Viewpoints: a question of leadership

leading-leaders

‘Viewpoints’ is where we hand the TFT keyboard to a new contributor. If you’d like to get involved, e-mail maxie@thefulltoss.com. It could be anything from a full article to a quiz, a fantasy XI, or just a feature-length comment. Today, Philip Chapman looks at the management and leadership culture – or lack of it – which underpins Team England.

During the great Pietersen debate two or three key themes have struck me as odd: the development of young talent, the general management of talent, and the creation a team which is greater than the sum of its parts.

I will not pretend I can provide definitive answers on all these points. But I wanted to think about them as if I were speaking to a company – say, a bank. How do cricket, and other team sports, compare with business and schools when it comes to leadership, behaviour and culture?

The other day I was at the Oval for my young son’s ‘little big hitters’ course. On the wall by the stairs down to the indoor school is this wonderful quote from Richard Thomas, chairman of Surrey.

Imagine what you could achieve if you felt you couldn’t fail.

Which led me to ask – if I were a newly-appointed coach or captain (or corporate CEO, for that matter) seeking to develop the kind of values around which I would try to build my perfect team, what would they be? As cricket fans, you might imagine where I went with this…

  • Courage
  • Flair
  • Patience
  • Excellence

By comparison, for my notional new bank team (and yes, I know this is a bit Powerpointy):

  • Respect
  • Integrity
  • Communication
  • Excellence

Oh dear. I think I may have spent too much time with people like me. This approach to building a team isn’t going to work.

So I looked at the leadership instead. My experience of team sports is that the team, over time, takes on the characteristics of those in charge. For example, when I have captained a team they have usually been fun, with an underlying hint of grumpiness but well drilled and technically as accomplished as a mixed group of amateurs can be. I do love a bowling machine!

Other examples include the dour and occasionally brainless recent England cricket team, the madcap national football side under Kevin Keegan, the liberated England of Michael Vaughan, and the disciplined, but inventive England rugby XV coached by Clive Woodward.

The sooner a team accepts this tone-setting principle, the more quickly it may develop to being the best it can be.

You can perhaps define the concept of culture as “how things are done around here”. So the culture of the team is, in fact, inherent its leadership, not an artificial, contrived list of behaviours.

An elite sports team artificially trying to create something will not succeed. Most such sides are built around volatile young people who have no life experience, but have always been the highest-performing among their peers. These talented young men need to be led, guided, nurtured, and allowed to fail so they can learn to succeed – while simultaneously operating within a hugely pressurised environment.

This is the huge challenge faced by the captain of a cricket team, and one which the modern coach is trying to take over. This, I believe, is one of the key recent failings of the England cricket team.

It is easy for managers to surround themselves with supporters and so-called team men. But doing so misses the key point about teamwork. The onus remains, more than ever, on the captain.

To win international cricket matches you need things the opposition don’t. Eleven ‘team men’ won’t win you a test series or the World Cup. Your performances will be ugly, workmanlike, and leaderless on the pitch. You’ll make the semis at best.

To say, as rugby’s Stuart Lancaster did, that you want a team of Johnny Wilkinsons, forgets the roles of Jason Robinson and Mike Catt when we won the World Cup. The read-across to English cricket is clear. Sidelining your most talented players because they are hard to manage prevents you from winning. Let’s not forget that the eventual selection of the England team which the World T20 was determined by a warm-up game in Dubai, not meticulous planning.

Business leaders fail just as regularly as sports managers by using this ‘team-man’ approach.

As you build a new team the captain should have faith in what works for him. And this should shine through in his personal leadership. He should articulate his values and allow the side to develop around them. By extension, the onus is on the selectors to pick the right leader, and for the development structure to develop worthy candidates for them to choose from. When we look at the current England team we don’t see eleven leaders – or even one. This represents a failure of management.

By not having the courage to pick a Chris Ashton or Danny Cipriani character (or even a K***** P********) , you are prioritising Moneyball management and marginal gains over the inexplicable. The historic champion teams are not Moneyball journeymen. Instead, they are built around class players and a superstar character. It takes the inexplicable to trump the opposition.

In football, Barcelona and Real Madrid’s teams are built around superstars, not team men. Were Shane Warne or Don Bradman team-men in the form the modern ECB would recognise? No. David Gower, Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff were all at times seriously hard work for management. But what talent they had. And what results they achieved.

So when I read about the importance of the right values, of “team ethic and philosophy”, I feel just a little bit sick. It misses the point. These things are impossible to define. Building team spirit is hugely important but building a winning team is more important.

England’s coaches should learn how to manage people and talent, instead of coaching the charisma and individuality out of young players. Uniqueness should be celebrated and encouraged.

Does the ECB even think about teaching its captain and coaches how to manage people and personalities? Does Alastair Cook ever get together with the eighteen county captains to discuss human behaviour within a cricket context? Do they get advice from expert behaviourists?

I hate seeing our talented young cricketers – and other sportspeople – having their heads filled with guff about good areas, executing skills, and being high velocity players. They should be freed from worry about failure. I worry for the future of Steven Finn, Jos Butler, Joe Root and Moeen Ali.

Is managing difficult people hard? Yes. Are they high maintenance? Yes. But this is international sport, for goodness sake. You’ll win nothing by taking the easy road.

The highest levels of cricketing performance are not hewn from a list of the correct team behaviours, blu-tacked to the dressing room wall. In the heat of battle, these theorised credos will be forgotten. Just ask James Anderson. But give players the freedom to perform, and you might just get something special.

12 comments

  • Thanks for posting. For those who don’t recognise them, the banking values belonged to Enron.

    Which makes the point.

    Not the bs written in today’s telegraph by Steve James.

  • I am mystified by the attention Lancaster gets. He’s done some good things, but has yet to win a single trophy as a professional coach either at club level or with England. Ok, he won promotion with Leeds, but lost 4 games which is quite a large number for the winners of the championship. His one season as a head coach in the premiership ended with relegation (2 wins in 22 games). I like the guy, and thinks he talks some sense, but to say the adulation is premature would be an understatement. Indeed, Lancaster himself probably thinks it’s premature.

    The media are a curious lot, and Lancaster seems to have them eating out of the palm of his hand. Lancaster has not won the 6 nations in three attempts, and the so called rabble he transformed actually won the thing the year before he took over! The narrative is therefore more than a tad curious.

  • Good piece. Leadership in a lot of areas within the ECB and the England team set up has clearly been non existent for a while now. I am completely disillusioned and for the first time in many many years will not be purchasing any tickets to see England this summer, a pathetic protest I know but my own personal stand! I strongly object to the national team not being selected on merit and a ‘difficult’ character being omitted on this basis – whoever that may be. As the author of this piece states had the current set up overseen the careers of Warne and Botham then they probably would have ened up with about 10 wickets between them!

  • Quite an insightful post on leadership styles. Nothing speaks louder than cricket, particularly in sports. What works for one captain may not work for the others. The same captain is lauded when the team wins, and is buried when his team loses. This is where the collaborative coaching schools come into picture where the support staff facilitate the leadership style of a captain, rather than trying to change that style.

  • Problem is the ECB management have commodified cricket. It’s the way of the modern world. Every aspect of life is to be packaged up, commodified, and sold for as much as you can get. The only leadership model they use is top down, barking out instructions. Thinking for your self is not encouraged.

    It is often repeated that there is no alternative to Cook as test match captain. The famous TINA defence. This argument may have some truth to it. But a much more interesting question is Why are there no other leaders in the dressing room? Hardly surprising that after a decade of top down management, where players are brought up in an environment where they don’t need to think for themselves there is a dearth of leaders.

    When it pays to not rock the boat, and just submit to whatever cack handed, latest management theory is being pushed; And where there is an army of back room staff to cater for your every need is it any wonder there are no leaders. It also does not help or encourage leadership candidates when the ECB run a Feudal system of leadership.

    They go out of their way to tell everyone who they have chosen, and are ‘grooming’ as the next leader. This process seems more concerned with how good looking the candidate is, how sponsor friendly he is, and which school he went to. Family background also seems very important to the ECB model. It’s typically English aristocratic. Born to lead as opposed to being any dam good.

  • “Most such sides are built around volatile young people who have no life experience, but have always been the highest-performing among their peers.”

    These are absolutely key points.

    Yes, the players are young people and the modern international game doesn’t give them much chance to grow up. The England’s men’s team’s solution in recent years has apparently been to treat the players like sixth-formers on a school trip from some expensive private school. Other nations’ teams have been bemused at both the massive support staff and the sense of entitlement that surrounds these spoiled boys, not to mention the controlling ‘masters’. (Contrast with the England women players, who are mostly even younger in years but have had to fend for themselves, and until recently, pay their own way, and appear far more down-to-earth, independent and capable.)
    Whoever is captain of the men’s team will of course be equally immature and, as pointed out in this excellent piece, it seems no specialist training is made available even for those who are labelled early on as an FEC.

    The second part of that sentence is also hugely important in managing elite athletes or any talented people. Some of them will have been ridiculously better than everybody else for years while growing up. They’ll have had no experience of failure and don’t know how to handle it. Others will have an apparently balanced view of where they stand relative to others, but may be haunted by secret fears of being ‘found out’. Just because someone is gifted doesn’t mean they’re not genuinely insecure and genuinely in need of good balanced critique and reassurance. This is surely what the coaches and captains who’ve succeeded with Pietersen have understood.
    Journalists who were middling quality players themselves seem particularly bad at understanding how the mental side of things works with people who have outstanding natural gifts, and one has to suspect that an element of jealousy comes into that.

  • Some good stuff here.
    I’ll add that for international cricket, the challenge is more like a small business and less like club football.

    My key point?
    There is no real choice of employees. Small businesses don’t have the resources to do a lot of employee search or cope with the downsides of a lot of staff turnover. Hence, they have to learn to get the best out of the small pool available to them.

    Likewise, in international cricket you have to acknowledge that the talent pool isn’t that deep. Some people, awkward as they may be on a personal level, will not be interchangeable. Talent is a reality.

    When you’re Alex Ferguson at the head of an all-conquering Man Utd, you have your pick of the best talent. You can prioritise “team ethic” in selecting out of the 10 best strikers on the market, because you are choosing between 10. At international level, neither Roy Hodgson or Peter Moores actually has that luxury.

    However, both cricket and football press are remarkably resistant to this reality. As a result they are forever harping on “loving the badge” and “feeling honoured to wear the shirt/cap.” In effect, they repeatedly excuse Andy Flower’s poor man management because they don’t actually believe in man management…

  • Metatone

    I think too many people forget how long it took Alex Ferguson to establish himself at Man U. When he began, there was no obvious alternative to Liverpool as top team. I think it was about 4 years before Ferguson assembled a reasonable team. Until then, results were sporadic – a win against odds against Liverpool followed by a loss against Wimbledon. Tthe fans wanted him out. I guess his mangement realised that he was working towards something…the dreaded “process” word that nFhoni recently trotted out to justify a bad defeat.

    There are no easy answers. But patience is always required and an ability to see the long game.

  • It’s a really great piece. It truly is. So much is good about this piece. Should be a Text Book on how to run a team in sport. It could pass over to any sport.

    A couple of things:

    1. I was a school captain of our rounders team. A right mouthy lot we were, but all had great skills, different skills. Quite often the Captain would be bowling, but I was so good at First Stop so I chose those who could deliver bowling better than me! We had great fielders and a backstop to die for. I was a very good catch – one-handed – so between myself and backstop we got a lot of people out. When it came to batting, I was one of the best. Although only 4ft 11 1/2 and a dog end tall I could hit the ball mega distances. Everyone in our team knew where they were best and played accordingly. No one fought over a place. We worked like a tight knitted team of individuals. We beat everyone except the teachers! That was because they cheated!!!

    So team is getting the best in the positions where they will flourish. Individual flair being an essential part of the mix. More mouthy and individualistic the better. I didn’t have any problems with the team because they were in the positions where they played best and were highly motivated. If a mistake happened then we just got on with it and cheered each other on. We were damn good.

    2. When my boss went AWOL I had to take over the department — in house printing department. It was damn hard work for 3 months. I didn’t tell upper management otherwise my boss would have been sacked!!! I set about listening to everyone’s point of view and let them work how they wanted to organise their day. If a job was not done properly I would go and tell the person that it had to be done again, very quietly. When people came in to thank me for the work, I’d say: “Don’t tell me, tell the folk who have done the work. I’m just shuffling the paperwork around!” However if they came to complain then I dealt with it and didn’t pass it on unless it was serious! I took the responsibility. One day someone came in and was shouting the odds about a job that had been done wrongly. I had a choice, I either stepped in or I allowed the two people to try and deal with it. They needed the experience to deal with difficult situations. They explained to the customer that they had kept the brief to the letter – which they had – and that the mistake was in the order. He went on for a while and they continued to explain that they had only done what they had been asked. When I knew they had finished what they had to say, this bloke still went on and on. So I stepped in. “You’ve been told exactly what happened and why. Our folk followed the instructions in the order to the letter. You have come in here been aggressive and abusive and rude. Now I’d like you to leave this office immediately. I will be making a formal complaint about your behaviour.” He did have another crack. “Right! I have asked you politely to leave. If you do not leave now I will throw you out. Now bugger off” The two very hard workers said they were grateful to have their say and very grateful when I stepped in.

    A team leader leads from the front, allows the members of his team to do what they do best; Steps in when things get out of hand; Takes responsibility when things go wrong; Gives the praise to his team when they do well and ensures that his team is informed; Leads by example; If someone gets it wrong has a quiet word. If problem persists gets the person some extra help. Could be from a senior person in the team who knows how to overcome the problem. Praises the team to the hilt in public but doesn’t ball people out in front of others. If someone has an emotional problem then takes them aside and gets them some professional help outside of the present set up. (Have done this a few times!) Nothing, but nothing is made public! Bullying is an absolute no no. No excuses for shouting at members of the team in public and in front of others. It is bullying! If someone does it the leader takes the person in hand and gives them a harsh warning. Bully (bullies) who continue to publicly humiliate other members of the team then the leader public tells bully to shut up or bugger of! Three strikes and you are out on your ear.

    Management puts in place the best person for the job. If he/she doesn’t then all manner of nasty stuff can happen – seen it, experienced and got several t-shirts. Right leader knows good and poor points and builds up strengths and gets professional help for weaknesses. A good leader allows and encourages members of the team to excel and shine. A great leader is not so interested in looking good for self, but is more interested in showing how good the team is as it works together.

    The ECB is totally useless, rubbish bunch of old farts. Only interested in power and money grabbing. The ECB only wants robots to do as they are told. Senior players seem to think it is ok to mouth off at younger players and senior players on the pitch!!! It is not okay. The team as a whole suffers. Unless members of the team have backs made of cast iron, they will all suffer and be worried about failure. Keep pointing out failure and failure will continue to happen. Look at what Broad said himself when he got a call from Flower. He panicked and said: “I was sh…..g myself!” Said it before and say it again: The ECB couldn’t lead a bank robber to a safe!

  • Good article.
    I should point out, though, that the inspiration for ‘Moneyball’, the great Bill James, would not necessarily disagree with you:

    http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/bill-james-statistical-revolution/
    “I have to take my share of responsibility for promoting skepticism about things that I didn’t understand as well as I might have,” he says. “What I would say NOW is that skepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.”

  • thanks for the comments – you have jumped at the heart of what made me want to write this piece.
    When you join an international team you going from being the best to being the same as everyone else – this is a huge huge leap and no amount of values and media training can prepare you for that.

    This is why the role of the coach is to manage the people and the role of the captain should be managing the team and strategies – and why money shouldn’t be spent on vast numbers of coaches – but by sharing expeience from across the counties and former elite players.

    Not sure this will happen anytime soon in England with the way the current team is managed.

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