by Carson, Mike
Me:
I want to communicate with you every day. There is going to be lots of communication and a great deal of mutual respect.
Franck:
That’s music to my ears because my other coach he never talks to me and when he does it is only to criticise.
Me:
Well, Franck, having spoken to you I would love to work with you.
Franck:
And I with you also.
‘We still keep in touch. Franck is a legend in Hibs folklore. The fans absolutely adored him and we had a great footballing team with Franck in the starting line-up.’
Where there is real talent, expectation properly handled will act as fuel. Sauzée wanted nothing better than to show his paces for delighted supporters; Mourinho and his players seized the opportunity to show the world they had something special. This dimension of the winning mindset is hugely powerful. It stops short of arrogance; it takes pride in its ability.
Captivating the Talent
At the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd commented: ‘It’s one thing to build such an ensemble from scratch. The trick is keeping it together. Some actors will want to work in film or television. Others will want shorter contracts. There will be those who want to be bigger fish in a small pond, getting bigger roles.’
How then to captivate the talent you’ve assembled? Boyd reasons: ‘People will stay as long as they feel that they are growing with the company, and as long as the work is good, and they feel it gives them a profile and as long as they don’t feel that their individuality is being ironed out or homogenised.’
Mourinho focuses on personal motivation and passion, reasoning that a motivated side is a stable side: ‘To lead a side you must motivate it, and to motivate you must be yourself motivated. I motivate people with my own motivation. If you are fully motivated, if you show them that, if you make them feel that you have that, they will do well. If you are not a guy with motivation, with passion, how can you make other people feel passion for the game? After that I think you learn with experiences. The moment that you learn that every person is a person, that’s the point you become a better leader, especially in a group like ours, in football, with very gifted people.’
In the end, charisma plays a huge part in this motivation. A leader has to engage at a human level if he wants to captivate genius. At Manchester City, Mancini worked with an array of disparate talent – men with contrasting personalities, but united by their skills and appetite for the game. ‘When you manage a top team you have 24 or 25 players with different mentalities and they come from different countries and different cultures. It could be a problem to manage these different players. You should treat them all the same way. This can sometimes be difficult, but I know my job and I will have a good staff and together we are able to manage all these players. At Manchester City I had Mario Balotelli, I had Sergio Aguero and I had Carlos Tevez! Players like these are genius and when you are a genius you can do something well – sometimes also something bad. A manager and his staff – the staff is important – work in different ways and sometimes we make mistakes. We don’t do everything well – it is impossible that we can be perfect. Some mistakes are helpful because we can learn from them. It is not only players that can make a mistake. When as a manager I make a mistake, then I apologise – and this is very important.’
Mancini certainly did something right to re-energise Carlos Tevez after his return to City from Argentina in the spring of 2012. Putting him alongside his compatriot Sergio Aguero created a spark – genius to genius – that carried their side to the title. ‘I think there are some cultures that are strong: Argentina, Uruguay, these players have a strong mentality. In a difficult moment, probably because they come from a difficult life, difficult culture and when they have a good chance to win, or the chance to earn more for their family, I think they have a strong mentality.’ As the subsequent season opened, Tevez went on record in the press as saying: ‘The problem with Mancini was good for me. I’m enjoying football again, which is what I wanted – to feel this hunger for glory and to be happy like this. I had a pre-season like I hadn’t had for a long time. I worked very hard, I feel good on the pitch, light, strong, fast.’ The talent was captivated once more.
The Talented Leader
So, is there a formula for handling outrageous talent? Surprisingly, there is – or at least there are some clear pointers from the world of professional football. Not to say that applying them is at all easy – but there appear to be five key principles to consider.
1. Embrace the talent:
As Mancini says, ‘I get great results because I have great players!’ Mourinho cannot imagine how anyone would not relish the chance to work with genius. Supreme talent creates possibility. The enterprising leader will welcome it.
2. Know your job and know your man:
There is no substitute for knowledge. Hoddle takes time to understand his man, so he can motivate him at a deeper level. Mourinho takes time to understand physiology so he can discuss injuries with his players, earning for himself ‘credit, respect, admiration’. And your team need to know you are a step ahead. ‘How many times I have predicted things with my players and they happened? Many times – and that gives you credit and a better leadership. An example at half-time: “Boys, in this match if we go to the last 15 minutes with a draw they will take risks and we will win it.” If that happens ... the players say this coach is top!’
3. Offer friendship:
You cannot be friends with every player. But for Mourinho, making the offer of friendship – welcoming his talented charges as something resembling younger brothers – has delivered success, time and again.
4. Focus on the team:
Healthy team dynamics are crucial. If the leader can focus on the needs of the team and get his star player(s) to do so too, then the spotlight will move away from the individual and somehow illuminate the whole group.
5. Do it all with humility:
Once again, humility is a powerful trait in a leader. There is something inspiring about the way in which the 62-year-old Warnock was prepared to be changed by the young genius of Taarabt, about Mancini’s willingness to apologise when he gets it wrong and about Mourinho’s recognition of his colleagues’ worth that would never, ever have him travel a class above his players.
PART FOUR
Personal Leadership
CHAPTER SEVEN
PURSUING A CAREER UNDER PRESSURE
THE BIG IDEA
Leaders are human beings too, pursuing a career just like the people they manage. By and large the further they get in their career, the greater the personal pressure leaders face. Expectations run high, demands multiply and the buck stops more definitively with them. The temptation in these circumstances to change your game plan is enormous: what if I’ve been wrong all this time? Alternatively a leader may decide to ignore what’s in front of him and refuse to adapt: I will stick to my guns no matter what.
High-profile football leadership is a vivid example of this challenge. The job of manager in the Barclays Premier League is one of the most publicly scrutinised in the world. Amateurs think they could do a better job; experts and critics voice their opinions publicly on a daily basis. And all the time there is the sense that a manager’s tenure is limited, and that his future employability depends directly on his team’s short-term performance.
In testing times, leadership becomes even more critical to team success. How the leader responds in the pressure of the moment will affect everyone in the organisation, and will most likely decide the success or otherwise of his own career.
THE MANAGER
In 2010, Brendan Rodgers took over as manager of Swansea City. After one season, he had secured for them a promotion to the Premier League that few had predicted. The following season, he guided them not just to safety, but also to an impressive 11th-place finish – and playing some of the most attractive football around. Just a few weeks after the season ended, he accepted th
e role as successor to Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool. What makes these feats all the more remarkable is Rodgers’ relative youth and limited experience as a first-team coach. Before Swansea, he had a total of just 11 months in the leading roles at Watford and Reading. And his professional playing career had come to an abrupt halt through injury at the age of 20. He became manager of Liverpool at just 39.
His Philosophy
Rodgers’ philosophy is based on two major principles. The first is around playing beautiful passing football. This includes imparting to local, home-grown talent the belief that, just because they aren’t Brazilian or Spanish, it doesn’t mean they can’t play that way. His second principle is around the club standing for something beyond its own boundaries. In other words the club needs to have a major positive impact on the local community, and give people something to believe in. ‘When I work with a team, it is typically about defending our cause, defending our beliefs and how we play. My philosophy is about playing attacking and creative football to win, but always with tactical discipline. Over the years in Britain, our players – especially British players – have been told they aren’t equipped to play this style of football. My philosophy is a fusion between British and European styles, tactics and ethos. I’ve been able to nurture and provide the cause around the principle of defending our belief in the game.’
The Challenge
All leaders experience pressure – and football’s leaders are no different. The unusual thing for football leaders is the relentless intensity and public scrutiny. Senior politicians understand this to some degree, as do many other national and international figures. The job has its compensations, of course – recognition and reward, at times on a grand scale. But the pressures remain very real, and almost invariably have career implications – both real and imagined.
Reality
The pressures come at all levels: long term, short term and instant. In the long term, top-flight managers feel pressure to go somewhere, to succeed, to build something, to leave a legacy. In the short term, the pressure is on to make good decisions and to produce instant results. Decisions include whether to play or not play a given player, to renew a contract or not, to play a particular formation or system on a particular day, to change things at half-time or to stick to the game plan, to hire a potential colleague or not, to pursue disciplinary action or not, to answer a press question head-on or to keep my counsel. The list is seemingly endless, and the challenges come thick and fast. And all the while, the distractions are there: recent defeats, recent victories, stakeholder demands and needs from players, executives, public, press and others. Instant pressure is what any leading athlete or any student sitting exams would recognise: the pressure to perform at the big moment. The feeling, right or wrong, that it’s now or never. It all hangs on this – can I do it?
The inner voice
Set alongside the challenges of reality are the challenges of the imagination. Almost all leaders – and competitors – know it as the ‘inner voice’. When British Olympic champion Sally Gunnell overcame illness to break the world record for the 400m hurdles in Stuttgart in 1993, her main emotion was sheer disbelief. She had just added World Championship gold to her Olympic gold – but the personal hurdles along the way had been greater than the simple wooden barriers on the track. Two years before, her biggest opponent had been her inner voice – or as her coach called it, the ‘duck on her shoulder’. She was a superb athlete, with amazing potential – and yet she says: ‘The voice constantly sowed doubts and negativity.’
Leaders of all hues suffer from a deep underlying sense of inadequacy. The acknowledged number one fear of CEOs is the fear of being found out. Do I really have what it takes? We look into a mirror and we know that deep down there is greatness inside. Then once more frustration sets in: ‘If that’s true, then why don’t I ...? Why can’t I ...?’ and the accusing voice takes over again. It is easy to assume that the primary leadership challenge is: ‘How do I get the most from my people? If I can create a consistently high-performing team, then we will all be happy and successful (my people, me, stakeholders, shareholders).’ But the reality is that the leadership challenge starts inside.
When Brendan Rodgers was first confronted by the tidal wave of daily responsibility at Watford, he admits he was dealing with anxiety: ‘I’d been a coach, and been in the background, but now I was in poll position. Yes, I think some fear drives you, I think it still does: fear of failure, fear to not let people down that becomes the lever to drive you on ... But I generally felt excited. There was a nervousness, taking those first steps. I was as prepared as anyone could be, but there were still those butterflies.’ Did he encounter the negative voice? ‘Yes, absolutely. Whatever I’m looking at, the glass is always half full and where there is a negative, there is a positive intention behind it somewhere. So my thought process goes to why is that a negative reaction, then look at the positive element of it. So there’s no doubt every sportsperson would go through those feelings of that inner voice, but I’ll always try to rebound off the positive voice.’
Walter Smith’s inner voice tries to kick in when he makes a mistake. He responds with a rational honesty: ‘I think if you’re in management, the first thing that you do realise is that you are going to get things wrong. You will make mistakes if you’re in a position where you have to make decisions. No one will ever make 100 per cent correct decisions in their management career. They just won’t. But you have to get the majority of the bigger decisions correct the majority of times. So my philosophy is to be honest with yourself. All the way through my management career I have tried to assess objectively my own performance as a manager. You have to be brutally honest in that respect.’
Alex McLeish freely admits, ‘I’ve still got the bad parrot that appears every so often, the negative parrot that appears and I get a bit of foreboding at times. However, throughout my career, I’ve been able to firmly dispel most of these thoughts.’ Writer and former tennis pro Tim Gallwey calls it interference. For Gunnell it’s a duck; for McLeish it’s a parrot. However it shows up, it can lessen a leader’s potential and reduce their effectiveness. All leaders have to deal with it, or it will amplify their pressure at every level.
The Story
We do not live in isolation. What we say, what we do, how we spend our time and energy – all these things not only define our own journey, but they impact on everyone around us. Great leaders tell great stories – stories that hang together, are relevant to their people, are engaging and compelling. A great story allows the leader to rise above the pressures – long term, short term and instant. And as the story unfolds, he is not simply navigating his own career path – his is creating meaning for other people.
It may sound suspiciously like a formula. But great leadership stories have three components that define them: a source of inspiration, a trajectory (some sort of life and career progression) and a goal (some sort of destination). They also have two foundational elements: a clear philosophy and the ability to learn and grow. These five components contribute to the leader’s story, impacting others and enabling him to pursue a career under pressure.
Where the Story Begins: Relying on your Source of Inspiration
All great stories begin somewhere. When we meet fascinating people, we want to know where they came from – what shaped the person standing in front of us. We want to know if that source could shape us too. Strong leaders will have a well-defined source of inspiration – someone or something that they recognise openly as having shaped them, and to which they look back when they need to make sense of life.
In football, as in other fields of endeavour, these sources of inspiration differ from one leader to the next. But almost every leader can give an example of a great figure from their own profession who continues to be for them a powerful anchor point.
Brendan Rodgers
Rodgers’ story began to take shape at Reading when he was a 13-year-old boy – not so much because of the football he played,
but because of the influence of a man he admired. ‘I played my first game at 13. Then, after travelling to various clubs, I got an offer to go to Reading at 16. The first-team manager at the time, Ian Bradford, was a terrific influence on me. I felt he had a real duty of care not only for me as a footballer, but also as a human being. So I gravitated towards him because of that feeling: he made me feel important.’ Rodgers would take that philosophy with him into his leadership for the rest of his career. But on a higher level, Ian Bradford simply inspired him to become a manager. ‘I look back now at what he did: first-team manager at the football club, and he used to pick me up from the airport and make sure I was home. He would make me feel important every time I was over [from Northern Ireland]. He would just do that little bit more for me and that would make me feel important and special. I sensed the real power and strength of the man. In those early days I could see how hard he worked. There was a real work ethic: he was the manager, but he was also locking up at the end of the day.’
