Read The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders Online
Authors: Mike Carson
The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (16 page)
7. Positive response to pressure
Great teams respond to pressure as one. Glenn Hoddle recalls the 1981 FA Cup final where Spurs took Manchester City to a replay. ‘We had to learn from that first match
– we knew we had to change. We had a real open discussion from that; we all spoke individually. It was this dream and it was too big. All of us had gone through it and we wanted it so
badly. We got there as a team, we played well as a team, but at the big occasion we started to fragment. We all wanted to be the man of the match, and in a team sport that won’t
work.’ Spurs took the pressure on board as a team and won the replay 3-2.
So there they are – seven mindsets and behaviours needed in a high-performing team, football style. All seven need to be both coached and role modelled by the leadership
team, though, if they are to take hold and truly create a high-performing team at the front line.
The High-performing Leader
The leader of a high-performing team in a complex and changing environment needs to inspire both directly and from one step removed. He can curse complexity, technological
innovation and societal change, or he can choose to embrace them. He can be fazed by the scale of his team of staff, or he can create it himself, building trust and leading it to high performance
in its own right. In doing so, he can infuse it with his own personality and leverage it to tackle successfully all the challenges that present themselves.
High-performing leaders create high-performing teams – in football just as in other arenas. While individual priorities vary, most leaders will agree on the four major tasks to focus
on:
1. Understand the nature of the battle and the need for close allies:
Some will use the war analogy more readily than others, but high-performing leaders recognise the gravity of their task, and happily admit their need for support. In that
vulnerability lies a strength that will bring them success.
2. Create a high-performing leadership team:
This is a group of close allies – normally not more than eight to ten – in whom the leader has trust. He trusts them to both support him and challenge him, and
he knows he can delegate to them in their areas of expertise. They will bear his signature, so he needs to express his character through them. And he may wish to have as part of the
leadership team his playing captain, who takes his leadership philosophy right to the front line.
3. Build the environment for success:
The leadership team adds real value when it fashions an environment where success is inevitable. It does this by dealing with the pressing issues of the industry in which it
is working. In football these include complexity, technology and people; in business these three might translate to strategy, operations, IT and HR.
4. Create the high-performing playing team itself:
Finally, a leader’s focus should be on the people at the front line. The leadership team – from their war room, boot room or executive team room – need
to model and coach the key behaviours and mindsets they expect to see from those people. In football, these distil down to seven critical principles: collective belief, selflessness,
excellence, motivation, personal commitment, clarity and positive response to pressure.
As with many leadership arenas, football leadership has become a whole lot more complex. But the leader who can use his team of staff to bring simplicity out of the complexity
will win the day.
Delivering Results
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FIELD OF PLAY
THE BIG IDEA
Leaders establish a way of being in their organisations, through what they think, believe, say and do. They impart some sort of fingerprint – some DNA – that is
intimately associated with their character, which drives the behaviours and performance of their people and leaves a clearly defined legacy. Think of almost any society from any era. England of the
16th century, for example, is associated with seaborne trade, commercial flourishing and religious reform. All these were driven by the character of the leader, Queen Elizabeth, and the era is
naturally called Elizabethan. But she clearly did not do it all herself.
Leaders at all levels are judged by the performance of their people. From captains of infantry companies to heads of schools, leaders need their people to perform at the front line if they and
their organisation are to achieve their goals. In professional football, nothing is more public or more defining than the team’s results. From technical areas and half-time talks to technical
reviews and training sessions, every intervention counts. So how do football’s leaders ensure they inspire their teams to deliver world-class performance on the field of play?
THE MANAGER
Roberto Mancini established himself as a 17-year-old attacking footballer at Sampdoria where he won multiple domestic trophies and the club’s first-ever European
competition. Fifteen years later he left for Lazio where, under Sven Göran Eriksson, he again won multiple trophies, both domestic and European. As soon as his scoring touch began to desert
him, he announced his retirement and moved seamlessly into coaching as Eriksson’s assistant.
Mancini was an almost instant success as a top-tier manager, winning trophies at both Fiorentina and his former club Lazio, and working with a huge array of world-class talent. At
Internazionale, he led the club out of the shadow of their Milanese neighbours, rebuilding the Nerazzurri’s reputation over five years and taking them to an unprecedented three consecutive
Italian league victories.
In late 2009 he accepted the enormous challenge of revitalising Manchester City under the new ownership of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour. His first full season in charge brought an end to a
35-year trophy drought with FA Cup victory, and a first ever place in the Champions League. In his second full season, Mancini went one better and won the Barclays Premier League title after the
most dramatic of season climaxes to end the club’s 44-year wait.
His Philosophy
Roberto Mancini is a charming man with a core of steel. His philosophy is very straightforward: assemble great players and work extremely hard. By ‘great players’ he
means players with both the skill and the mindset needed for the task. ‘I have good players because you can’t win if you don’t have top players. But if you tell me they all look
like top players, then I tell you with some we need to work on mentality. You can look like a good player, but not have the mentality to win at the top level.’ And by extremely hard, he means
a relentless pursuit of excellence. As his assistant and former Sampdoria teammate David Platt comments, ‘Even winning the league did not alter that. After a break, it was straight back to
work.’
The Dimensions of the Task: Skills and Mindsets
Roberto Mancini was installed as Manchester City manager in time for the 2009 Boxing Day fixture against Tony Pulis’s Stoke. Presenting an immaculate and calm image, he
oversaw a 2-0 victory – and so began his journey to club success. It was not a simple journey though. To begin with, Mancini has some unshakeable views of how a team should work: ‘When
I started to do this job I wanted players with good mentality ready to understand my view, my mentality.’ David Platt observes a single-mindedness that alienates the less committed: ‘He
has a very strong work ethic. There is an Italian way of doing things which is professional, strong and committed, and he brought that with him. When he arrived at Manchester City he didn’t
say, “Well, I’ll hang around and look and see what’s happening and maybe change the odd thing.” He said, “I am going to come in and do it my way and that’s the
way we are going to do it and it’s as simple as that – because in the end, I am responsible for team performance.”’
Mancini may have felt he knew little of English football, but he wasted no time in getting to grips with the challenge. ‘It was difficult because I didn’t know this championship, I
didn’t know the English players, I knew only David. In Italy it is different. I had to adapt a bit to the culture. Sometimes this is not easy and the first six months were difficult because I
changed the training sessions, the method of training; and for the players it was also difficult for the first few months. However, in the first six months we improved a lot as a team, and we
fought until the last game against Tottenham for the Champions League place.’
Mancini had made a fair start, with City finishing fifth. But for his first full season in charge he started shaping the team in his image: ‘In the summer when I changed players, and
bought players that were for me good players, that month we start to work on their mentality and their attitude.’ There’s that word again – mentality – the mindset of
commitment and hard work. Mancini attributes it in large part to his small-club origins: ‘I had always this mentality even when I was a player and I wanted to play always to win. And from my
colleagues too I wanted 100 per cent because only by this can you arrive on the target. I didn’t always play for a top team – this was my choice because I wanted to play for 15 years
for Sampdoria and then three years for Lazio. I started playing for Bologna when I was young, but they were all small teams and with these teams who never won, we won everything. And I learnt this:
that if you are in a small team and if you want to win, you work hard and you can do everything. Also if you are not the top team, it is important that you have players with good mentality –
that you have teammates who say they want to win, they want to work, to improve.’
Mancini’s early work paid off: he managed to shift the mindset of the squad, and City’s trophy drought ended with the FA Cup. In Mancini’s view, that was a turning point:
‘I think we changed our mentality after the FA Cup. We started to believe in ourselves. When you arrive in a club that has not been winning, you need to win one title. It’s not
important [if it’s the] FA Cup or Carling Cup – it’s important to start. When you start to win, the mentality changes. And the players are human beings – if every day you
work hard and if you still don’t achieve your goals after one or two years the players can go down. If instead you work hard and in the end you win a title, your job becomes easier. It is
never easy to do this job; but when you win your car is full, everybody is with you. When you lose you are alone.’
Preparation is everything
Football matches themselves are intense bursts of activity in the flow of the work that the manager, staff and players do together over weeks and months. Getting the pacing
right is all-important. Mancini’s approach is to even out the workload: ‘Before the game we spend a lot of time together. I believe you should work every day during the week to prepare
the game, because the day of the game the players have pressure. Usually I speak ten minutes with the players before the game and maybe another five minutes in the dressing room. The day of the
game I don’t think they need a lot of this because if you are a good manager you explain everything during the week on the training ground.’
In the run-up to the match, one of the manager’s tasks is to help his players into the right frame of mind for their burst of high performance. Much of the preparation is personal. Glenn
Hoddle recalls his own preparation as a player, involving getting detached, listening to music and using visualisation techniques. Then he’d drive to the ground, visualising how he was going
to play. Where his manager really helped him was in two areas: guidance on his tactical role on the team, and helping him to stay positive: ‘I would also have to think about positive things.
You can learn from your negatives, of course, but people don’t learn enough from their positives. As a player and as people we always analyse when we play bad or when something goes bad. We
don’t analyse enough when things are going really well – we take that for granted. I’ve found with experience how to deal with those fears and those anxieties I had when I was
younger, and I’ve tried to hand that on to my players as a coach and get them to learn that early. If you haven’t played that well in a match – well, there must have been one or
two things that you did well because you are back in the team again. So, an hour before kick-off, focus on the strengths that you have got and learn from the good things that happen to you. Grasp
hold of them, then step back into the arena and play again.’
Hope Powell reinforces both Mancini’s view of the flow of preparation and Hoddle’s commitment to the positives. She adds to that a clear message of ownership: ‘We have meetings
every day with players where I give them ownership. We do a lot of group work, scenarios, what happens if? what would you do if? We have a lot of unit meetings – the back four and the
goalkeeper, the midfield and the front three – and for each unit we ask what’s your role within the overall philosophy? Then I get them to share it with each other. What I am trying to
do more and more is get the players to own their performances rather than leaving it all to the manager. They own the game. Then when we’re leaving for the stadium, it’s just about
reinforcing the work that we’ve done in training: a gentle reminder of what the job is, remember what we’re good at, remember what we can do, what your role is, what your
responsibilities are.’
One thing the managers all point to is de-emphasising the Big Event. All the preparation is done before. The well-prepared team arrives at the field of play confident in its ability to deal with
whatever comes. Such a team has no need for pre-match hype; they are professionals, out to do their job to the best of their very considerable ability.
The Training Ground
Training is not just about honing footballing skills. At Chelsea, Carlo Ancelotti built great rapport with the players through the professional setting of the training ground:
‘I gave to the players all my experience, everything because I found a fantastic group. The English players were the symbol of the team: Joe Cole, Ashley Cole, Lampard, Terry – they are
great professionals. The English players surprised me because on the pitch they are really professional. Outside the pitch I don’t know, but on the pitch nothing compares, not the French or
Italians, because you have to push the French to work hard. The same is true with the Italian players – you have to push them too. The English you have to push to stop! I felt really good
about the group, we had a very good relationship.’