The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (31 page)

Easier said than done, of course. But Smith recounts that Souness had an interesting strategy: ‘When we arrived at Rangers, everybody got the impression of massive changes. In reality, the
changes were pretty modest: only three or four players brought in – Chris Woods, Terry Butcher, Graeme himself. We worked with a squad composed mainly of the players we had inherited. We got
an immediate reaction from them though, and won the championship and league cup in the first season.’ The management team appreciated the impression of the clean sweep, but did not get
carried away by it. They were at all times grounded in reality.

The legacy challenge

Towards the end of the 2011–12 season, Manchester United’s supporters were smelling blood and singing ‘City’s cracking up’. In the title race
United’s winning mindset was coming to the fore, just as City’s old losing mindset seemed to reappear. Jim White, writing in the
Daily Telegraph
, spoke of the ‘continuity
of success’ in the Old Trafford dressing room, where the ‘long-serving, medal-accumulating players pass on winning habits to new recruits’.

There was no crisis at Manchester City. Here was a club with new, ambitious owners, massive recent investment and seemingly limitless opportunity. Yet to seize that opportunity required a real
shift. For Mancini, the losing mindset was a deep underlying challenge that demanded turnaround action. The team he inherited from Mark Hughes in December 2010 was not in serious danger –
indeed a top-four finish looked possible. But they were not yet consistent, some of their expensive signings were not matching expectations and the great promise of the Abu Dhabi investment was not
yet coming good. Mancini faced the legacy mindset of ‘typical City’ – the club that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, that created anxiety when the match should have been
won and that always dwelt in the shadow of United.

So how would Mancini tackle this need for turnaround at City? ‘First you need time, because if you don’t have time then it’s difficult. You can’t work on the
players’ heads in one month, three months or six months. You also need luck because if after one year you can win, then it’s easy because the players follow you. You also need to work
hard. We worked hard, very hard, and they were not ready to work hard like we worked them in the last two years. But in the end if you win, the players are ready to do this. After that we work also
with their mentality because the players understand that it is not important only to play; it is important to win. They understood if we arrive in second position it is not enough, and we should
play always to win. We do this also during the training session. If you can understand this, you can change your mentality.’

Don’t declare victory too early

Had Manchester City declared victory too early after the investment? It is unclear how much of the initial posturing a year before Mancini’s arrival was media-generated,
but the signature signing of Robinho was to prove unsuccessful and initial momentum was lost. At Rangers, the huge first-year success of Souness was almost wasted, when the club failed to invest
– and Smith believes they did declare victory too early. ‘In our second season when we were looking to build even further and be stronger, we didn’t manage to spend the money that
was necessary to continue the improvement. Graeme Souness had been a fantastic player for us in the first season, but he was finishing playing. Terry Butcher who was our captain and on-field leader
broke his leg. We won the League Cup earlier on in the season, but didn’t have the size of squad to cover for injury and suspension, so we suffered towards the end.’ The club learned
its lesson though: ‘At the end of that season, we managed to do what we should have done a year earlier – invest greatly in the team, bring in another level of player and propel the
club to sustained success.’ Best-practice turnaround happens in both the immediate and the longer term.

The power of symbolic actions

One of the most powerful tools for shifting mindsets is symbolic action from leaders. With the new owners at Rangers came new management, and with the new management came new
players. Smith is sure that the freshness of the new blood made all the difference: ‘This vitality was a huge thing. All the players and staff who continued into the new era could sense it.
The owners had no need to physically go down into the dressing room ... Just the act of bringing a new manager, especially as high-profile a manager as Graeme Souness, made everybody in that
dressing room realise that the new owners were serious. They were not expecting the team to stay where it was.

‘Everyone knew that they had to rise to the challenge that was being thrown to them if they wanted to remain at the club. Success hadn’t been there for a great number of years, but
now it was expected once again. They were going to have to step up to the plate. The actions of the owners were as important as anything Graeme said or did in the dressing room.’ Smith has a
point. ‘Handling a crisis is not a one-man show. Each major stakeholder has to play their part: vision and investment from the board, ownership and commitment from the players.’ In
addition, clear, decisive action was taken at Rangers that left no doubt in the minds of the players about what was acceptable and what was not. At City, Mancini appeared to do the same: from the
training-ground regime to selling key players, he was also unambiguous.

Tony Pulis arriving at Stoke City took very forceful and early symbolic action that was also intensely practical: ‘Initially we were in a very difficult situation because we were a mid- to
low-table Championship club and surviving on gates of 11,000. We found it very, very difficult initially to attract players. We weren’t the biggest payers in the world, but luckily for me the
loan system had just kicked into place where you could actually take seven players on loan. We weren’t able to do much business when the transfer window was open, so as soon as we were able
to loan players we loaned fringe players from Premier League clubs. Players like Patrik Berger and Salif Diao arrived, which not only gave the club a massive lift, but also enabled us to attract
better players from Championship clubs. So we had a plan which we stuck to, we managed the resources available well and it worked for us.’

Symbolic actions reverberate throughout an organisation, and show that the turnaround leader means business: he will not easily be diverted from his task.

Transformational leadership is a contact sport

The words change and transformation are often used interchangeably. In fact, they carry quite different implications. Change is often fleeting. A manager can change the shape of
his team at half-time, and then change it back again when they take a two-goal lead. This change is not permanent. Transformation – like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly – is truly
radical. And there is no going back. What was required at Rangers in 1986 was a full-blown transformation. And what was demonstrated is that leadership of this type is a contact sport. It’s
all about how you engage with people. Walter Smith recalls: ‘It was important to demonstrate that what had been acceptable previously was acceptable no longer – and for that, actions
are initially as strong as words. I think once you are in the midst of the turnover, things naturally lift and naturally get carried away and there’s a freshness there that makes management a
little bit easier than it is over a longer period.’

One of the first things Souness had to do was make assessments – work out who would fit where and who wouldn’t fit at all. ‘These are the first decisions you make as a manager
and even if you don’t know for sure, you often have to make an early assessment. When you go in there are some players who disappoint you, some players who surprise you – so that early
assessment is important.

‘If you’re one of the players who’s been retained, you’re feeling good about yourself – but you’re also feeling some weight of expectation. You begin to
believe you have a role to play in getting to the next level and making this club great again. That’s the message that must be communicated to everyone. But words are easy. In football
especially you have a 90-minute period, sometimes two 90-minute periods in every week where you actually see your work – it’s actually there and it stares you right in the face. So when
we were asking players to change their mindset, then we were able to see whether they’re really shifting. Allowing for a little bit of time for a team to come together, we can see whether
that mindset is changing within the players who were previously there. On the majority of occasions, once you make your decision on a player and you’re quite happy with the way he’s
playing, they are the ones who have normally reacted in the proper manner and the ones that you’re happy to keep.’

The early contact is not always easy, and takes gutsy leadership. David Platt says of Mancini’s arrival at City that he was ‘never afraid from the beginning to ruffle feathers and to
confront people when they disagreed with him’. Just as Mancini would do with Manchester City ten years later, Rangers had to keep their eyes on the prize: ‘The most important thing was
achieving a lift in the whole club – a lift in everyone who played, everyone who supported and everyone who wanted to come into the new thing we were building. And as Rangers began to achieve
success, that created an expectation of more success and a next level of performance for players to rise to. Then they had to show they could handle that on a longer-term basis.’

When, during Smith’s second spell as Rangers manager, the severe financial situation necessitated that every player be made available for transfer, it took courage and openness for the
manager to break the news to the squad. This approach was rewarded in a way he did not expect. ‘What I never thought would happen was the strengthening of bonds both within the squad and with
the management. Because we put everyone up for sale, effectively every player was in a similar situation. We then went through a few transfer windows where we transferred some players and cut our
squad size down, and did everything that we were asked to do in a financial sense. We ended up with a squad of players that remained more or less the same for two full seasons, and they created a
terrific bond that as much as anything helped us through the situation. It may have happened by accident, but it was a factor in the team remaining successful despite the financial problems off the
field.’

Talk with people

While Smith’s arrival back at Rangers in 2007 originally looked like a turnaround situation of an underperforming team, within two years it evolved into a full-blown case
of crisis management that he could not have anticipated.

Interestingly, though a man of action to his core, Smith also knows the power of words. His first priority in the maelstrom was his team. ‘As soon as we were told that we had a problem in
a financial sense and that every one of our players was going to be put up for sale, I felt it was important to be straight with the players right away. So I held a meeting and explained the
financial situation to them and told them we had no other path to go down other than to make everybody available for transfer. I then had fairly regular meetings with them just to explain to them
where we were financially without going into minute detail. I explained to them why they weren’t getting offered contracts when they were coming to an end and being allowed to run out. And
looking back, to be quite honest, it was the right thing to do.

‘There was always the chance to talk, which is the advantage of having a small workforce of maybe 24 guys, roughly speaking. They are there every day. You’re in contact with them
every day. I don’t like to have too many formal meetings with the group – I like to keep these for when they really matter and when I’ve got something to really say. To keep
continued success going, you have to keep taking stock with the team on a fairly regular basis. If they’re at the top of the league, they’ll always imagine that they’re being
successful. But at times I had to show them that their performance levels had fallen. They might still be winning, because a lot of the time you can be good enough to still win while playing at a
slightly lower level. But I had to generate the spark to keep them at that high level. So I would use my instinct to know when a team talk would have real impact. Too many and you lose your impact;
too few and they think you don’t care.’

So his advice to a leader in crisis or turnaround would highlight regular, frequent, honest communication. ‘I would sit everyone down – and explain the situation on as honest a basis
as I possibly could to make them realise exactly where they are at the present moment, and where I hoped to be in the short and long term. And I would keep that level of honest sit-down,
clear-the-air communication going quite regularly in the short term. Once you settle down and start to get on with the turnaround, you still have to have these sessions so that everyone knows
exactly where you are – but at longer intervals. Football is slightly different in a sense, in that the world knows where you are anyway: your wins, your defeats, your position in the league
– it’s there for everybody to see – there’s no hiding place. But in any crisis situation there has to be a real honesty and some real straightforward talking done in the
initial part of it – to lead people out of it.’ Leaders in business will recognise this. Straightforward conversations about results – real and projected – are essential,
and not only with front-line staff, but also with management, board and shareholders.

‘In the crisis, chief executive Martin Bain and I were left with the task of the day-to-day running of the club, and I think when you have the problems in the manner that we had, then the
relationship you have with your chief executive is probably as important as any at the club. Martin was fantastic in helping me handle the overall situation. It was a hard time for him as well
trying to handle the club, keeping everything going and making sure that we had enough support to make us competitive on the field, while still trying to juggle with the banks and financials in the
background.’