by Carson, Mike
Historic context, soaring expectation, change of ownership, short-termism, macro-economic changes, personal relationships: in the end, the problems were too big and came too fast for Allardyce to solve.
Technology change
With the increased demands of the game has come a balancing increase in the availability of information and technology. These channels can greatly benefit managers, but they also need managing. Allardyce remembers keenly the shift as it happened at Bolton: ‘When I arrived in 1999, there were two computers – one for the physio and one for the academy secretary. By year four we had so much technology – data and the means to crunch it – we knew there was no turning back.’ Wilkinson is another manager who has watched the growth of technology in football with interest. ‘The information available to managers has grown over the years, and it’s good that it’s grown. People ask how we make good decisions, right decisions. The first thing we need is fact. We need as much objective information as we can get. It doesn’t make decision-making any easier; but it does help us come to a higher-quality decision.’ Harnessing the raft of new technologies available is a complicated and demanding business. Progressive leaders are surrounding themselves with experts who can do this and interpret the data for them.
People
While all of this has led to significant shifts in the task of a manager, Wilkinson makes the case that the underlying people-focus of the profession has not changed. ‘The job’s changed, but I don’t think the best managers have changed fundamentally. I think they still have knowledge and a thirst for knowledge, they are prepared to move and change with the times, but not fundamentally to change what they believe is important and not to change what they expect from players. No matter what culture or background you come from, the best managers are still interested in your being a better person when you have passed through their door and leave. They see that as part of being a better player.’
No business leader would dream of dealing with all his organisation’s people issues alone. Among his close advisers will be at least one HR professional, and beyond that he will typically discuss critical people issues with other close colleagues. Chris Hughton finds his staff colleagues hugely valuable here: ‘As a manager of course you always want to be liked. But I know I am going to upset players from time to time. The advice of my staff is very important here, and they often help me think things through.’
A story from the USA convinced Allardyce of the value of people focus: ‘Mike Ford [Performance Analysis Manager] came back with a great story of an American football team that won the Superbowl. When he asked for the key success factors, they were clear that a major contributor was a woman who we’ll call Alice Smith. Everybody spoke about what they did in their department to win the Superbowl, but they all acknowledged Alice Smith had a big part to play. So he’s going around from the CEO to the head coach and he keeps hearing the name Alice Smith, and he didn’t know who this Alice Smith was. It turns out she was the ticket office manager and travel organiser! She was so good that the players didn’t have to worry about a thing. Every ticket, every family, everything was sorted. All the players had to do was run out, wave and play. In football, things move on – but leadership is still all about people.’
Building the High-performing Leadership Team
Leadership is a lonely task unless you are surrounded by people whose character, opinion and expertise you can trust. So convinced is Allardyce of the need for support from his staff that he considers it the heart of his work as a leader: ‘Daily leadership looks like leading the team behind the team, and making sure that the team behind the team is delivering on a daily basis. It’s about preparing them for the battle ahead. We call it “managing the madness”. The best way to manage the madness is your staff, the team that works with you and their heads of department. The staff that we recruit in each department is the critical side of delivering to the players. We have to earn their respect.’
But if your staff team is this important, who should be a part of it? Carlo Ancelotti brought his assistant Paul Clement from Chelsea to PSG ‘because of his player knowledge and his knowledge about football, about training. He has a lot of experience, knowledge, charisma, and personality. He would probably be a very good manager, 100 per cent.’ Great leaders are not worried about having people around them who might outshine them; in fact the contrary is true. One of the acts that distinguishes a strong leader is deliberately seeking close colleagues who will stretch him, and who have strengths that complement his own. Allardyce would agree: ‘I recruit excellent people I can delegate to. I trust them to do the job better than me. I add to that the experience of many years in football, and I always listen very carefully to them about the job that they do and how they do it. Again from sheer experience, I have gathered a little bit of knowledge about how everyone’s job works so I can speak to them on their level: knowing what the words mean and how they think.’
The principle applies also on the field of play. Kevin Keegan looks for ‘the area of expertise where I’m not strong. I’ll take a defensive coach with me nine times out of ten, because I was a forward and I can see how to score goals, I can see how to make goals, but I was never a defender so I don’t think from a defender’s point of view.’
The team also need to be people you can intrinsically trust. Keegan points out that players now easily make friends among the staff: ‘They have a favourite physio; the doctor has different relationships. It can be more difficult where it should be easier, because you should be able to delegate. At Newcastle I had probably about six or seven too many staff for the way I wanted to run a football club.’
Support and challenge
Martin O’Neill has built up a core of talented staff he trusts. When he arrives at a new club, the trick is to fuse them together with the existing team, and to craft a new leadership team dedicated to the task ahead. ‘I started out in management at Grantham – it was really what I wanted to do, and I needed to find out whether I could manage at all. I got in touch initially with John Robertson, who had been my playing partner at Nottingham Forest. My idea was that John might be able to play a bit for me even though he had left the game at that time. He did play a number of games for me, but by now was much more interested in joining me in management. We forged a relationship then.
‘When I moved to Wycombe Wanderers, I reconnected with Steve Walford who had played with me at Norwich City. He dropped down to play at Vauxhall Conference level for me at Wycombe, and he and I built a trusting relationship there. Steve’s fascinating – a quiet man, but a totally different person when he’s on the coaching field! He is a very, very good coach. We were all at Leicester City, Celtic and Aston Villa together, and Steve was with me at Sunderland. Steve is remarkable: he is as good as any of the coaches out there, but never promotes himself. We also had an excellent goalkeeping coach in Seamus McDonagh who was with me at Leicester City and at Aston Villa, and a terrific fitness coach called Jim Henry that I met at Celtic. This is the small team I brought with me.
‘Joining a club in a mini-crisis, it was important to me to have these particular people. Apart from that, I didn’t make any other changes. At the same time I also embraced what was happening at the football club. I’ve never gone in with a scattergun approach of relieving people of their jobs – I go hoping that I will be able to work with these people in time. I think the staff are very, very important, and I always hope that eventually I can build the same levels of trust that I have built with the other people. There will be the occasional person at the football club who’s been involved with the previous manager who might want to leave of his own accord or because he wants to go with the other manager who has gone to another club, and I understand that fully.’
Of course, great leaders want to know that they will get challenge as well as support from their leadership team. As O’Neill says: ‘We have differences of opinion in the team, which is good. But when we get to the field, we are all of the same mind.’
Like Allardyce, Glenn Hoddle also thinks of his leadership team as close allies to whom he can delegate: ‘I can’t have my eyes everywhere, so I want people around me I can delegate to. For example, I want them to tell me if they can see a problem coming up with a player. I remember once I was left out of a team. I was 20 years of age and I thought I should be in the team every week. I went off and did my sulky bit and the manager left me for about two weeks, when I think if he’d had left it a day and we’d had a chat I could have been straight back in to the team. So I learnt from that you have to communicate quickly – and a good team of staff help you to do that.’
If you buy into the value of delegation, then there is a very simple way to think about who you need. For any individual in any area of effort, there are two dimensions involved: skill and will. For example, I might be excellent at clearing up my kitchen, but having done it a thousand times, I am not excited to do it again. In this situation, I am ‘high skill’ but ‘low will’ so I might decide to pay someone to do it for me. Keen to earn the money, he is very happy to do it – but has no idea where anything goes. For the time being at least, he is low skill but high will. Both these things can be improved – skill through training and will through coaching – but in the final analysis, the leader wants people allocated to tasks where they are both high skill and high will. To these people, he can delegate with confidence. And delegation means you can almost forget about the task until it is done – or at least be checking in only occasionally, to encourage and be informed.
O’Neill admits that, like a surprising number of leaders, delegation isn’t something he always finds easy: ‘The people around me would probably tell you I am not the greatest delegator in the world. For me it’s a matter of trust – and part of that trust is in their sheer ability to do the job. Delegation has always been difficult for me, but I’ve learnt over time to trust especially my close colleagues, Steve, John and the team, to do in my absence a job in a way that I would be happy with.’
A lot of a football leader’s daily delegation is done in the specialist areas: logistics, medical, analysis. Hope Powell puts it neatly: ‘I trust them to do a good job and if they say to me, “Hope, I think this,” then I will listen. I’ll make the final decision, but I trust their knowledge enough to take it very seriously. If a medic says that a player should only play for 60 minutes, well – I’m not a medic, so if he’s telling me that’s the case then I have to respect that.’ Acknowledging your team’s expertise that complements your own skill set is important for the smooth running of your leadership team and for your own successful decision-making.
Another component of the art of delegation is knowing what not to delegate. There is an economic principle that translates into leadership: that leaders should ‘only do what only they can do’. In other words, focus on the things that no one else can do. This principle allows Allardyce to delegate effectively to his team of experts: ‘I employ coaches to coach, not to carry balls and put out bibs and cones.’ He defines his own role as leading his team of close colleagues, and making selective coaching interventions: ‘I spend my time meeting with other members of staff and making decisions on a daily basis, then going out working with the coaches and still doing some coaching myself. I refuse to be a megalomaniac and do their jobs as well as mine – so I make a sacrifice and let go of what I like doing the most, i.e. working with the players. But I won’t sacrifice that 100 per cent. I still think it’s important to keep that personal link with the team.’
For O’Neill, results are what a manager lives or dies by, but just as significant is ongoing recruitment and watching potential new recruits for the squad: ‘Getting young players through from the academy might take three, four or five years, and in the meantime you have to be on the search for improvement in the playing side. No matter how many times somebody would report that this player is really good and we should do something about it, I need to see a player at least once in a live game before I make a decision on him.’ Alex McLeish also takes pride in his deep knowledge of players’ skills – and not just his own players: ‘I’ve always been a bit of an anorak in knowing my players, but since I’ve come to England [with the bigger league] I’ve learned to trust the advice of other coaches and scouts. However, I still find it important to take a good look myself at any player before he joins the team. If we’re looking at a player individually and I’ve got a scout or assistant manager I trust and he comes back and says to me “sign him” – I’ve done that in the past and I’ve regretted it. Unless it’s a household name like a Zidane, then you have to know what you are taking in.’
Expressing your personality
An important observation made by many managers is how their leadership team essentially bears their signature. A team is known by its leader – just watch how the press and cameras pick out the manager at every significant moment in the life of his team. The leadership team should be intimately involved in formulating the vision and goals of the team, but once the leader’s philosophy is articulated, they need to faithfully convey it. Martin Jol is clear on this point: ‘Half of my work is on the pitch, and the other half is with the staff. So it’s important that the staff understand my philosophy. I want them to deliver their expertise, but that must be in line with my philosophy.’ His former close colleague Chris Hughton echoes the principle: ‘It’s really important that we have a coaching staff that leads by example and creates an environment around my personality. My style is to offer people some flexibility. So if a lad runs out two minutes late with his boots undone and gives the excuse that he had to go to the toilet, then we look around the rest of the players and ask, “What do we do? Do we fine him or let him off?” We are being professional, but also creating warmth between the players and the staff.’
The special case of the captain
The captain is an appointment made by the manager and a position often held for a long period of time – typically more than a single season. Managers vary as to how they use their captain – the responsibilities they assign and the performance they expect. But invariably they select someone with leadership qualities, who can act as a decision-maker on the pitch and an authoritative influence in the dressing room. In this way, some managers see them as a full part of the leadership team. Roberto Mancini defines the captain as ‘the player who has respect from all the other players; who creates a team spirit’. He also points out that he seeks six or seven players with a captain’s mentality. Hoddle agrees almost word for word. Even when he was player-manager at Swindon and Chelsea, he appointed a team captain. ‘What I want is five or six good leaders, one of whom has got the armband. The captain is important to the rest of the players because they go through the captain to the leadership team. When you are a manager and not a player-manager, that captain has to be an extension of your management. He goes on the pitch while we go to the sidelines. But you need a character, you need the players to respect him.’
For the leader of a complex team facing a daunting challenge, the high-performing leadership team needs to be made up of people you can trust and will probably be founded on a core of people you know well. They need to support you and challenge you, you must be comfortable delegating to them, as ultimately they will carry your signature.
Building the Environment
Once assembled, the leadership team needs to create a high-performing playing team. This is why Allardyce calls it ‘the team behind the team’. The work is a combination of art and science – some things can be prescribed, others are intuitive. At its essence, it involves role modelling and coaching the mindsets and behaviours needed from the playing team. But even before the leadership team can fashion the playing team itself, they must first focus on building an environment for success.
When British swimmer Adrian Moorhouse arrived at Berkeley, California in the mid-1980s to begin training for the Olympic pool, the first thing he saw was a large sign, high up, that read: ‘This is an environm
ent where success is inevitable.’ Allardyce believes creating this environment is very much the role of the leadership team: ‘The team has to deliver the philosophy you have so as to create a successful environment that people enjoy working in and that people don’t want to leave as quickly as they possibly can. I want an environment where they want to stay and improve themselves as much as possible.’ Gérard Houllier agrees: ‘In creating the environment in which you are going to work, the first thing to get right is the staff: make sure that the team behind the team is competent and that they have a very positive attitude because that attitude will influence the players and create the atmosphere. The leadership team needs to infuse confidence, trust and positivity into the club.’
If the leadership team is to take on the responsibility for inspiring the players, then they need to be inspired themselves. Allardyce does this through dreams: ‘I believe in living your dreams. I won’t call them goals – that undermines what a dream is. Not too many people in life can actually fulfil their dreams. We are very fortunate in professional football. If you get into the game as a youngster, you have already started to fulfil one of your wildest dreams. And although there is hard work – you are getting paid for it! When I moved from playing to managing, I felt like I was putting something back into the game that I loved. I wanted to dream dreams for others, and inspire them to pursue great things. I had to make sure it was reachable, this dream – and I wanted to share it with just a close family. This family for me was the group of staff I assembled at Bolton.’
