The sports coach as Executive Manager

I'm picking up on my model of last week.

- doer
- manager
- executive manager
- enterprise manager

Sometimes it can be useful to look elsewhere to understand you own context, and two examples particularly strike me as useful. The first is sport. The model translates pretty neatly onto the pitch for team games in particular. Look at football or rugby:

- player
- captain (organises things on the pitch, holds people to their assigned roles, makes decisions 'in the moment')
- coach/manager (creates structure and purpose, selects personnel, decides on key strategies and style of play)
- chairman (overlays financial concerns on pure sporting issues, sets the enterprise in a social and economic context, and usually bears the losses)

So I'm arguing that player to captain is an OK transition, but coach/manager is traumatic. You can no longer show how it's done by simply being the best. In fact, although a successful playing career lends credibility to the coach/manager, it by no means predicts success (compare the careers of Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Keegan, Gascoigne with Wenger, Ferguson, O'Neill, Allardyce). OK this is not a rule, but there's a point there.

What, then, do the successful coach/managers do? I would say they focus on the structure rather than the process of performance. Less, 'how must you do this'. More, 'what makes it so that you do it well'. A great example of this is John Harbin. A soft spoken Australian from a rugby league background with a track record of getting teams to play better than they thought they could. I interviewed him last year while he was at Crystal Palace and was impressed by how strongly he felt for his players. Here's an extract from that interview.

“We treat the player firstly as a human being and secondly as a footballer. And that’s absolutely vital,” says Harbin.

The bottom line counts like it does anywhere else, and the management need to be clear about what’s required to do the job. The criticism, though, is very definitely about the performance not the person:
“Honesty at times hurts. But they’ll get over that. You can say to a player, ‘I’m dropping you this week, because of this part of your game, but I’m willing to spend time with you to help you improve it.’ The player will be very disgruntled overnight but they’ll accept what you’ve done.”

Yet I can’t believe that a team made up of experienced professionals suddenly developed a level of skill that accounts for the difference between relegation and promotion. I remind Harbin of some of Palace’s performances in the Premiership the following season: holding the far superior Arsenal team to a draw, in particular. How does that happen?

“It’s the intangibles: commitment, desire, hunger, dedication, unselfishness. A team, group or organisation which is overloaded with the intangibles can often outperform a team with more ability. History’s full of sporting teams that have pulled off upsets because they’ve been loaded up with the intangibles.”

How do you load up those intangibles? Harbin is a great believer in leading by example:

“I guess it’s your own attitude, your own persona: your own hunger, your own dedication, your own commitment that starts the ball rolling. If you haven’t got these, you can’t pass them on. Now you don’t necessarily have to be noisy about it. Some of the quietest people have got it. Take someone like Wayne Bennett at the Brisbane Broncos: he’s a quiet man, but as a human being he is absolutely loaded with the intangibles.”

Leading by example is a commitment, though; Harbin is absolutely clear:
“If that’s what you’ve based your building blocks on, the intangibles, and I think that’s a very secure foundation … but when they waver in your own life, those foundations become very shaky. It’s not for show – you’ve got to display these qualities always and all the time.”

This adds up to a very clear philosophy of team performance. I asked Harbin where it comes from.

“Criticism is soul-destroying. It’s so much easier to criticize than praise. I was fortunate that I did a teaching degree and we were analyzed in our classroom practice to measure how much positive and negative reinforcement we gave. Now I’m a positive person, but the figures were alarming. At first I actually thought, ‘no, that’s not me’, but what I needed to think was, ‘yeah, that is me, and what am I going to do about it?’”

What did he learn from that?
“People have the ability to change the attitude of others through changing their own attitude. And in their own way, they become leaders. They’re infectious. Their spirit is infectious. Of course if it’s a positive spirit, that works well, but if it’s negative it’s soul-destroying. Human beings are very very powerful.”

It’s more than just an approach to getting things done, though. “I’ve got a saying pinned up in my office: ‘You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.’ I taught for quite a while and you can really see how it works. Sometimes some of the young teachers found it hard with very disadvantaged kids to put their arm round them and give them the encouragement they need. But that’s when you know whether it’s genuine or just for show.”

And in Harbin’s case, it’s not just for show:

“I worked with Iain at Oldham, and if I didn’t think Iain had that same philosophy, I wouldn’t have come here. Whatever club I went to it wouldn’t matter to me what the philosophy of the manager the chairman the chief exec. I would hope that they’d have the same philosophy as me, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter, because I would never ever compromise my philosophy.

“It’s a strange philosophy for football. Players here say to me, ‘You’re one of a kind’. And I think, ‘what are you talking about. I’m just normal. This is how normal human beings are’. And the great thing about it is that these things are under your control. Nobody has an influence on how loyal I’m going to be. That’s me. Nobody has an influence on how dedicated I’m going to be. That’s me. I make that decision.”

Harbin tells me an anecdote which seems to sum it up.

“I was sitting on the beach reading a book by Jack Welch called ‘Winning’. Looking for some new ideas. I guess it’s about someone who’s been pretty successful by being a bit ruthless and being well organised. He talks about sacking people, keeping people competitive. It wasn’t really a turn on for me. But as I’m reading it, I see this guy in his fifties with three little kids. Two of the kids are trying to get the youngest one to go into the water. She doesn’t want to go. They’re trying to drag her in the water and the little girl just wouldn’t go. She’s screaming, and I’m thinking why doesn’t this guy do something? He let them go for a little while and just watched. Then he put his arm down to this little girl and she looked up at him and took his hand. He walked her down to the edge of the water and just looked at her again and smiled at her, and he walked out into the water without a murmur. And I thought, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about trust, caring, loving and getting somebody to achieve something that they’re terrified of. That’s what he did. And I threw the book about winning away. Because that guy showed in that brief moment that you’ll get people to follow you into the face of fear if you show those things.”
(From the Bulletin of the Association for Coaching, Issue 7, 2006)