The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (22 page)

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.

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.

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 the 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.