Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches
Page 2
When Ancelotti was at Chelsea there was a rocky period. His management was coming under scrutiny from the media as a result of some leaked briefings from within the club. After he held a press conference, Guardian journalist Barney Ronay wrote a revealingly accurate description of Ancelotti’s ‘Quiet Way’:
What today provided was a welcome draught of Ancelotti’s own wonderfully moreish charm. For the neutral, he has been a disarming presence at the heart of the Chelsea project, maintaining throughout his early successes an air of something jarringly wry and sceptical within the corporate labyrinth of the club’s managerial superstructure. Admittedly, this is almost entirely down to his rogue eyebrow, that arching salt and pepper caterpillar, perpetually humpbacked with what appears to be a sense of portable deadpan irony. The Ancelotti eyebrow seems to speak to us directly, offering its own subtitled counter-commentary on whatever conciliatory patter might be emerging from the Ancelotti mouth. It is a quality the English have warmed to. We understand eyebrow speak. The unspoken, the taciturn and the repressed: this kind of talk is our kind of talk.
(Guardian, 22 November 2010)
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Part One
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THE LEADERSHIP ARC
Chris Brady
There is an extensive literature around the concept of what we will call, in this book, the leadership arc. Whether it is the mid-2000s work of Ken Blanchard or George D. Parsons and Richard T. Pascale’s ‘Summit Syndrome’,* or even workshops taking place at the Wharton School, there is widespread recognition that the careers of even the greatest leaders follow a similar pattern.
Currently the average tenure of a FTSE 100 CEO is 5.18 years; for English Premier League managers it’s just 2.36 years (if Arsène Wenger is excluded from that equation, the average drops to 1.7 years). In Italy’s Serie A the average is 1.31 years; in Spain’s La Liga it’s 1.34 years. The longevity record is barely better in other sports. In the USA, a manager in the NFL (National Football League) has an average tenure of 3.4 seasons; a new manager in the NBA (National Basketball Association) can expect 2.4 seasons.
The end can often be sudden and brutal. The English professional leagues saw a total of forty-seven managerial dismissals in the 2014–15 season, and seventeen of those were first-time managers, many of whom will find it very difficult to get another opportunity to manage.* Furthermore, more than 150 coaches lost their jobs as a direct consequence of the instability caused by sacking the manager and the desire of the club to bring in a host of new staff. Other than for an elite few, reference to the merry-go-round of football management is far from reality; in the majority of cases their family has suddenly lost its main source of income. This is not a business for the faint hearted.
The parallels with business are very clear. Every week a sporting manager is subjected to the same scrutiny that a CEO receives with quarterly statements. As an English Premier League chairman once stated, ‘Every week 40,000 stakeholders turn up and tell me how they think I’m running the business.’ Everything in sport is compressed into the span of a single season, whereas the life cycle in business, before results can be validated, is likely to be around ten quarters or thirty months.
For both business and sport there seems to be an inexorable arc to the leadership lifespan in successful organizations, notwithstanding outliers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Bill Belichick at the New England Patriots or Gregg Popovich at the San Antonio Spurs.
Is such an arc inevitable, or is it possible to identify key tipping points, moments at which the leaders themselves can alter the course of events either by exiting of their own accord or by remaining in the post by changing the dynamic? Carlo Ancelotti’s career and successes in four of the top European leagues suggests both are possible, but require an early awareness of the typical leadership trajectory and an ability to manoeuvre around the pitfalls in each type of trajectory. Now, over to Carlo.
1. Experience
Unless you happen to be a one-off like Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, the careers of leaders in most walks of life follow a similar path. My time at Real Madrid demonstrates it clearly and it shares important similarities with the time I spent at all my clubs.
First, comes the courtship, when the club identifies you and tries to acquire your services. Then comes the honeymoon period, when everyone – the players, the staff, the fans – give you the time to establish yourself, but which unfortunately, as always in life, never lasts long. Next comes success and stability, should you be able to achieve it – for a top club this means trophies, but success is measured differently further down the league. Eventually, this stability plateaus and then the problems begin: the cracks in the relationship. If we look at Madrid, this was undoubtedly when my challenges took hold. Finally, comes the breakup – the inevitable parting of ways. We can call this process, this rise and fall, the leadership arc.
At Madrid, my leadership arc was very tight, very compressed, but it is the same at every top club. It was less than a year for David Moyes at Manchester United. I have had a much shallower arc too, eight years at Milan, which is a very long time to spend at such a big club. The average tenure of a manager in any of the top divisions in England, Spain or Italy is a long way below this: the compressed arc is the norm.
Along the way there are pivotal moments, where the leader can influence events and determine their path, but these key points on the arc have followed me throughout my time in football, starting with my first job.
Climbing the Ladder
First Job: Reggiana
If I were advising the Reggiana president today, when he was contemplating hiring a retired player with local roots to manage the club, I would say: ‘What do you want him for? He’s got no licence and he’s never coached anywhere before. He might have been a good player, but who cares?’ Thankfully for me, the crazy way of football does not work like that.
Make no mistake: Reggiana hired me because I was a famous player and a local boy. It’s the little things, sometimes. It might not make any sense at all reading it, but Reggiana made perfect sense for me and vice versa. They had just been relegated to the second division and they needed a name. I had that name and I was ready for it. Not for the project, necessarily, but certainly to be the boss.
Today, I’ve seen enough to know that you must never think that being a player is enough to be a manager. It enables you to have a relationship with the players and to understand what they need, but the other aspects of management have to be studied and learned. For a good part of my first season at Reggiana I didn’t even have a coaching licence. I had completed two elements of it and I would work on the final section while doing the job. I am a strong believer in acquiring your qualifications before starting out on a career, but sometimes it’s not possible. There should be no MBA or manager debate. There’s no need to choose – both are good.
Since I didn’t have my own licence, I needed to employ someone who did to be my assistant and I also needed a goalkeeping coach. I searched the Italian coaching association book for someone who satisfied both criteria. The first name I came to in the alphabetical listings who was suitable and who lived close to Reggiana was Giorgio Ciaschini. I didn’t know him, but I called him anyway and he agreed to come and work with me. We stayed together for more than ten years. He became a loyal part of my football family from the start of my time as a manager and, as will become clear throughout this book, loyalty is very important to me.
With a brief from the president at the start of the season that our objective was to win the championship, we were lying at the bottom of the table after seven games. It was probably my fault, through my inexperience, as in the beginning it was not so easy to suddenly be the boss straight from being a player.
Of course, I wasn’t totally green. Just before I finished as a player at Milan I was offered the opportunity to be assistant manager to Arrigo Sacchi in the Italian national team. I could have continued to play, but I preferred t
o stop because I thought the experience with Sacchi would be good for me. That period was critical for me to grow as a manager and maybe without those years with Gli Azzurri I would have failed at Reggiana. When I went to Sacchi to tell him that I wanted to take the job at Reggiana and start alone, he said that he thought it was time and wished me good luck. However, even though I had been number two with Sacchi, it is totally different when you are the boss.
The problem is that when you become a manager after finishing a playing career so recently, you think that you know everything. In reality you know nothing. Firstly, there is a difficult and important thing to get right – to have a good relationship with the players but also be the boss at the same time. It is not impossible to do and it is strange that many people think the manager cannot have a strong, positive relationship with the players while still maintaining his authority.
The thing that scared me most, however, was having to put my face in front of the players and speak to them regularly. If the players have a lot of respect of you, you have to speak both for them and with them. They expect it to be perfect because you are the boss, but it is new to you. You are not used to being in this position, where you have the careers of others in your hands. Understanding and accepting that I was the boss was very difficult for me. I knew my own inadequacies, my own vulnerabilities, and I could not believe that others could not see that. Maybe that’s the most difficult element of the transition from worker to boss for most of us.
When it came to speaking in front of the squad and staff, which could be twenty-five, thirty people, they were not all totally attentive and alert. One might be yawning, another could be ‘resting their eyes’ in the corner, while someone might be staring blankly out the window – someone might even be fast asleep. It’s really difficult, at the start, to command everyone’s attention all the time.
When I would start the meetings, everyone would usually be listening, but the problems came when I named the team. You have eighteen, maybe twenty players, but once you’ve named the eleven in the team, the faces of the others, which were so excited before, suddenly become sullen. I knew this because until recently I had been one of them. So for a period when I started, I would leave the naming of the eleven until the end, just before we left the dressing room, to try to keep everyone involved in the proceedings. But no matter when you name the team, you will still always have players who are not happy.
Another difficulty in your first job as the boss is simply how to prepare for the game. Players don’t fully appreciate the amount of preparation needed to manage well – I know that I didn’t when I was playing. I read that Bill Parcells, the legendary American football head coach, believed that ‘everybody has the will to win but only the best have the will to prepare to win’. He was so right. It all looks easy from the dressing room. At the beginning, I didn’t even have the answer to questions as simple and fundamental as: ‘How are you going to do the training?’ I don’t know about other first-time managers, so I can’t speak for them, but my lack of qualifications at the time meant I didn’t have the technical knowledge of how to organize the training properly. I did, however, have my experience with Sacchi to fall back on. In the beginning I just copied his methods, but gradually I began to develop my own ideas and objectives – and my own training schedules.
Giorgio Ciaschini, my assistant, was a massive help for me during this period. I had to learn to speak to the players and for them to believe in me because we needed to start winning. I brought the players together and said to them, ‘I have my beliefs about how we should play and behave. If you agree with them, we can stay together. If you don’t agree, I don’t want to wait for the owner to sack me. I will go now. If we’re not together, we can finish here and now.’ Almost all of the players were with me. Only two would not follow but, as I’ve said, you will always have some who are not happy. Gradually, we began to get better results and we finished in the promotion positions. We would play in Serie A the following season.
During those first seven games I thought that I would not make it as a coach. I was worried that maybe this wasn’t the right profession for me. There was too much pressure. Most of this pressure, I was putting on myself, as it was at the beginning of my career and I knew how important this first job was if I was going to be successful. Now, I am a member of the League Managers Association, and when I see their research about the time in a job most new managers get, it scares me. I’m glad I didn’t know these numbers when I was at Reggiana.
The end of my arc at Reggiana, the breakup, came about not as a sacking, as happened at Real, but because I was offered the job at a bigger club – Parma. The end of an arc can be instigated by the leader, just as it can by the organization, and it is important to be philosophical about the manner of the arc ending. Sometimes you leave on your own terms, sometimes you don’t. That’s football, just as it is in business.
Second Job: Parma
Parma wanted me because Fabio Capello, who had signed a contract with them, refused to go because he decided to go to Real Madrid. As he had pulled out at the end of the season, they didn’t have a lot of time to replace him. I had done well at Reggiana, I knew the general manager of Parma and it was a good move for me, to a bigger club. A new leadership arc began.
Just as at Reggiana, at the beginning the team were not playing well, but in the end we were able to have a successful first season. I had a good squad, with the likes of goalkeeper Gigi Buffon and defender Lilian Thuram, who formed a central defensive partnership with Fabio Cannavaro. They were young, too. Buffon was only seventeen, Thuram around twenty-one and Cannavaro twenty-two or twenty-three. Then I had a striker, Hernán Crespo, whom I had scouted from the Argentinian Olympic team – he was their top scorer in the Olympic Games and only twenty-one years old. In that period we also bought Rivaldo and after that Cafu, although they were immediately loaned to Deportivo de La Coruña and Roma. Parma was a small club then so we had to release players. Maybe Capello had been right after all. Parma had an interesting relationship with the Brazilian side Palmeiras, which worked well for us. Issues such as third-party ownership were not considered important at the time and many of the big European clubs had ‘relationships’ or ‘arrangements’ with Latin American counterparts, whereby all sorts of deals could be done.
I finished two seasons at Parma, qualifying for the Champions League and the UEFA Cup, before my first experience of being sacked, after a run of poor results.
After a brief flirtation with Turkish team Fenerbahçe – a case of approaching the leadership arc but not quite embarking upon it – I got lucky. I had been out of work for six months and the Istanbul side were courting me just as Juventus came calling with an alternative, and that made the decision easy for me.
Company Man: Juventus
My courtship with Juventus was a new experience for me. I was about to leave for Turkey to discuss terms with Fenerbahçe when I got a call from Luciano Moggi, the general director of Juventus. He asked me not to commit to anything until I’d met with him, so I went to see him at the home of Antonio Giraudo, the club’s technical director. When I arrived I found Giraudo, Moggi and Roberto Bettega, the legendary former Juventus striker, waiting for me. They made their position clear when they simply said: ‘We want you to be the next manager of Juve.’ They knew my contract at Parma still had time to run – technically, I was on gardening leave – so they accepted that I would have to stay out for one season, but I would be the manager for the 1999–2000 season. A few hours later, I had signed a precontract. As it happened, the incumbent at the time, Marcello Lippi, left Juve early. He hadn’t done a good job and he was sacked in January, so I went to Juventus in February 1999, with the club handling the outstanding contractual details.
Juventus was tough for me because, after working at a club like Parma, which was a family, Juventus was like working at a company. Juventus is a great company, a great organization, but for me, going to the training ground was like going to work at a factory
. There were impressive people working there – the owner was Gianni Agnelli, there was Luciano Moggi, plus the financial director – but it was not a family, not like Reggiana or Parma or, as I would discover later, Milan. Having achieved some success at Reggiana and Parma I wanted to go to the next level, and by this time I had the confidence to go to a club like Juventus, a club with great tradition and a big history.
Aside from the cultural shift, from the family to a company environment, there was another reason why it was difficult for me in this job: the Juventus supporters hated me. Why? Because I was Roma player, a Milan player. When I was at Parma we had fought against Juventus for the title, so they really hated me. Most of the time I would find them outside the training ground, waiting to bait me. It’s true – in Italy this kind of thing happens. It was a big task to win over the fans.
I stayed at Juventus for over two years until they sacked me too, and I stayed out of the game for another four months. The leadership arc at Juventus had been completed before I was ready. In truth it was possibly one that I shouldn’t have even started on, but it gave me a taste of what it would be like at a big club, which was where I wanted to manage.
Coming Home
AC Milan
For a long time it looked like I would be heading back to Parma and the relative security of my home region. However, what might have been a backward step was averted by a last-minute phone call from the club that had given me my greatest moments as a player, AC Milan. Milan had just lost 1–0 at Torino and, as it turned out, I was in the mind of Milan’s general director Adriano Galliani. He had spoken to me a few days earlier about other matters and while we were talking I had let slip that I would be signing for Parma again.