Individual talent alone is not enough, it is great teams that win the day.

Watching some of the World Cup matches on TV, it is clear that simply having great individual players is not always enough.

Obviously it helps to have a Torres or Gerrard in your side, but the most successful teams are often those that work together as a unit, where the players are genuinely motivated by putting on the national jersey and competing at the highest level.

As with football, so with business. Some of the most successful retailers of recent years have built strong, united teams whose collective strengths make them even more formidable than their significant individual talents.

It is no coincidence that many of these businesses also have effective processes by which they engage their staff at all levels of the organisation, such as John Lewis’s weekly staff magazine The Gazette.

At Kingfisher we operate several similar two-way channels. For example, B&Q has its TEA (Tell Euan About) sessions, where groups of staff meet B&Q chief executive Euan Sutherland to discuss key issues and opportunities. One of our French businesses, Castorama, operates an interactive website and an in-house TV channel to encourage staff feedback.

The power of being involved in creating something, whether it be a new way of solving a problem or even a new strategy, is incredibly empowering and motivating. It is much more powerful than the top-down approach, where a tablet of stone is handed down by management with commandments saying: “Thou shalt not…”

By contrast, I think it was Chairman Mao who said: “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.”

This collective, inclusive approach is something we are working hard on at Kingfisher. In the past few days the top 250 managers at Kingfisher all got together in Barcelona to talk about the next phase of our strategy.

We have an ambition to be the world’s leading, local home improvement retailer and we want to create one team to fulfil that ambition, for our customers, staff, suppliers, shareholders and the communities in which we operate. But how we achieve our aims is very much for our wider management group to decide together.

So in Barcelona all the attendees were asked in advance to share their views on our business and these views then formed the basis of full and frank discussions at the conference. As we operate in eight countries, sharing ideas around the group is important, so at the conference venue we ran a ‘Spanish marketplace’ at which our people could see and ‘buy’ useful ideas from their colleagues in other countries.

This kind of inclusive approach can be slower and much harder work. But it is also much stronger and longer-lasting because everyone will feel that they have ownership of the plan, rather than having it imposed on them.

Of course, leadership teams need to lead and they must provide direction and a consistent message. But a unified team will always defeat a collection of disparate individuals. On that basis, I’m tipping Germany and Holland to do well in the World Cup because they have a real team spirit.

And, as I write this, I’m still hoping that England can recover theirs.