that awareness, rather than entitlement, creates the most impactful leadership.
The Question to Test
If you lead a team, ask three people what you want from them over the long term, and see how closely their answers match. If you are the one being led, ask whether you could repeat your leader’s vision back accurately, or whether you have been filling the gaps yourself. Whatever gap you find will not close with a single conversation. It will close the way Spain’s did, slowly, over years, by a leader disciplined enough to build a team that doesn’t always need them in the room.