The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football's Leaders (32 page)

No engagement with significant stakeholders is wasted. In October 2009, Smith commented in one of his post-match press conferences on the extent of the financial constraints at Rangers, and
explained how all of his players were up for sale. ‘It’s important to explain the overall picture to everyone concerned. When they see circumstances arising and decisions being made,
both supporters and media can be quick to jump and blame people for making those decisions. If leaders in football have got a problem financially, then they should tell people that they have got a
problem financially. Supporters contribute an awful lot of money to the club’s wellbeing, and if that money is not getting spent in the manner they would like, then they have a right to know
that as well.’

Likewise, Martin O’Neill is a great believer in talking to people in any form of turnaround. When he arrived at Aston Villa, the club could not be said to be in serious crisis – but,
as with every managerial appointment, the owner was looking for an early impact – a turnaround on a smaller scale. ‘Whenever you have time – let’s say you sign for a
football club pre-season, and you’ve got a number of weeks to work with them – then it’s worth having that individual meeting with players. At Aston Villa, I had a fortnight
before the season kicked off and sometimes in life that fortnight seems like six months, which was great. It gave me a chance, for instance, to convince Gareth Barry, who wanted to leave to go to
Portsmouth, to stay in order that things might improve. He hadn’t been involved in the England team for some time. So I sat down and had a conversation with him – and then he proceeded
to play his best football. Now not for one minute do I think that the talk had everything to do with that, but it did steady his mind. And he played so well for us that next season that not only
did he get into the England squad, in time he got into the England team and cemented his place there. Of course, for him personally, he has now gone on to Manchester City and has won medals, so it
has gone well.’

Low points will happen

Looking back on extraordinary success in both the turnaround and the crisis situations, it would be easy for Smith to forget the low points. But he is clear they happen:
‘At Rangers, the low point was in the second year. We didn’t do enough to improve on the first year’s work. That brought us down a little bit, but then we managed to improve and
get a few other players in and the whole place received a massive lift again. That was effectively the moment when Rangers went on and dominated Scottish football for that nine-year period.’
The lesson here is that a slump after the initial post-crisis success does not spell disaster. Once again, the challenge for the leader is to remain grounded in reality.

‘In many ways, Everton was a far bigger test than Rangers, where all the background circumstances were there for me to front a level of success. At Everton they weren’t, so we were
flying by the seat of our pants a lot of the time. It was a crisis: a period of intense turmoil, with a hundred small decisions to be made every day. The questions come from every angle –
they come from the team, from the bank manager, from the chairman – hundreds of things at once. The most important thing though is to show your people – your staff and your players
– that you’re leading and you’re not being affected by anything that’s happening off the pitch. That’s an important aspect of it. To show the confidence that
you’re going to get through it and you’re going to take them with you. That for me was the main leadership challenge in crisis.’ The leader in crisis needs to be calm and assured
– and Smith demonstrated those qualities again during his crisis-hit second spell at Rangers.

The Commander

Of Professor Keith Grint’s three styles of addressing a problem (command, lead, manage), the ideal one for crisis is command. He writes, ‘A
Critical
Problem,
e.g. a “crisis”, encapsulates very little time for decision-making and action, and it is often associated with authoritarianism. Here there is virtually no uncertainty
about what needs to be done – at least in the behaviour of the commander, whose role is to take the required decisive action – that is to provide the
answer
to the problem, not
to engage processes (management) or ask questions (leadership).’

In today’s leadership environments, many new leaders face something akin to crisis on arrival. In football leadership, someone has almost always been sacked – provoking a mini-crisis
in itself. Smith faced a graver than usual crisis in 2009, and (albeit in very different contexts) both he and Mancini on arriving at City faced the need for turnaround. Without generating hysteria
or causing unnecessary pain, in each instance both men took command of the situation. Essentially, that command style required three things:

Most turnarounds need delivering over two horizons. The first is the very short term: steadying the ship, so to speak. This is especially important in a true crisis, and is
where the O’Neill-style quick results are needed to steady the nerves. How long a leader has depends on the environment – but it’s typically months, and sometimes weeks –
never years. The second is the medium to long term – setting the ship on the right course. This is where the Souness, Smith or Mancini-style building to trophies is required. Here, the leader
may well have years – provided the trajectory is right. But no leaders in turnaround are given long if results elude them. Souness, Smith, Mancini and O’Neill all began their tenures
with wins. This is not essential, but it is highly desirable. In football as in business, it does not take too many reversals before questions get asked. The successful commander drives through the
short term and adapts for the long term. No wonder it only falls to a few to do it well.

THE BIG IDEA

Professional football at the highest level is a game punctuated by enormous highs and lows. For the football leader – just as for the business leader at the top of a
company with shareholders – the line between success and failure is thin and not always well defined.

Both joy and pain are ever present; and one gives way to the other with astonishing frequency in high-pressure environments. How leaders handle success and how they handle failure goes a long
way to defining them in the eyes of their own people and of a watching public.

Mick McCarthy has played and managed with distinction at the highest level of football. At international level, he led his country in separate World Cup final tournaments as
both a playing captain and as a manager. At club level, he played top-flight football with Manchester City in England, Celtic in Scotland, and Lyon in France – most notably winning Scottish
Premier League and Scottish Cup honours while at Celtic. While playing at Millwall in the second flight in 1992, he moved overnight from player into his first management role. He has moved role
only four times in 20 years: first to Ireland, then to Sunderland and on to Wolves, remaining in each post for between four and six years. His Sunderland team won the Championship in 2004–05,
and his Wolves team equalled the feat in 2008–09, leading the table for 42 out of 46 weeks. He would go on to be Wolves’ most successful manager in 30 years, leading them in three
consecutive Premier League campaigns. McCarthy made his fourth managerial move, to Ipswich Town, in November 2012.

His Philosophy

McCarthy appears to the watching public as a tough, Yorkshire-born former centre-half who eats people for breakfast. In reality, he is a very thoughtful leader of people who
leads out of decency, integrity and passion. He refuses to blame, or to complain. He takes ownership for his failures and his successes. He believes in setting and modelling high standards of
behaviour, and he believes in the inherent decency of people. His appetite for ownership and responsibility lies at the heart of his ability to deal equably with whatever triumphs and disasters he
encounters.

The Challenge

The 19th-century author Rudyard Kipling suggested we should seek to ‘Meet with triumph and disaster and treat the two imposters just the same.’ How many of us get
carried away with the ups and the downs of our lives and careers? When something goes well, we think we’re invincible. When we fail, we can begin to experience an abyss from which we fear we
will never escape. This black-and-white view of a world that has countless subtle shades of grey is one example of what psychologists call ‘crooked thinking’.

Consider for a moment the dangers of this brand of thought. One victory becomes in our minds a guarantee of great achievements and riches to come. For a football manager in the Premier League,
this is incredibly dangerous. The pressures on him to succeed are intense and come from a raft of people with considerable personal interest. Players look to him to lead them to glory, owners need
to see some payback on their often massive investments and the fans, week in week out, arrive at the ground expecting and demanding results. Equally, even a short run of poor or unexpected results
can prompt a leader to ask deep and unsettling questions.

Leaders in this situation can all too easily lose their sense of objectivity, and find themselves drawn down one of two dangerous avenues.

The trap of triumph

There is nothing wrong with celebrating success. Ignoring success – or skating over it too fleetingly – can lead to resentment in leaders and their people. McCarthy
is a great believer in enjoying the moment: ‘My latest success is always the best one. Getting to the World Cup finals with Ireland in Iran was just surreal. I am the manager that’s
taken the Irish team to the 2002 World Cup finals. Someone hit me and wake me up! So that was great, but then when I got Sunderland promotion that was better, getting up with Wolves and staying up
that was better, staying up a second year was better and whatever I do next will be better than all of them.’

Who would argue with the right of a cup-winning side to parade the trophy on a bus? Neil Warnock contrasts moments of triumph at Scarborough, Notts County and Plymouth with the QPR promotion
campaign of 2010–11. ‘At Scarborough when we got promoted, there were amazing scenes with an open-top bus ride through town. With Notts County, two promotions and two Wembley play-off
finals, two open-top bus rides – coming back up the motorway to Nottingham with all the flags flying – unforgettable. Plymouth had never ever been to Wembley – we got there and
got promoted. To see all the people who still talk about the open-top bus ride coming down the motorway from Wembley – grandads and young kids with their flags out of their doors, windows
– superb. At QPR, we’d been through the mill with all the point-deduction business. We won the league, got promotion and we never had an open-top bus ride, we never had a celebration
dinner, we didn’t have anything at all. It was a moment lost. Fans remember these moments all their lives.’

Warnock is right. Achievement deserves celebration – especially when hard work has played a part. It also allows leaders to show their gratitude publicly – managers to honour
players, owners to honour staff at all levels and the club to honour the fans. But success is fleeting. Ask just about any high-level, high-quality professional football manager. And because it is
fleeting, the leader who pays it too much attention opens himself up to dangers on two horizons. In the short term, the trap is to grasp at positives that are not really there, or not really
relevant (‘we had more possession than they did’), or to seize on a single win or a short run as a sign of turning a corner. When subsequent events prove the manager wrong, he loses
credibility. The long-term trap is even more dangerous. The scent of success is heady, and as an admiring world begins to celebrate a manager’s achievements, it’s very easy for him to
start believing his own publicity and then to miss the warning signs of the mire ahead. The same admiring world will be only too eager to cut him down at the earliest signs of frailty – real
or imaginary.

The slough of despond

The second of those dangerous avenues leads to becoming obsessed with failure. Four straight defeats for your football team do not make you an incompetent manager, but the
spiral from upset to despair is slippery and very common. McCarthy has never really suffered from this – although he admits he nearly went there as a player at Manchester City: ‘I had a
torrid time of it. The manager Billy McNeill left me in the team – he trusted me, which I appreciated. I remember it vividly. I had a month or six weeks where I struggled. I stayed in, I went
out; I drank more, I drank less; I trained harder, I trained less; I tried everything to rectify it.’ Characteristically, McCarthy took ownership of the situation and told himself to
‘just get on with it. I got myself back playing.’

Warnock’s blackest moment came in 2007 when Sheffield United were relegated from the Premiership just one year after their promotion. After a series of three defeats in the spring, they
achieved two great results under pressure against their closest rivals for survival: a 3-0 home win against West Ham and a 1-1 away draw at Charlton Athletic. Then they played Wigan Athletic at
home in the final match, needing only to avoid defeat to ensure Premiership status. On the same day, West Ham played at Manchester United – and needed at least a draw to survive.
Dramatically, West Ham won at Old Trafford – and Wigan won at Bramall Lane. The 2-1 defeat meant that Sheffield United were relegated by a single goal. ‘We had 38 points, which was
unbelievable – that would be mid-table some years, but we got relegated by one goal. It was like an arrow – really painful: the worst moment of my career. I stood with the rain pouring
down on me with a few minutes to go, knowing I’d got my boyhood club relegated.’ But straight away came the determination: ‘It felt unjust, but then again I was determined to show
[chairman] Kevin McCabe how good I was. I thought: right, I’m going to go somewhere else now and do it. I couldn’t quite do it at Palace, but that drove me on again ...’