Let me start this 51st missive with a huge apology to my legion of dedicated fans and followers. A period of unprecedented mental disturbance has caused me to take my eye off many important balls, but a gap of nineteen days tests the patience and loyalty of even the most committed reader. Which leads me to think that I am probably writing only to Michael, my guardian angel, who is thankfully ever present and a source of great solace in times of need. So….
Dear Michael,
In a time of incredible sporting achievements, I have been musing on one of my favourite subjects: leadership. England now has four football clubs in the final of the two big European competitions. Is this cause to slap ourselves on our national back and bask in the glory of our brilliance? At the risk of deflating this jingoistic bubble all four teams are managed by foreigners and typically the teams involved have about three England-qualified players each. As usual in football it all comes down to who has the deepest pockets in a game that requires very deep pockets just to get past the bouncers at the entrance. That said, it’s clear that the quite magnificent comebacks by Liverpool and Spurs in particular, in the Champions League semi-finals were achieved in large part thanks to the genius of Jurgen Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino, their respective managers.
In my thirty six years of sports broadcasting I have witnessed a particular phenomena time and again, across a broad range of sports; namely the radical impact a new “leader” can have on a team, or indeed individual. Without changing the personnel, suddenly the team starts to perform and realise its full potential, frequently going from also-rans to world beaters. What’s the magic potion, the secret formula that permits this to happen? More often than not, the new person in charge oozes charisma. But there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s vital that the Manager (let’s use that as a generic term to cover all persons “in charge”) has the respect of his or her chargelings. Sometimes that’s achieved by previous deeds, but as Martin Johnson (one of English rugby’s greatest Locks and captains) discovered, that will only last so long if you don’t step up to the plate in your new role. In modern sport there are so many elements to success; tactical planning, attention to the tiniest of details, training regimes, fitness, nutrition, sports psychology, etc etc. The successful manager will almost certainly have recruited a great team of experts and specialists to handle all those different aspects. But ultimately the buck stops at the top. All the extraordinary feats that I can recall in the last sixty years have occurred with an extraordinary man in charge. Equally, many great teams have under-performed with an inadequate Manager.
There are so many different qualities required and not everyone has all of them. Brian Clough and Alex Ferguson were two very different characters, with contrasting techniques, but Clough took a very average Nottingham Forest team to the summit of Europe, while Ferguson enjoyed twenty six years at Manchester United, winning thirty eight trophies and becoming one of the legends of the game.
One of the interesting things to me is how people reach these elevated positions, in any walk of life. I spent thirteen years in the Armed Forces, where leaders were trained from the inception to lead. Everything we did was designed to teach us how to command the respect of our subordinates and how to make the right decisions in times of crisis, often under intense pressure. Maybe the greatest leaders are born, but in my mind you can learn to become a very good leader. You can certainly learn good management and that’s probably a crucial part of being a good leader. In peacetime, it’s true that a number of very senior officers reach their elevated status by being expert managers and by keeping their noses clean as the much maligned “yes man”. Those folk tend to get found out very quickly once the shooting starts!
I then spent over twenty years in and around the BBC. Here there’s a very different career path. Generally broadcasters broadcast and remain in that role, although there have been exceptions. For the most part the men and women in senior positions of management have come through the production side. This means that if you are a creative genius, an ideas person, who can bring great new programmes to air, or indeed improve on old ones, there’s a very good chance you will be promoted into senior management, often with no aptitude or inclination for your new role. Some learn the new skills required with relish, others don’t but not infrequently are promoted well above their level of competence.
It’s been intriguing to me as an outsider to witness the same thing happening in Education. Teachers, unsurprisingly, are trained to teach. Success in that role often brings elevation to higher positions, ultimately, for the chosen few, to Headship. Far from being teachers, those men and women are essentially Company Directors and eventually Chief Executives, running very large businesses with significant budgets, requiring great skill in personnel management, sales and marketing, PR etc.
For all I know the same could apply to the NHS, the Police , the Railways and a whole tranche of other businesses and services.
The European Tour was until quite recently run by former professional golfers. Realising that it had become a large, multi-million pound, worldwide business, the Board of Directors took the big decision to bring in a non-golfing Chairman with extensive high-level business experience. He in turn recruited a high-flying business Chief Executive who then revamped the Board, bringing in more non-golfers with broad business experience. He ruthlessly axed a significant amount of dead wood and recruited eighty new personnel to increase the expertise and dynamism across a broad range of activities. Professional golfers know how to play golf, not, for the most part, how to run a big business.
It’s an intriguing conundrum, with no easy answer, but I do know that I have witnessed a depressing amount of crap leadership from people who don’t understand the basics of handling people, perhaps the most important commodity in any operation.
The Managers of Liverpool, Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea are clearly much more than managers. They lead.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 