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MANAGEMENT
SPECIAL Any Given Sunday
Mike Carson, Consultant, Author, Leadership Expert
If
you can manage a football team, you can lead anywhere in the world, says
Mike Carson
When it comes to the most popular clubs in the Barclays Premier League,
chances are the die-hard football fan will recall the names of the managers
before the top players. In football, it’s hard to isolate the manager from
the team that he handpicks and nurtures, taking full responsibility for
anything that goes wrong on the field. Not surprising then that most fans
have a love-hate relationship with the manager of their favoured team.
“Senior managers have among the toughest jobs in terms of leadership. They
are constantly in the spotlight in a challenging environment; though they
are called managers, they are actually leaders,” says Mike Carson,
cofounder of management consulting firm Aberkyn, and author of The Manager:
Inside the Minds of Football’s Leaders.
Carson spoke to 30 managers and former managers, who have a cumulative
experience of over 15,000 matches between them, in order to understand
their take on leadership. He believes that if a person can lead people in
sports, he can lead anywhere. In the corporate world, performance can be
predicted to some extent but not on the field. “There are fewer
regularities in what they do and the work is more prone to exogenous shocks
– dealing with injuries, discipline issues and unexpectedly poor
performance on the field,” he says. What Carson found most surprising was
the humility all these leaders possessed. For instance, Chelsea’s Jose
Mourinho strongly believes that his people are more important than him,
preferring to fly economy with his staff if everyone cannot be accommodated
in business class. Another common thread was the balance of empathy and
steel. “All the managers possess these two characteristics, only one would
be dialled up a bit more in some.” So while former Manchester United
manager Sir Alex Ferguson had more steel in him, Chelsea’s former manager
Carlos Ancelotti definitely scored higher on the empathy quotient. Managing
a football team in an era of high pressure-high expectations where the team
is expected to win all the time isn’t all that different from ensuring your
business posts profits quarter after quarter. There are investors who often
need pacifying, as well as owners who might get too meddlesome. Given this
kind of an environment, Carson says we are seeing the emergence of a new model
of leadership. “You need to know how to manage your players who know they
are gifted and are earning big bucks. We are seeing the emergence of a new
way of leading, where empathy and intuition score high,” he says. Arsenal’s
Arsene Wenger strongly believes in the power of good, old-fashioned values.
Viewing players as icebergs where only a part of them is visible over the
surface, Wenger has understood that it is what lies beneath that truly
drives them, and that is their beliefs, thoughts and emotions. This is what
he focuses on at the club, preferring to manage through values. Perhaps one
of the toughest things a football manager needs to do is deal with his star
players, all of whom come with sizeable egos. Carson prefers to call them
huge talents. It’s not very different from managing a star performer in a
corporate set up, especially someone who knows that he is destined for
great things. The most commonly quoted example here is Man U’s Alex
Ferguson. He advocated respect for the club and ensured that players knew
that no one was bigger than the club — it was there before them and would
continue after they leave, they were only a part of it. Ferguson also has
the distinction of being among the longest serving and most successful
managers ever; Carson distils the success down to building for the long
term, and building something bigger than yourself. It’s about making quick
decisions, focusing on people — especially investing in the next generation
— and most important, planning your own succession. Being a successful
leader also has a lot to do with the mindset. Carson advocates relishing
your role at the centre and getting your priorities right, accepting that
there are multiple involved parties and establishing a clear relationship
with each of them and working towards a shared vision. On whether
leadership, in sport or otherwise, is gut or science, he says, “There is a
lot of intuition based leadership and leadership sharpens the intuition.
The blend of the two is about the individual style of the manager.” The
important thing is that they’ve learnt to read people — to be able to take
on the spot substitution decisions on the field requires an acute
understanding of the players body language, and that is something all
managers must get right.
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