Leadership Skills: Inspiring A Shared Vision

Published: October 2025 Reading time: 14 minutes

When Jürgen Klopp recently explained how he built Liverpool into champions, there was no talk about tactics. Instead, we could hear him talk about belief.

"I was the number one supporter of my team wherever I was," he said in a recent interview. Take note of the detail here: He didn't say he "became" the biggest supporter, no. He was. From day one, even when they were finishing not so glamorously - yet - and playing uninspired football, he saw champions.

In the same interview (on "Diary of a CEO"), Klopp revealed the three specific things he did to make ordinary players believe and see that they were extraordinary. Again an important detail: Not eventually and conditionally based on their performance, but immediately. Now. Before they had earned it.

"Create the best team possible," he said. Then he clarified - great teams don't just work next to each other, oblivious to the next person's needs and wants and strengths and weaknesses. They must know each other, really know each other. The struggles. The fears. The moments when each person might be weak.

"We have to find a reason why we deserve it more than the other."

Again: Not why they want it more, but why they deserve it. There's a difference.

Klopp went on to explain that this is when people would be willing to "walk through the fire for one another".

"How?", the interviewer asked. "How do you make people walk through fire for one another?"

And then Klopp revealed the secret sauce to his many, many extraordinary successes:

"You have to create a culture, an environment, a vibe, where everyone understands that 'this is special.' This is worth it."

After studying how Klopp and others who actually did this, something fascinating became clear: The leaders who create teams that would walk through fire don't do it through motivation. They do it through something much more radical: seeing something inspiring that doesn't exist yet with such conviction that it has no choice but to become real.

Let me show you exactly how Klopp did it, and why most leaders get this so wrong.

The "Special" Isn't What You Think

When Klopp talks about creating something "special," most managers hear "culture" and immediately think "free Fridays", or team-building retreats.

They think it's about making work fun.

They're catastrophically wrong.

Argue with me on that, but for world-class teams, they would in fact be catastrophically wrong.

The Liverpool manager who won everything worth winning didn't create "special" by being nice, or ordering better food. He created it by making his players believe they were part of something that might never happen again. Not in spite of the struggle, but because of it.

But here's what Klopp revealed that managers must pay attention to: "I was always the team's number one supporter." Before they won; before they deserved it. He saw champions when they were in tenth place in the Premier League. He treated them like world-beaters when they were still losing to teams they were only hoping to be able to win against.

Some would say this is delusional optimism. Yet, it's something even more radical - choosing to see what doesn't exist yet with such conviction that it has no choice but to become real.

And if we slow down to think about this for a minute: The moments that bond teams are not the easy wins, but much rather they're the impossible comebacks, or the all-nighters that saved the company, or the projects everyone said would fail and then we made them a screaming success despite the odds.

Teams don't become special in comfort. They become special in crisis.

Shared Struggle

One thing that fascinated me about Klopp's Liverpool teams is something that can also be observed in corporate teams, although it's rare: The Liverpool team didn't work to avoid struggle, but they were seeking it to grow stronger, to steel themselves against it.

And when they failed? Klopp had another principle:

"It's only a defeat if you choose not to learn anything from it. If you learn something, it's not a defeat, but incredibly valuable information."

I have insight into a small retail chain in Germany, from which I am going to share with you a story? Why the small retail chain? To illustrate that you don't have to be a celebrated football manager at a major club to be able to do what Klopp did. Here is the story: A retail chain's shop manager - of the tiniest shop in the entire chain - told me about how he managed to outsell all of the other, much larger shops in the chain by an impressive margin.

After a long period of improving workflows, processes, experimenting with product display and many more small little actions, the team was finally on the path to catching up and possibly beating the results of their peer shops, when their revenues took a significant hit by being robbed in broad daylight. Twice!

Yet, this turned out to be the year where they managed to outsell everyone else.

When I asked how, one employee said: "Our manager had been telling us for months that we were the best retail team he'd ever worked with. We all thought he was just being motivational. But that month, when everything went wrong and we got robbed, after an initial shock we all shared, he looked at us almost like he'd been waiting for this moment. Like he knew we could handle something nobody else could. We were going to make up for the loss and then some. There was no doubt."

The robberies and the subsequent recovery became legendary in the company. Not as a failure, but as the moment that this team discovered what they were capable of. They learned more about sales skills, customer service, and relationship building with clients in a few months than most teams learn in years.

The Three Conditions for Special

After looking at Klopp's methods and comparing them to high-performing teams across industries, three patterns emerge that create this "worth walking through fire" feeling:

1. Temporal Urgency (This Window Closes)

Klopp's Liverpool knew there was a window. Key players would age out. Other clubs would catch up. This exact constellation of talent would never exist again.

The best startup teams often have this same energy. Not the manufactured "urgency" of arbitrary deadlines, but the genuine recognition that this exact group of people, with this opportunity, at this moment in the market, will never align again.

These windows can last quite a long time, but they will eventually close. For a good decade, I was lucky to be part of a group that had did have arbitrary deadlines - but also, just under the surface, there was this recognition of everyone involved that this moment in time, this constellation of talent against these particular challenges in the market, was absolutely unique.

In hindsight it is clear to me that the window closed on us, too. Things are changing, talent is moving on, or retiring. Perhaps there's another team, in another constellation that is the right one for the future. Or perhaps what's left will deteriorate slowly and die. But realizing that "this is special", enabled us to achieve things that must have looked insane or impossible from the outside.

2. Mutual Revelation (We See Each Other)

Klopp's teams don't simply "know each other" in the corporate icebreaker sense. They know what everyone is truly about, who's good at what, who has family troubles at home, who is afraid of what, or who values what the most.

Real teams aren't built in trust falls - (the silly practice of blindly letting yourself fall, 'trusting' that Eric from accounting is going to catch you). No. Real teams are built when your head of manufacturing admits she's terrified of the automation transition, and your senior engineer stays late walking her through it. When your sales team gets humbled by a lost deal, and the quiet customer support team steps up to find last minute opportunities to help close the gap to the target.

But here's what Klopp did that most leaders don't: When he looked at all of this - the fears, the failures, the moments of weakness - and his belief got stronger, not weaker. He saw all of this simply as steps on the way to future strength.

There are conditions under which you may have the opportunity to see this magic togetherness emerge: high stakes, shared accountability, and leaders who model the behavior by admitting their own limitations first and call on others for help.

3. "We Know Why We Deserve This"

To me, this is Klopp's masterstroke. Not just having goals, but creating a shared understanding about why this team - specifically - deserves to win.

Liverpool set out to be the best - eventually, sure. But the much more important story was probably about being the hungriest. About a city and club that had waited 14 years to win the Champion's League again. About proving the doubters wrong through collective will.

And when they lost? The team incorporated losses brilliantly by putting on a genius paradigm: Every defeat became part of the education required for eventual triumph.

Your team needs its own narrative. Not the generic "we're changing the world" hoorah, but a specific story about why this group deserves to succeed. Maybe you're the team of misfits from failed startups who finally found each other. Maybe you're the only ones who truly understand the problem because you lived it.

The story doesn't have to be grand or massively profound. It has to be true, and it has to be yours.

The Leaders Real Job

Here's what most leadership development programs won't tell you: Creating "special" isn't about motivating in the traditional sense. Your job is to help your team see what Klopp saw: their own unrealized possibility. Not what's at stake if they fail, but who they're capable of becoming if they fully commit to discovering it together.

But you have to see it first. You have to believe in their "extraordinariness" before they've shown any evidence of it. You have to treat them like champions while they're failing, like innovators while they're struggling, like the best team you've ever worked with while they're proving they're merely ordinary.

Klopp invited the team to celebrate after having lost the finals, but not celebrating the loss, as you might think. He invited them to celebrate the fact that they have reached and played in the finals to begin with! For them to celebrate this as an important step of the way to eventually winning it next time.

The difference between Klopp and most leaders isn't that he motivated better. It's that he saw something that wasn't there yet - the champions inside the tenth-place team - and held that vision so consistently, so genuinely, that his players started looking for it too.

And once they started looking for it, they started finding it.

When a manager at an IT company went through our simulation training, she had a revelation in that sense: "I finally understood my job wasn't to reduce pressure. It was to make pressure meaningful while believing my team could handle it."

The Cost of Special

Let's be honest about something that Klopp doesn't often mention in interviews: Special has a price.

Teams that walk through fire together often can't walk through normal together afterward. The intensity that creates magic also creates burnout.

Some startup teams disintegrate after IPO because they only knew how to be special, not sustainable. The very intensity that made them extraordinary made them unable to be ordinary.

This isn't an argument against creating something special. It's an acknowledgment that special is, by definition, temporary. The window closes. The team disperses. The moment ends. Jürgen Klopp's eventual departure from Liverpool was related to realizing he lacked the energy required to maintain this intense level of commitment.

But the people who were there - who felt what it was like when a group of humans decided something mattered enough to transcend their limitations - they carry that forward forever.

And they carry something else: the knowledge that every failure along the way was just a piece of education preparing them for the moment they succeeded.

The Question That Defines Your Leadership Legacy

So here's the real question, the one that separates managers from leaders:

What makes THIS team, THIS challenge, THIS moment special enough that your people would choose struggle over comfort?

If you can't answer that - if you're reaching for generic motivational concepts - then you're asking people to walk through fire for nothing.

But if you can see it, name it, and help your team feel it? If you can look at them during failure and see future champions learning their trade? If you can treat defeat as intelligence rather than a verdict?

Then you're not managing resources. You then have a shot at creating one of those rare moments when ordinary people discover they're capable of extraordinary things.

And that feeling - that glimpse of what we're capable of and the realization of the uniqueness of an opportunity worthy of pursuing - is what people actually mean when they talk about engagement, culture, or purpose.

For making work special we must begin by seeing that a team is already special, believing in that team before they deserve it, and having the courage to treat every failure as education rather than evidence.

Even if it's hard..

Especially then.

With LeaderCoreAI, we help leaders practice these high-stakes moments before they happen. Because the ability to recognize what makes "this" special, to maintain belief through failure, and to treat defeat as data isn't intuitive - it's a skill that requires deliberate practice. And your team deserves a leader who's ready when the moment arrives.

Ready to inspire your team's shared vision? Visit leadercore.ai to practice with AI team members who challenge you just like your real ones do.