The most striking thing about a football manager, when you really watch them, is how little they can do once the match begins. They have built the squad, chosen the team, drilled the patterns, set the plan. And then the whistle blows and they are reduced to a figure on the touchline, gesturing, shouting words nobody can hear over the crowd, watching other people do the thing they cannot do themselves. The manager does not kick a single ball. Everything that happens on the pitch is done by someone else. And yet we hold the manager responsible for the result, and rightly so. I find this one of the most honest pictures of leadership there is, because it strips away the comforting illusion that a leader’s job is to do the work.
Most people who become project leaders were promoted because they were good at the work. They were the strong analyst, the capable engineer, the one who delivered. And then they are handed a team and discover that the skill that got them there is no longer the skill they need, because their job is no longer to do the work but to make a group of other people do it well. The touchline is where that transition becomes visible, and where a lot of new leaders quietly struggle.
The work is done before the whistle
Here is the truth the touchline makes undeniable: by the time the match is being played, most of the manager’s real work is already done. The selection, the preparation, the patterns rehearsed until they are instinct, the belief built over weeks — all of that happened before kickoff. What you see on the touchline is the small residue of in-game adjustment. The bulk of the influence was exercised long before, in training, in the team room, in the thousand quiet decisions that shaped what the players would do when the leader could no longer reach them.
This is exactly true of leading a project, and it reframes what the job actually is. By the time the work is being done, your influence over it is largely spent. You shaped it when you chose the team, when you set the direction, when you built the standards and the culture and the shared understanding of what good looks like. The leader who believes their influence is exercised in the moment, by intervening in the live work, has misunderstood the role. The real leadership happened earlier, in preparing people to perform well without you. If you find yourself having to intervene constantly during delivery, that is usually a sign the preparation was insufficient, not that your hands-on involvement is the thing holding it together.
You have to let them play
The manager who could not bear to let go would be a disaster. Imagine one who tried to direct every pass from the touchline, who could not trust the players to make their own decisions in the flow of the game. The team would be paralysed, looking sideways for instruction instead of playing what they see. Football moves too fast for that; the players have to decide for themselves, in the moment, and the manager’s job is to have prepared them well enough that their instinctive decisions are good ones.
This is the hardest thing for the newly promoted leader, the one who was promoted for being excellent at the work. The instinct is to stay in the work, to do the difficult parts yourself, to intervene whenever you see something you would have done differently. That instinct, indulged, produces a team that cannot function without you and never grows, because it is never allowed to. You have to let them play. You have to tolerate them doing it differently from how you would, sometimes worse in the short term, because that is the only way they ever become capable of doing it without you. The leader who cannot let go is not protecting quality. They are capping the team at their own ceiling and ensuring it can never exceed it.
The few things you can do, do well
The manager is not powerless during the match, but their power is now concentrated into a few specific levers, and the good ones use those levers with precision. The substitution that changes the shape. The instruction passed on at the right moment. The visible calm, or the visible urgency, that the players read off their leader and absorb. These are few, but they are potent, precisely because they are chosen rather than constant.
The lesson for a project leader is to understand which of your levers actually matter once the work is underway, and to use those well rather than dissipating yourself trying to touch everything. Removing a blocker the team cannot remove themselves. Making the decision that only you have the authority to make. Setting the emotional tone — because a team reads its leader’s composure or panic and mirrors it, on a pitch or in a project room, without fail. These are the touchline interventions that count. They are worth more, used sparingly and well, than a leader who is involved in everything and therefore decisive in nothing. Your job during delivery is not to do more. It is to do the few things only you can do, and to do them at the right moment.
Carrying the result is part of the deal
There is one more thing the touchline teaches, and it is the least comfortable. The manager did not kick a ball, but the manager carries the result. Win and the players are heroes; lose and the manager is questioned. This can seem unfair — how can you be responsible for an outcome produced entirely by other people’s feet? But it is not unfair, because the manager accepted exactly that bargain when they took the role. Leadership means owning outcomes you did not personally execute. That is the whole deal.
Project leaders sometimes resist this, wanting credit shared in victory and blame shared in defeat. But the role does not work that way, and the best leaders do not want it to. They shield the team when things go wrong, taking the heat publicly even when the failure was not theirs to execute, and they push the credit outward when things go right. This is not martyrdom; it is the correct understanding of what a leader is for. You accepted responsibility for a result delivered by other people’s hands. Carrying that, gracefully, in both directions, is the job you signed up for the moment you stepped off the pitch and onto the touchline.
What to take into your own leadership
The move from doing the work to leading the people who do it is the hardest transition in a career, and the touchline is its clearest image. A few things to carry across:
Do your real work before the whistle. Your influence is mostly exercised in preparation — selection, direction, standards, belief — not in intervening during the live work.
Let them play. Tolerate the team doing it differently, even imperfectly, because that is the only path to a team that can perform without you.
Use your few real levers well. Identify the interventions only you can make and deploy them sparingly and precisely, rather than dissipating yourself across everything.
Carry the result in both directions. Take the heat in defeat, push the credit outward in victory. Owning outcomes you did not execute is the deal you accepted.
The best managers I have watched are at peace with their own relative powerlessness during the match, because they understand where their power actually lay: in everything that happened before, and in the few sharp things they can still do when it counts. The leader who is still trying to kick the ball from the touchline has not yet understood the job. The one who has built a team that plays well without them has understood it completely.
This piece sits alongside What a Referee Teaches You About Authority and Decisions and The Substitutes’ Bench: Resourcing, Depth and the People You Don’t Use.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and former Australian Project Manager of the Year, sharing practical lessons from major projects, events and complex stakeholder environments.
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