Steve Crabb's blog

Football's a funny old game, as the cliche goes, and English football is funnier than most. Some of the most successful managers in the world have tried their luck in the Premier League and been chewed up and spat out - think of Jose Mourinho or Martin Jol.

And conventional ideas of what constitutes good management seem to bend and warp once you step into the dressing room. Sir Alex Ferguson is brilliant at identifying and nurturing talent, but he has a notoriously short fuse when things aren't going the way he wants – David Beckham reportedly needed stitches after being hit in the head by a flying boot during one of Ferguson’s post-match debriefings.

But perhaps standard management practices do still have a place on the football pitch. Take these two quotes from the post-match interviews after Swansea City played Norwich City:

1. Norwich City manager Glenn Roeder: "It's just diabolically poor play, poor defending… it's totally unacceptable. It's so disappointing when they don't do what they're told. It bothers me that some of them are quite experienced players. It's just a total lack of football intelligence."

2. Swansea manager Roberto Martinez: "In football everyone must have a dream and ours is to play in the Premier League. But it could take us five years or even 10 years to achieve. Expectation levels are always very high in south Wales, but at the moment all we are trying to do is to consolidate at this level.

“There are six or seven players here who have the ability to play in the Premier League, but at the moment we have still got to prove that we can compete week in, week out at this level. It was a big thing for us to come to a place like Norwich and get a result like this. It's a big step forward for us, a big moment."

Of course these may be selective quotes. Perhaps Roeder (the losing manager) also accepted his share of the blame for poor preparation or a game-plan that didn’t work. He did make some comments about his team’s bad luck in not converting more of their chances. And it must be hard to find positive things to say when your team has just lost a game at home after being a goal up.

But let’s stop bending over backwards to make allowances. The bottom line is that Martinez, still in his first full season as a manager, communicated a clear vision (‘we aspire to reach the next league up’), injected a note of realism (‘it could take us five years to get there’), praised his team (‘it’s a big step forward to win against a former Premiership team like Norwich’) and ensured his players would stay motivated by holding out a carrot (‘six or seven of these players could be playing in the Premier League if their keep up the good work’). Superb leadership and textbook emotional intelligence.

Roeder, on the other hand, threw a hissy fit that can’t have done much for the morale of his team, his backroom staff or more thoughtful fans of Norwich City.

I know which style of leadership I’d rather be following, and which I’d bet on to deliver for the long term.

* The author of this blog would like to declare an interest as a supporter of Swansea City Football Club. For more on long-term sustainable performance, see the CIPD research programme Shaping the Future 

If familiarity truly does build contempt, the word “leadership” is in deep trouble. Over the past few years it’s been over-used to the point of losing its meaning. No one wants to be a manager any longer – leadership (in all its various guises) is the only badge worth wearing.
Well, there’s nothing like a sharp (and hopefully short) period of economic turmoil to sort out the real leaders from the wannabes. In ‘Leading Through Uncertain Times’ – the first in our new series of ‘Futures’ reports – we’ve asked leading HR professionals and CEOs from the private, public and voluntary sectors what qualities our leaders will need to display to steer their organisations to safe waters.
I was expecting some tough talking, even bravado. What we got was a consensus view that leaders need to keep their nerve, continue investing in developing the leaders of the future, and a genuine recognition that in uncertain times, it’s doubly important to keep your people engaged and motivated.
This isn’t special pleading for HR – it’s a reflection of more mature understanding of the importance of people, and the way they are managed, to organisational success. And it comes from leaders who’ve been at the sharp end and know what they are talking about. Neil Roden has overseen some of the toughest and most admired mergers and acquisitions in UK business history. Joe Duckworth had to manage a huge corruption investigation on the Isle of Wight. Chris Burchell was a manager at Railtrack when the Ladbroke Grove rail crash killed 31 people.
I hope you’ll find their reflections on leadership in uncertain times interesting, even inspiring. But their essays are only the start of a process of debate – now we want to hear from you: do you agree with their conclusions, have we missed anything crucial, have we been too optimistic about the readiness of UK plc to invest in the future and take a long-term, strategic view? Over to you...