The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (26 page)

THE BIG IDEA

Leaders need to be excited by their subject and committed to their cause. Without it, they will not inspire. But the line between commitment and obsession can be a thin one,
and in high-pressure environments, it can be almost impossible to see where that line needs to be. Imagine a business leader in a crisis, working all hours at his desk. At one level, it is good for
him to be immersed. But how effective is he? And how long can he maintain the pace?

Managers in professional football are subject to the same traps. A series of defeats or poor performances – even a short series – creates pressure. The default reaction to this for
many is to seize the problem with both hands and to wrestle with it, day and night, until it is resolved.

The motivating force for leaders under pressure can often be fear; and fear can distort reality. So they can end up spiralling into reactive and poor decision-making, losing their perspective,
their health and potentially their job. Great football managers are able to work with fears, emerge from under the pressure and regain a perspective from which they can lead their team to improved
performance and get to sustained success.

Harry Redknapp is one of the great characters of the English game. A successful midfield player with West Ham United in the mid–late 1960s and early 70s, he played
alongside some of the true greats of the game: Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters, Bobby Moore. His professional league management career began in 1983 at Bournemouth, where he led the team for nine years,
building a reputation as a great judge of footballers and as an unfussy, straightforward leader. His break into the big time came at former club West Ham in 1994 where he produced a sustained
period of high performance. He is acclaimed as the man who revived the fortunes of Portsmouth Football Club, leading them in 2002 to promotion to the Barclays Premier League for the first time.
After a short time down the English south coast at Southampton, he returned to lead Portsmouth to their highest finish (ninth) in half a century, and later to FA Cup victory in 2008. In recent
times he led an entertaining and talented Tottenham side to their first ever UEFA Champions League season. The ensuing Champions League campaign saw Spurs beat AC Milan over two gripping encounters
to reach the last eight of the tournament. In November 2012 he was appointed as manager of Queens Park Rangers.

His Philosophy

Redknapp is a big-hearted leader who invests all of himself in whatever he does. He is passionate about football and yet he is extremely passionate about his family too, about
his country and about improving the lives of people less fortunate than himself. He holds dear values he would describe as old-fashioned: responsibility, duty, teamwork. He is committed to
attacking football, and builds entertaining sides. He is an uncomplicated man who despairs of trends in modern football, which he sees as eroding the traditional values of the simple and beautiful
game.

The Challenge to Balance

High expectation, instability, stakeholders, genius, triumph, despair – managers face them all. They all create pain in the moment – the short-term challenge. But
the long-term challenge to the leader in football is how to achieve and maintain a balance that will allow him to approach both the good and the bad times with equal ease, and to make the best
possible decisions at every turn.

Almost all the challenges managers face are a threat to balance. Turns of events on the field, distractions off it – they can all knock a leader off his chosen path. So significant are
these that Redknapp says he’s almost forgotten what balance is: ‘I mean, you go in in the mornings and you never know what is going to hit you. You can be with 50-odd footballers, kids,
everything. “Harry, we’ve got a problem with this kid. He’s got involved with a girlfriend whose previous boyfriend is a dangerous guy on the estate where he lives, and
we’ve got to move the family off the estate because they are in danger.” You never know what is going to hit you. Every day somebody’s not well, or the mum or wife isn’t
well, somebody’s children, there’s always something going on – and these things are obviously important too. You are responsible for everybody, your coaching staff could have a
problem – it’s really non-stop. Now with mobile phones you are never away from it, you are on call 24 hours a day really.’ One moment from Redknapp’s past tells the story:
‘When I was at West Ham, one of the players got arrested. He’d been in a fight up in Essex somewhere. So the phone goes at 3 o’clock in the morning and I’ve got family of my
own – it’s a horrendous time to get a phone call because you fear the worst – who’s ringing at this time of the morning? And someone says they are from the police and you
think, “My God, what’s happened.” It’s non-stop. You are always into it. I really find it very difficult to switch off.’

Deeper even than the most serious distraction though is the enemy we don’t see: fear. Fear clouds the judgement of leaders, turns us away from our deeply held values and beliefs, turns
challenges into stress, knocks us off course. When fear and not reason becomes the driver of what leaders do, then everyone around them suffers.

When fear becomes the driver

Arsène Wenger names a fear that many face – the fear of what people will think. ‘We have gone from a vertical society to a horizontal society where everybody
has an opinion about every decision you make, everybody has an opinion on the internet straight away. Basically the respect for people who make decisions is gone because every decision is
questioned. So one of the most important qualities of a good leader now is massive resistance to stress. Under stress you become smaller and smaller until you cannot give a message out any more and
that, of course, is something that is vital. Many people underestimate this challenge.’ Fear, then, hampers a leader’s ability to lead.

Sir Alex passionately agrees: ‘I see a lot of situations where a manager is under pressure and he’s not getting good results. Even though most of the players want him to do well and
try their best, somehow they can’t do it. They fail simply because the fear of the manager about the results at the time drip-feeds into the players’ minds. I see it all the time.
It’s the
Manchurian Candidate
, the drip, drip, drip in the head and eventually ... they give in. As much as they would like to do their best for the manager, you can see them
draining away. Some can pick themselves up, some can get out of it, some can recover, but I do see it happen – how that fear has a draining effect on the players when the manager is under
pressure.’

For many leaders, the deep underlying fear is one of failure. Rejection, inadequacy, not leaving a legacy – all of these are common; and all are entwined with the sense a leader has that
he might not succeed. As Redknapp simply puts it, ‘We all want to be successful in what we do – none of us want to be failures.’ For many in football, that translates very simply
into a fear of defeat on the pitch. Chris Hughton admits, ‘My fear is about losing games. In spite of all my experience as a coach and a manager, it has not got any easier. The fear is still
there.’ Redknapp shares that fear, and it is reflected in his reaction to a defeat: ‘I get so committed to it. The journey home afterwards – it’s just ridiculous really
– I could take a friend up to a game and I could not speak to him all the way home for three hours. I just want to shut myself off.’ And what fuels the fear for Redknapp is his great
passion for the game. It is hugely important to him and so, of course, he will feel defeat very deeply. ‘It’s difficult; it’s life-consuming almost. I mean if football’s not
going well, for me, I can get so low about it all. I’ve had a few bad experiences at Christmas when results haven’t gone well, and then Christmas is a nightmare. Then I’m no use
to anybody. I have the grandkids round – it’s sad, it’s pathetic really – but that’s how it gets me.’

Fear, however, has an upside. When moderated, it can drive passion, performance and right behaviours. Hughton recognises that in himself: ‘If anything, it makes me focus on preparation
going into games. I would like to think that I am better prepared going into games than I was a year ago and two years ago.’

A great perspective attributed to Mohandas Gandhi is that we live inside a circle bounded by our fears. In other words, fears limit us – our ability and desire to explore, to learn and to
perform. Imagine for a moment the inner circle being our comfort zone. There are many benefits to living inside the comfort zone – it feels relaxed, easy-paced, with no fears. However, over
time this can be dull, uninteresting, and unchallenging. If we step beyond our comfort zone, we find ourselves in the learning zone. Here the downside is clear – it is uncomfortable,
stretching, and can be quite salutary for us as we realise how much we do not know. Yet, it is interesting, challenging and potentially exhilarating – and is the place we need to be in if we
are to grow at all.

There is one more zone beyond this: the terror zone. Here, challenges become stresses, we become afraid and we learn very little. Life in this zone is not healthy and not productive. So leaders
need to be able to judge how to stay in their learning zone without creeping into their terror zone. They need to ask themselves: ‘How can I grow my learning zone and shrink my terror zone so
that fear comes less readily in moments of challenge?’

Arrest the Fear

When fear shows up, it needs to be dealt with quickly or it can become debilitating. Leaders experiencing fear of whatever type need first to stop the boat rocking.

The first thing to do is to identify the fear for what it is, and put it into context. It is said that the celebrated England rugby fly half, Jonny Wilkinson, would wake up on big match days and
feel the pressure of the day in his stomach so that he could not eat breakfast. Then he would recognise it, welcome it, go on to the practice field and kick dozens of goals before returning for a
big breakfast. Seeing it for what it is constitutes the first step; implementing some kind of routine response is the second.

After losing a game, a natural fear for Chris Hughton would be losing the next: ‘If we’ve lost on Saturday, then that night I won’t be in the best of moods. I accept that, and
so do people around me. Sunday is typically a hangover day. I put the defeat into perspective: if we lost a match against Manchester United 1-0 and played really well, then my level of
disappointment won’t be as great as if we’ve lost at home to a team that’s bottom of the division and we’re in trouble. That tells me what processes of recovery I need to
put in place. Then from Monday morning we are getting ready for the next match.’

What’s the worst that can happen?

The recent period of economic austerity in Europe has prompted a revival of the old English wartime refrain: ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ This has a very practical ring
to it, and is a genuinely useful principle of leadership. Mick McCarthy embodies this idea, not least because of his sense of perspective. ‘I’ll be honest with you; the fact that
I’m never ever going to be skint helps. I’m not going to be out of work because I have belief in myself and think I did well.’ This self-belief is also a practical antidote to
fear.

For Walter Smith, this calmness is accompanied by a natural instinct to take ownership of his own circumstances: ‘I don’t think any manager that’s worth his salt will sit down
and kid himself that he played no part in a defeat. You have to sit down and make an honest assessment of what’s gone wrong and at the time admit, maybe just to yourself, that you made those
decisions and they were wrong ones at the time. Perhaps you shouldn’t have made the decisions as quickly as you did. But if you’re going to manage properly, you have to know that there
will be times when you will make the wrong decision and you have to have the strength of character to carry on and continue to pursue the goals that you originally set out.’ Smith is putting
the defeat into the perspective of a larger goal; and provided that goal is not under threat, then the fear needn’t take hold.

What’s the best that can happen?

Positivity is also valuable. Stronger leaders are optimists. Not pie-in-the-sky dreamers, but forensically positive. Redknapp is deeply aware of the need for him to stay
positive during the tough times: ‘I can’t go in and let the players see that I’m down or that I think things are going wrong. As down as I can be at home or when I’m driving
the car to the training ground, once I walk in there if I’m going to be down then we’ve got no chance. It soon transmits to the players how you are feeling so you just can’t do
that.

‘You’ve got to come out every day and you’ve got to be up and you’ve got to be bright and you’ve got to get them all going again because otherwise the players will
pick up on that – they don’t miss a trick. So I find I have to be strong, I have to be positive. Every week is different, one game has gone on to the next game. OK, we got beat last
week – we’re ready to go again next week and make sure we get the result. When you do win it’s such a fantastic feeling! I drive home in the car and I can just be driving along
and I punch the air and people must think I’m mad! I can do that about 20 times on the way home.’

Sir Alex Ferguson believes himself to be lucky. Speaking in the days before the showdown matches at the end of the 2011–12 season he observed: ‘I don’t panic, I lost panic a
long time ago. But I certainly concern myself about Sunday’s game coming up. I concerned myself about last Sunday’s game because we are in an important time of the year now. You have to
have an optimism that something is going to happen for us on Sunday. The dangerous rat is the one that’s sat in the corner; I’ve got to hope that [the right result] can happen.’
This is rational optimism. On this occasion, it went the other way – but it’s this never-say-die attitude that infects the United players week in, week out – evident in their
frequent injury-time winners, most notably with the miracle at the Nou Camp in 1999 against Bayern Munich that saw United crowned champions of Europe.