The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders

by Carson, Mike

  ‘Our first game against Blackburn Rovers, we played really well in the match, had just a little bit of luck and scored twice late on to get three very valuable points. That gave the lads confidence heading into the Christmas period. One way or the other we just seemed to deal with injury setback after setback. By the time we played Manchester City on New Year’s Day we had midfield players playing in full-back positions, we had centre forwards having to drop back and play in midfield ... But all in all we had gained a bit of spirit at that time and the players saw it through and actually won the game in the very last minute. It is remarkable because a couple of days later we travelled to Wigan and won at Wigan. Now whether we would have won at Wigan had we not won against Manchester City is always debatable, but as the great Jonny Giles once said to me, “Ifs, buts and maybes – if you keep them out of the equation you may be able to think a bit more clearly.”’

  O’Neill brings with him into a turnaround situation an energy that is both practical and positive. He welcomes the chance to address low confidence, and seems to bring about early results almost by sheer force of character. Once they got going, his Sunderland side hit a run of form, their confidence growing by the week, proving the value of early results.

  Shifting mindsets

  Like any turnaround leaders, football managers find that shifting behaviours in their people is critical. Arriving at Rangers, Graeme Souness and Walter Smith found some things that needed to change. When players have become convinced they are second best (or worse), they can begin to behave negatively or disruptively both off and on the field. Complaining, blaming, getting angry, arguing, dropping heads, making unforced errors. All of these behaviours are detrimental to any team – but especially to a high-profile football team looking for rapid improvement. Gérard Houllier’s fourth foundational value is ‘be a winner’. Smith, Mancini and others speak of ‘a winning mentality’ and ‘shifting mindsets’. But what does this actually mean?

  Returning to the idea of the iceberg, we can only achieve lasting change to our behaviours if we do shift our mindset. A manager can tell a player to stop complaining, and he may well do so – for a while. But unless he shifts the feeling of injustice that has led to his behaviour, he will simply return to the complaining.

  The behaviours Souness and his assistant manager Smith encountered were being driven by a losing mindset – and they had to address it head-on in order to achieve lasting change. ‘We had a group of players who hadn’t won a championship for nine seasons. At Rangers, that’s probably been the longest spell for 60, 70, 80 years. Nine years before, at the same time as Celtic began their championship-winning run, Rangers themselves had a good team. But Celtic had a terrific team and they went on to win nine straight titles under a fabulous leader, Jock Stein. Rangers were reaching European finals, winning cups, and having good runs in Europe, but Celtic’s dominance and a lack of investment at Ibrox created this losing mindset. When success is elusive, players start to consider that that’s normal and that they can’t rise above it. It was important to instil in them the belief that those days are over and there’s going to be a total change.’

  Easier said than done, of course. But Smith recounts that Souness had an interesting strategy: ‘When we arrived at Rangers, everybody got the impression of massive changes. In reality, the changes were pretty modest: only three or four players brought in – Chris Woods, Terry Butcher, Graeme himself. We worked with a squad composed mainly of the players we had inherited. We got an immediate reaction from them though, and won the championship and league cup in the first season.’ The management team appreciated the impression of the clean sweep, but did not get carried away by it. They were at all times grounded in reality.

  The legacy challenge

  Towards the end of the 2011–12 season, Manchester United’s supporters were smelling blood and singing ‘City’s cracking up’. In the title race United’s winning mindset was coming to the fore, just as City’s old losing mindset seemed to reappear. Jim White, writing in the Daily Telegraph, spoke of the ‘continuity of success’ in the Old Trafford dressing room, where the ‘long-serving, medal-accumulating players pass on winning habits to new recruits’.

  There was no crisis at Manchester City. Here was a club with new, ambitious owners, massive recent investment and seemingly limitless opportunity. Yet to seize that opportunity required a real shift. For Mancini, the losing mindset was a deep underlying challenge that demanded turnaround action. The team he inherited from Mark Hughes in December 2010 was not in serious danger – indeed a top-four finish looked possible. But they were not yet consistent, some of their expensive signings were not matching expectations and the great promise of the Abu Dhabi investment was not yet coming good. Mancini faced the legacy mindset of ‘typical City’ – the club that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, that created anxiety when the match should have been won and that always dwelt in the shadow of United.

  So how would Mancini tackle this need for turnaround at City? ‘First you need time, because if you don’t have time then it’s difficult. You can’t work on the players’ heads in one month, three months or six months. You also need luck because if after one year you can win, then it’s easy because the players follow you. You also need to work hard. We worked hard, very hard, and they were not ready to work hard like we worked them in the last two years. But in the end if you win, the players are ready to do this. After that we work also with their mentality because the players understand that it is not important only to play; it is important to win. They understood if we arrive in second position it is not enough, and we should play always to win. We do this also during the training session. If you can understand this, you can change your mentality.’

  Don’t declare victory too early

  Had Manchester City declared victory too early after the investment? It is unclear how much of the initial posturing a year before Mancini’s arrival was media-generated, but the signature signing of Robinho was to prove unsuccessful and initial momentum was lost. At Rangers, the huge first-year success of Souness was almost wasted, when the club failed to invest – and Smith believes they did declare victory too early. ‘In our second season when we were looking to build even further and be stronger, we didn’t manage to spend the money that was necessary to continue the improvement. Graeme Souness had been a fantastic player for us in the first season, but he was finishing playing. Terry Butcher who was our captain and on-field leader broke his leg. We won the League Cup earlier on in the season, but didn’t have the size of squad to cover for injury and suspension, so we suffered towards the end.’ The club learned its lesson though: ‘At the end of that season, we managed to do what we should have done a year earlier – invest greatly in the team, bring in another level of player and propel the club to sustained success.’ Best-practice turnaround happens in both the immediate and the longer term.

  The power of symbolic actions

  One of the most powerful tools for shifting mindsets is symbolic action from leaders. With the new owners at Rangers came new management, and with the new management came new players. Smith is sure that the freshness of the new blood made all the difference: ‘This vitality was a huge thing. All the players and staff who continued into the new era could sense it. The owners had no need to physically go down into the dressing room ... Just the act of bringing a new manager, especially as high-profile a manager as Graeme Souness, made everybody in that dressing room realise that the new owners were serious. They were not expecting the team to stay where it was.

  ‘Everyone knew that they had to rise to the challenge that was being thrown to them if they wanted to remain at the club. Success hadn’t been there for a great number of years, but now it was expected once again. They were going to have to step up to the plate. The actions of the owners were as important as anything Graeme said or did in the dressing room.’ Smith has a point. ‘Handling a crisis is not a one-man show. Each major stakeholder has to play their part: vision and investmen
t from the board, ownership and commitment from the players.’ In addition, clear, decisive action was taken at Rangers that left no doubt in the minds of the players about what was acceptable and what was not. At City, Mancini appeared to do the same: from the training-ground regime to selling key players, he was also unambiguous.

  Tony Pulis arriving at Stoke City took very forceful and early symbolic action that was also intensely practical: ‘Initially we were in a very difficult situation because we were a mid- to low-table Championship club and surviving on gates of 11,000. We found it very, very difficult initially to attract players. We weren’t the biggest payers in the world, but luckily for me the loan system had just kicked into place where you could actually take seven players on loan. We weren’t able to do much business when the transfer window was open, so as soon as we were able to loan players we loaned fringe players from Premier League clubs. Players like Patrik Berger and Salif Diao arrived, which not only gave the club a massive lift, but also enabled us to attract better players from Championship clubs. So we had a plan which we stuck to, we managed the resources available well and it worked for us.’

  Symbolic actions reverberate throughout an organisation, and show that the turnaround leader means business: he will not easily be diverted from his task.

  Transformational leadership is a contact sport

  The words change and transformation are often used interchangeably. In fact, they carry quite different implications. Change is often fleeting. A manager can change the shape of his team at half-time, and then change it back again when they take a two-goal lead. This change is not permanent. Transformation – like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly – is truly radical. And there is no going back. What was required at Rangers in 1986 was a full-blown transformation. And what was demonstrated is that leadership of this type is a contact sport. It’s all about how you engage with people. Walter Smith recalls: ‘It was important to demonstrate that what had been acceptable previously was acceptable no longer – and for that, actions are initially as strong as words. I think once you are in the midst of the turnover, things naturally lift and naturally get carried away and there’s a freshness there that makes management a little bit easier than it is over a longer period.’

  One of the first things Souness had to do was make assessments – work out who would fit where and who wouldn’t fit at all. ‘These are the first decisions you make as a manager and even if you don’t know for sure, you often have to make an early assessment. When you go in there are some players who disappoint you, some players who surprise you – so that early assessment is important.

  ‘If you’re one of the players who’s been retained, you’re feeling good about yourself – but you’re also feeling some weight of expectation. You begin to believe you have a role to play in getting to the next level and making this club great again. That’s the message that must be communicated to everyone. But words are easy. In football especially you have a 90-minute period, sometimes two 90-minute periods in every week where you actually see your work – it’s actually there and it stares you right in the face. So when we were asking players to change their mindset, then we were able to see whether they’re really shifting. Allowing for a little bit of time for a team to come together, we can see whether that mindset is changing within the players who were previously there. On the majority of occasions, once you make your decision on a player and you’re quite happy with the way he’s playing, they are the ones who have normally reacted in the proper manner and the ones that you’re happy to keep.’

  The early contact is not always easy, and takes gutsy leadership. David Platt says of Mancini’s arrival at City that he was ‘never afraid from the beginning to ruffle feathers and to confront people when they disagreed with him’. Just as Mancini would do with Manchester City ten years later, Rangers had to keep their eyes on the prize: ‘The most important thing was achieving a lift in the whole club – a lift in everyone who played, everyone who supported and everyone who wanted to come into the new thing we were building. And as Rangers began to achieve success, that created an expectation of more success and a next level of performance for players to rise to. Then they had to show they could handle that on a longer-term basis.’

  When, during Smith’s second spell as Rangers manager, the severe financial situation necessitated that every player be made available for transfer, it took courage and openness for the manager to break the news to the squad. This approach was rewarded in a way he did not expect. ‘What I never thought would happen was the strengthening of bonds both within the squad and with the management. Because we put everyone up for sale, effectively every player was in a similar situation. We then went through a few transfer windows where we transferred some players and cut our squad size down, and did everything that we were asked to do in a financial sense. We ended up with a squad of players that remained more or less the same for two full seasons, and they created a terrific bond that as much as anything helped us through the situation. It may have happened by accident, but it was a factor in the team remaining successful despite the financial problems off the field.’

  Talk with people

  While Smith’s arrival back at Rangers in 2007 originally looked like a turnaround situation of an underperforming team, within two years it evolved into a full-blown case of crisis management that he could not have anticipated.

  Interestingly, though a man of action to his core, Smith also knows the power of words. His first priority in the maelstrom was his team. ‘As soon as we were told that we had a problem in a financial sense and that every one of our players was going to be put up for sale, I felt it was important to be straight with the players right away. So I held a meeting and explained the financial situation to them and told them we had no other path to go down other than to make everybody available for transfer. I then had fairly regular meetings with them just to explain to them where we were financially without going into minute detail. I explained to them why they weren’t getting offered contracts when they were coming to an end and being allowed to run out. And looking back, to be quite honest, it was the right thing to do.

  ‘There was always the chance to talk, which is the advantage of having a small workforce of maybe 24 guys, roughly speaking. They are there every day. You’re in contact with them every day. I don’t like to have too many formal meetings with the group – I like to keep these for when they really matter and when I’ve got something to really say. To keep continued success going, you have to keep taking stock with the team on a fairly regular basis. If they’re at the top of the league, they’ll always imagine that they’re being successful. But at times I had to show them that their performance levels had fallen. They might still be winning, because a lot of the time you can be good enough to still win while playing at a slightly lower level. But I had to generate the spark to keep them at that high level. So I would use my instinct to know when a team talk would have real impact. Too many and you lose your impact; too few and they think you don’t care.’

  So his advice to a leader in crisis or turnaround would highlight regular, frequent, honest communication. ‘I would sit everyone down – and explain the situation on as honest a basis as I possibly could to make them realise exactly where they are at the present moment, and where I hoped to be in the short and long term. And I would keep that level of honest sit-down, clear-the-air communication going quite regularly in the short term. Once you settle down and start to get on with the turnaround, you still have to have these sessions so that everyone knows exactly where you are – but at longer intervals. Football is slightly different in a sense, in that the world knows where you are anyway: your wins, your defeats, your position in the league – it’s there for everybody to see – there’s no hiding place. But in any crisis situation there has to be a real honesty and some real straightforward talking done in the initial part of it – to lead people out of it.’ Leaders in business will recognise this. Straightforward conversations about results – real
and projected – are essential, and not only with front-line staff, but also with management, board and shareholders.

  ‘In the crisis, chief executive Martin Bain and I were left with the task of the day-to-day running of the club, and I think when you have the problems in the manner that we had, then the relationship you have with your chief executive is probably as important as any at the club. Martin was fantastic in helping me handle the overall situation. It was a hard time for him as well trying to handle the club, keeping everything going and making sure that we had enough support to make us competitive on the field, while still trying to juggle with the banks and financials in the background.’

  No engagement with significant stakeholders is wasted. In October 2009, Smith commented in one of his post-match press conferences on the extent of the financial constraints at Rangers, and explained how all of his players were up for sale. ‘It’s important to explain the overall picture to everyone concerned. When they see circumstances arising and decisions being made, both supporters and media can be quick to jump and blame people for making those decisions. If leaders in football have got a problem financially, then they should tell people that they have got a problem financially. Supporters contribute an awful lot of money to the club’s wellbeing, and if that money is not getting spent in the manner they would like, then they have a right to know that as well.’