The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (19 page)

Leadership and management expert Professor Keith Grint of Warwick University defines these categories vividly. One approach is ‘command’. We don’t often think of leaders as
commanders, except perhaps in the military. In fact, football managers quite often use command. It is the act of ‘taking charge’ and imposing a solution. It provides little or no room
for discussion or disagreement, and is a sound approach in a crisis. When the going gets tough, people become worried and unsure. They look for direction – and commanders provide certainty
and answers.

When the team is
not
in a crisis, the question then becomes: is this something we’ve faced before – something to which there is a clear answer? If the answer is yes, then it
will respond to well-tried methods. It is a ‘tame’ problem. This is ‘management’. The manager is about rolling-out things that have been done before, where the degree of
certainty is high. The problem may feel like a puzzle – may even be quite complicated – but there is a solution, and the manager engages in a familiar process to solve it.

If it is not something we have faced before, and there might well not even
be
a clear answer, then we’re into ‘leadership’. Grint calls these challenges ‘wicked
problems’. In football, this could be about unusual individual behaviour, about a club near to bankruptcy, about a critical injury or about facing opponents who on paper are better in every
department. The leader will need to ask questions. He will often hear himself saying: ‘I’ve never seen this problem before; I need to get people together to work out what to
do.’

Mancini is a natural commander. As a player he was known for his assertiveness with his colleagues. Sven Göran Eriksson was Mancini’s coach at Sampdoria where he observed his young
colleague’s natural leadership: ‘He wanted to be a manager even while he was a player. He was the coach, he was the kit man, he was the bus driver, everything. He wanted to check that
everything was in place before training. Sometimes I would have to tell him: “Mancio, you have a game to play on Sunday. You’ll be exhausted if you have to control everything.”
But he was like that.’ Perhaps the young Mancini recognised this in himself: ‘I thought this when I was 12 years old – that I wanted to be a manager. When I started to play
football I thought I would want to be a manager. When I finished playing football this was still in my head.’

Arriving at a Manchester City starved of success, Mancini the natural commander simply said: this situation needs turning around. I know what to do here. If we do it, we will succeed. If we
don’t, we will fail. In the end the margin to win the title could barely have been smaller. But Mancini’s strong leadership delivered success and, although he has since moved on, his
fans are now legion. Or, as he would put it, there are many people in his car.

The Gift

While the delivery of results in top-flight football is an almost unique challenge, there are interesting lessons for a wider leadership audience. Football’s leaders, like
business leaders, would agree that the underpinning dimensions of the task are the skills and mindsets in the team. Then there is a six-stage flow from preparation to fall-out that enables repeated
success.

Above all of these, though, is an understanding of the problem. Does the challenge require management, leadership or command? There is something inspirational about Mancini. He
is a commander in turnaround, a leader with conviction. He is a man who does not seek the approval of others, yet is genuinely concerned with the feelings of the players he has to leave out of the
team. He is also a serial winner.

Success inspires – people follow winning leaders. Mancini knows full well that the more he wins, the easier it becomes to lead. But he also knows he has been given a gift: ‘To be a
top player means you have been given a gift. I had a gift from my Father. Then after, I need to work hard.’ The world’s most successful leaders all have gifts that set them apart from
their peers – gifts of ability, strength, insight or just plain circumstance. The leader who recognises this adds to his qualities humility – and that is inspirational indeed.

THE BIG IDEA

Genius is a mystery. Why could Mozart compose at the age of five? Why could Albert Einstein see beyond the scientific horizon of his day? The debate may continue forever around
what we are born with, what we are born into and what we are taught, but there is no doubt that in every possible field there is truly exceptional talent.

Leaders at the top of their game will meet genius. Market forces left unhindered will ensure that the best talent rises to the top. When we do meet it, it is thrilling, captivating – and
almost always unpredictable.

Genius brings challenge. People – especially young people – endowed with huge ability need careful, thoughtful and strong leadership if they are to realise their potential without
negatively affecting themselves and others. Perhaps nowhere is this played out more visibly than in the world of top-flight football.

José Mourinho can reasonably lay claim to being one of the best coaches in world football. The jury of his peers would agree: both Pep Guardiola and Diego Maradona have
gone on record as naming him the world’s best coach, while Arrigo Sacchi of Italy has called him ‘phenomenal’.

Famously nicknamed ‘The Special One’, Mourinho came to English public attention as the architect of Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea, moving to Stamford Bridge in 2004 following
Primeira Liga and Champions League success with Porto. With Chelsea he won the Barclays Premier League in his first two seasons and the FA Cup in his third, but Champions League success eluded him
and he moved in 2008 to Internazionale in Milan. There he won his second Champions League title during his second season, sweeping all before him to achieve the outstanding treble of domestic
league, domestic cup and European league. In 2010 he moved once more – to Real Madrid, where he won the Copa del Rey in his first season and La Liga in his second. This title success was
record-breaking in that Real Madrid reached 100 points, scoring 121 goals in the process. June 2013 saw him return for a second spell in charge at Chelsea.

Mourinho has arguably encountered, encouraged and managed more varied and outrageous football talent than any other coach. He strides across the landscape of modern football in its new, global
era, recruiting the best and motivating them to deliver on their excellent potential, and has led the greatest footballing talents in the world.

His Philosophy

Mourinho is convinced that great leadership is founded first on great knowledge. He is flattered by the suggestion that if you can lead at the top of professional football, you
can lead anywhere – but does not necessarily believe it. ‘I think one of the most important qualities in someone that leads is that the ones that you lead recognise in you a big
knowledge of the situation. So you have to know a lot about the area you are working in. I’m not saying that if you know a lot about football you can automatically be a leader in football. I
am saying if you don’t know a lot about football you cannot lead. That’s the main point for me.’ Hot on the heels of knowledge though comes a profound understanding of people.
‘I have to say we are speaking about men. We are speaking about human beings and human sciences. So is football a sports science? I think it is probably a human science and not a sports
science.’

The Challenges

Confronted with the undoubted challenges of managing outrageous talent, Mourinho simply counts his blessings: ‘The toughest thing is when you don’t have that talent!
I have never had a problem with working with that special talent, never, I never had that. I never understood when people say that is a problem, or you can have a special talent but not two or
three or four. I want 11 special talents! Maybe I was lucky, maybe I wasn’t, but it was never a problem.’

Mourinho has a point. Why would anyone
not
want to have a genius in their organisation? And yet questions can arise: is this person just too much trouble? Is he good value for effort
expended? Or will managing him take too much of my focus, to the detriment of the rest of the team? Of course, Mourinho is used to leading a team full of star talent – and that provides a
different landscape and subtly different challenges from the case where someone is head and shoulders above their peers. Nonetheless, he has mastered the art – and, like many other football
leaders, has achieved great results with world-class talent. For sure, Mourinho has been amazingly successful in this regard – perhaps a sign of his own genius. But what does he actually do
that is so successful?

Like all leaders of supreme talent, he must address – consciously or unconsciously – at least five challenges.

Imbalance in the relationship

For a leader working with true genius, a sense of imbalance can easily creep in. As Rangers manager, Walter Smith brought the stunning talent of Paul Gascoigne to Ibrox. He took
to heart a comment in a newspaper column made by Scottish comedian Billy Connolly after a high-profile Paul Gascoigne transgression: ‘You have to live with the genius, the genius
doesn’t have to live with you.’

Add to that imbalance the risk of player arrogance. Where does self-belief end and the unpalatable begin? Cristiano Ronaldo scores a breakthrough goal for Portugal at the 2012 European
Championships, runs away and stands apart, beckoning his teammates to come and pay him homage. Play acting or divisive? A leader needs to deal with any such imbalance in order to manage his
team’s talent successfully on and off the field.

Capacity to damage others

If genius is not handled with extreme care, resentment and divisions can quickly appear. From Milan to Chelsea, Carlo Ancelotti is no stranger to the challenge of working with
genius: ‘The behaviour of these players is very important for the team. You find a talent who is unselfish and motivated for the team. This is the key, and that’s very difficult to find
– a talent who is unselfish. You have to use the relationship to give him the possibility to understand that the talent is important for the team and not for him – but this is very
difficult. Rarely I have found players with talent who are unselfish. It is deep in their personality I think.’ Can he name one? ‘Kaka.’

Capacity to damage themselves

Genius is so often brittle. The notion of a ‘flawed genius’ is an all-too-common one. Stories from the artistic genius of Vincent van Gogh to the musical genius of
Amy Winehouse show us that the flaw can have the direst consequences. Whether from the pressure to perform, from the intense scrutiny, or from too close an identification of the man with his
talent, people of extreme talent appear to have increased capacity to damage themselves.

Living up to expectations

People pay to see genius, and are thrilled when it expresses itself. From a Rooney derby-winning bicycle kick through to the beautiful passing football of Xavi and Iniesta,
genius seizes the imagination. One of the great tasks of a leader is how to provide the ideal climate for that genius to flourish. Too much expectation, and the genius can crumble. Too little
expectation, and under-performance creeps in.

Maintaining stability

Every leader will recognise the value of stability. When Michael Boyd took over as artistic director of the world-famous theatre group the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002, he
observed that the growth of individual stardom and of a hire-and-fire culture had begun to erode the group’s foundations. Recalling his time with a Moscow company where a single artistic
director had held a post for 20 years, he noticed how there was a ‘tremendous sense of shared language and a depth of human interchange’ between the actors. So what is the right message
to supreme talent: dispensable or indispensable? Neither seems quite right: keeping genius happy and maintaining stability is not a trivial challenge.

What Imbalance?

The Mourinho approach to the imbalance question is typically robust. One senses there is no question of his feeling less talented or somehow awed by genius. Logically, why would
a man of his track record and ability have a problem striking a healthy, balanced relationship with talented footballers? And nor does he see himself as in any way superior. They are professionals
together: his role is to lead; theirs to play.