CHAPTER 6

HOW TO LEAD STAR PERFORMERS

When Sir Alex Ferguson retired after a hugely successful 26-year run as manager of Manchester United football club in 2013, ­Harvard Business School created a case study about his achievements and the Harvard Business Review interviewed him.1 When, in 2014, ­England’s cricket chiefs were weighing whether to drop Kevin Pietersen, the national team’s talented but rebellious batsman, I wrote my Financial Times column on how business leaders would approach the selectors’ dilemma.2

People love leadership lessons from sports stars. If you want a speaker on leadership for your annual corporate dinner, rugby players, rowers and athletes, active or retired, are yours, for the right price. Business diners and conference goers love hearing from top athletes because they are successful (otherwise we wouldn’t be inviting them), they are famous, and listening to them makes us think that we, in our everyday business roles, are ­achieving feats like theirs: training, performing – and winning. Our ­successes may not make it on to the evening news, and we may get a bonus rather than a medal or trophy, but many in business think they have something to learn from top athletes, and the athletes are happy to oblige.

When FT Forums was looking for a sports star to address one of its meetings, it chose Dame Katherine Grainger. Not only is she a celebrated rower – she won medals at five successive Olympic Games, including gold in London in 2012 – she is an academic high achiever, with a law doctorate. She is also a senior organisational leader, capping her rowing wins by becoming chair of UK Sport, the government body that invests in Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls.

At the FT Forums session, Dame Katherine described her daily life as a top rower. ‘When you’re an athlete, you have coaching every single day. Every single session, you work with someone. And I probably didn’t appreciate it at the time, what a difference it makes when you have someone constantly monitoring, judging, working with you, seeing where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are, what you can improve, giving you feedback every session.’ She said she sometimes felt annoyed by it. ‘You just think “oh no, not again, just let me go and enjoy myself on the water”.’

After retiring from the sport, she saw the constant training and feedback a little differently. ‘When you don’t have it, you realise what value it brings. Because when you have great coaching in a great environment, there’s no training session that’s wasted, there’s no training session that you’re just going through. If you’ve got half an hour in the gym, or on the water, there’s always a focus to it, there’s always a purpose to it. There’s always a point during that session of someone checking in and finding out how it’s going. How are you doing? Is it having an effect? Where we need to change it. Where we need to do it better.’

To the non-Olympian, it sounds exhausting. But when you watch the video of Katherine and her rowing partner Anna Watkins taking gold in the double sculls at the London Olympics, when you see the intensity of their effort, the exhilaration of their victory, their blinking back of tears on the winners’ podium during the national anthem, you begin to understand the mental and physical climb that has taken them to the pinnacle.3 And you also think: this is inspiring, but it isn’t really like a day at the office or at the computer at home. However much we may enjoy hearing about top athletes’ exploits, we probably know that no one working in a job, no matter how high profile, would be able to stand that level of control, that level of monitoring or that little autonomy without saying out loud, as Katherine said, just let me get on with it.

The Harvard Business Review interview with Alex Ferguson makes a Premiership footballer’s day sound as exhausting as Katherine’s was. ‘We never allowed a bad training session,’ Ferguson said. ‘What you see in training manifests itself on the game field. So every training session was about quality. We didn’t allow a lack of focus. It was about intensity, concentration, speed—a high level of performance.’

And, when it came to Sir Alec’s management style, there was little sign of the ‘set people targets and let them get on with it’ philosophy that we extolled in Chapter 1. He clearly didn’t see his players as equal partners in a shared venture. ‘You can’t ever lose control—not when you are dealing with 30 top professionals who are all millionaires,’ Ferguson told the Harvard Business Review. ‘And if any players want to take me on, to challenge my authority and control, I deal with them.’ We spoke in Chapter 1 about Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y: Theory X was about strict managerial control, Theory Y about treating workers like grownups. Alex Ferguson at Manchester United was decidedly Theory X.

We probably should not be surprised. For all the excitement of hearing from and reading about Olympic champions and famous football managers, there are vast differences between what they do and what the rest of us do in our working lives. There is a finishing line in sport, either at the end of the rowing contest or when the full-time whistle blows. The only full-time whistle in business is when the company collapses and the liquidators walk in. Only one athlete or team wins gold or a cup final. There is place in business for many successful companies. It is not a zero-sum game.

So, is there any point, other than star-struck entertainment, in business leaders spending their time listening to leadership lessons from top athletes? Yes, because, for all the differences between business and sport, there are similarities. In spite of Katherine and Alex Ferguson’s descriptions of the micro-managed training day, sports stars can’t be coached and cajoled at every moment. There is a time when the managers and trainers can’t be there, when all the practising, feedback and control has to end and the athlete has to take responsibility – and that is at kick-off or when the starter’s signal or gun sounds. As Katherine said of her coaches, ‘when you have to perform on the biggest stage, they will not be there’. They may be watching (and in the case of a football manager like Ferguson, shouting and gesticulating from the sidelines) but, when it comes to race or match day, the athletes and players are on their own.

In that sense, the best coaches are like the best organisational managers; they get you to reflect on what you’re doing and why, so that when it comes to performing, you know what to do. When you start out in the sport, Katherine said, ‘the coach will do more telling, because you’re still learning. But the brilliant coaches I’ve worked with are the ones who asked the best questions. So when it’s the feedback, it’s not “that was right” or “that was wrong”, it was often “why did you make that decision?”’ Katherine said. ‘The whole point of coaching is that when you go out there on your own, you can make those decisions under pressure.’

So, not that different from organisational life. In sport as in business, good leaders get the best out of their teams by instilling a set of principles to operate by, asking searching questions rather than giving instructions. There are other similarities between sport and organisational life, and we see them particularly in team games like football. In Chapter 2, we talked about generational differences and noted that, while these can be overdone, leaders deal with people who are, depending on their ages, at different points in their careers. Business leaders need to have new recruits coming in, a solid core of mid-career people to keep things going and an older cohort providing leadership and experience. It is the same in a successful sports team. Ferguson said that at Manchester United he had to develop younger players to ensure continuity so that they could take the place of the older ones who were moving on. Planning for the long-term meant ensuring that there was a range of ages across the team.

Another similarity, increasingly, between organisational life and sport is the importance of measurement. Business has long been about ­measurement – about sales made, cash to pay suppliers and service debt.

Sport is about numbers too, about who won and who lost, and by how much. But sport has increasingly become about more detailed numbers, about business-like numbers. In his book Moneyball (turned into a movie of the same name, starring Brad Pitt), author Michael Lewis tells the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team.

As a young man, Beane had been an exciting-looking baseball player himself; great things were expected of him. ‘He had the size, the speed, the arm, the whole package. He could play other sports. He was a true athlete,’ Lewis quotes Roger Jongewaard as saying. Jongewaard was the head scout who persuaded Beane to forgo a scholarship to Stanford University and play baseball for the New York Mets instead.4 But Beane didn’t achieve the baseball success everyone expected, and, as a coach, he saw the worthlessness of judging potential stars in the way that he had been judged – by outward promise.

That meant getting away from baseball’s traditional practice, which was to allow scouts to rely on their experience, instinct and subjective judgement of who would make a great player. Instead, Beane recruited statisticians to look at what attributes really go towards winning baseball games and, based on those characteristics, started drafting players that other teams were ignoring. These players may not have looked the part, but the statistics showed that some unfancied aspect of their game – for example their ability to get ‘walks’ (not swinging at four off-target balls) – could help produce a winning team.

The approach produced results. Startled by Beane’s success with the previously unglamorous Oakland A’s, rival baseball teams adopted his numbers-driven approach – and it wasn’t long before teams in other sports around the world adopted them too. As columnist Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times after interviewing Beane and Lewis, Moneyball had become more than a bestselling book and a Brad Pitt move. ‘“Moneyball” is also a phenomenon, which after changing baseball, is now sweeping almost all ballgames, from British soccer to Australian rules football,’ Kuper wrote.5

At his meeting with Beane, Kuper told him that the England cricket team had used Moneyball-style analysis to discover previously undiscerned weaknesses in India’s Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest batsmen of all time, allowing England’s bowlers to dismiss him cheaply.

As we shall see when we discuss the use of artificial intelligence at work in Chapter 9, businesses, too, are increasingly using algorithms rather than subjective judgement when, for example, recruiting staff, so this is another area where sport and organisational life are converging. Business didn’t learn about algorithms from sport; numbers were already coursing through corporate life. As Lewis wrote about the time before Beane’s methods became widespread: ‘Everywhere one turned in competitive markets, technology was offering the people who understood it an edge. What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street.’

It may be true that business got to numbers before baseball did, but, as we will see, business leaders are using numerical analysis far more intensively than they were.

Are there other areas where business leadership and sport have lessons for each other? Let’s come back to the column I wrote about the difficult cricketer – headlined ‘Would you want Kevin Pietersen in your team?’ – because it dealt with a problem that almost every leader has faced: what do you do with the brilliant performers who just won’t do as they are told? Pietersen, I wrote, was ‘difficult, self-regarding, occasionally irresponsible and, in the right frame of mind, outrageously talented’. The problem for the England cricket hierarchy was that Pietersen could also seem disloyal. In 2012, when England were playing South Africa, Pietersen, who grew up there, sent some of the South African players a crude insult in Afrikaans about Andrew Strauss, the then-England captain. To add to this apparent breach of team spirit, in later international test matches he seemed uninvolved and uninterested. Eventually, the England cricket bosses decided that, for the sake of team cohesion, they had to sack Pietersen.6

Getting rid of top performers is not an easy decision – and this one may have appeared to contradict some of the organisational values we regard as valuable, such as accommodating different sorts of people. As I wrote at the time of the Pietersen dilemma: ‘Organisations talk a lot about diversity but then impose a corporate uniformity . . . True diversity means getting the best out of people who are different, not forcing them to be the same.’

This is where sport and a difficult area of organisational life intersect: how do you deal with top performers, with specialists, with experts, with people who are at the top of their field? Not every organisation has people of this calibre, but many do: pharmaceutical companies, asset managers, research organisations. In other companies, there may be a star ­salesperson, an inventive advertising copy writer, a store manager with customers who never desert them. Do you give these stars some latitude and allow them to be different or, like Alex Ferguson or the England cricket selectors faced with Kevin Pietersen, do you get rid of them?

Managing talented people presents a dilemma to business leaders as much as to sports managers, so let’s look at how it can be done.

IT TAKES A TEAM

When sports stars fall out with their teams, they can move on. Kevin ­Pieterson’s international career may have come to an end, but he continued to play for various cricket clubs around the world. Footballers famously move on. Lionel Messi, regarded as the world’s best footballer, joined Paris Saint-Germain in 2021 after being at Barcelona since the age of 13.

Business stars may think their skills equally transferrable, but they aren’t always. In 2004, Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda and Nitin Nohria of ­Harvard Business School looked at what happened when top financial analysts switched investment banks. Those supposedly outstanding performers went into a decline. This was contrary to the view that top people could thrive anywhere. As I wrote in the FT, ‘It is a philosophy that underpins the headhunting industry. It is at the root of the “war for talent”, in which top companies strive to attract the best people.’7

But people don’t always thrive anywhere. Teams matter: they are intrinsic to success. The talented may not be as talented elsewhere, something managers could point out to those thinking of leaving. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki wrote about a study of 41 Nobel Prize-winning scientists that showed that these most successful performers did not do it on their own. They collaborated with colleagues more than non-prize-winning scientists did.

In sport, business and science, the most talented depend on others. They develop and hone their super-skills within an organisational structure. They may chafe against the organisation. They may break its rules. They may become so awkward that, whatever their talent, their organisation decides, as English cricket did with Pietersen, that they would rather manage without them.

Getting the best out of talented people requires skilful leadership, whether in sport or business. And in business, as organisations depend less on repetitive production-line work and more on innovation and discovery, leaders need to learn how to use those talented employees more effectively – not just for the organisation’s good, but for the good of the highly skilled staff member themselves. Because, as Groysberg, Nanda and Nohria’s Harvard Business School research showed, those supremely talented people may not seem that talented after they move.

HOW TO LEAD HIGHLY SKILLED PEOPLE

For several years, my morning walk to the local London Underground station became a politics, sociology and management studies seminar. This was because my walking companion was Gareth Jones, a wise head and vivid conversationalist who had run HR departments in the music industry and at the BBC, and was an experienced management consultant, business school academic and speaker on leadership. Our informal seminars ended when Gareth and his family moved to Hove, on the English south coast, but when, some years later, we worked together on an executive education programme for a large mobile phone operator, we fondly remembered the mornings we’d spent setting the world to rights with our non-stop chatter. It was entirely characteristic of Gareth that, the day after holding the audience of senior telecoms managers rapt with his funny, acute observations, he emailed me to ask how his talk could have been better.

Gareth died tragically in January 2021, drowning after plunging into the sea in an attempt to rescue the family dog, which had got into trouble in the water. He left behind not only a loving family and many friends and admirers, but a body of important writing about leadership, much of it in collaboration with his co-author Rob Goffee. Their book Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People, published in 2009, addressed the issue we are discussing here: how do you get the best out of exceptional employees?8

Their central insight is that the people they call ‘clevers’ cannot be clever alone. Talent requires a context. A footballer who can keep the ball aloft alone in the park, juggling it from knee to foot to shoulder to head, is of no consequence unless a talent scout spots him and recruits him to a team. A researcher who has an idea for a disease-conquering vaccine needs volunteers to test it and a factory in which to manufacture it. And the talented need someone to help them manage the process. ‘Clevers need leaders and leaders need clevers,’ Jones and Goffee wrote.

Leading these talented people is difficult because they often do not respect hierarchy. Your title alone will not impress them. They may have no desire to get to the top themselves. They want to get on with what interests them. They often pay little attention to the rules. Your role as a leader, as John Amaechi, former basketball player and leadership guru, said in Chapter 1, is to create the context in which these star employees can perform best.

How can that be done? By creating workplaces in which they can thrive. Organisations that want to attract, retain and get the best out of talented people need to establish environments in which potential stars want to work because they know they will be appreciated and allowed to get on with their jobs. Leadership and management writers often talk about how employees can be of more value to the company. Jones and Goffee turned that on its head. They asked how the company could make itself more valuable to talented employees – because that is how they would perform at their best.

That demanded a new style of leadership, they wrote. ‘Leaders can no longer be the sole driving force for progress. They are not the one who leads the charge up the mountain. Rather, they must identify the clever people with the potential to reach the summit.’

Leaders of star performers are enablers rather than enforcers. They need to provide the framework in which talented people can produce their best results. That doesn’t mean there are no rules. It does mean that there are lines that even the most talented can’t be allowed to cross. In Kevin Pietersen’s case, that was loyalty. In companies, loyalty is essential too. Giving corporate intelligence to the competition is clearly a no-no, however talented you are. Offensive behaviour towards colleagues is off limits too, although it may be best to speak to the offender about the damage they are doing rather than dismissing them for any but the most serious infractions.

More positively, it is about freeing the talented employees from unnecessary interference. When I led teams at the Financial Times, I knew how important it was to maintain the journalists’ independence from commercial pressure. So, I acted as a buffer between them and the commercial and advertising departments. I didn’t want my teams to have to deal with any subtle pressure to influence what we were publishing (and, to be fair, the commercial and advertising teams knew that editorial independence was the FT’s culture and practice). Jones and Goffee called this approach to talented people ‘protecting them from the rain’.

Leading talented people means listening to them too, appreciating their difficulties, suggesting new or different directions, but paying attention to their objections. Jones and Goffee wrote about the importance of ‘listening to the silences’. It is easier, when you are the leader, to do the talking, which means you are not listening. When I went into an internal meeting as a department head, I used to write ‘SU’ at the top of the page in my notebook. It stood for ‘shut up’, an instruction to myself to let others do the talking. (An FT reader emailed me the suggestion of the ruder ‘STFU’.)

Leading talented people means representing them to the organisation. If they seem to be taking time to complete an urgent task, leaders need to know that if they have always come through with the results in the past they will do so again. I once managed a rules-averse editor who would release the pages he was editing for publication at the last minute. They were always in perfect order. Once, people started fretting because this editor had apparently gone on holiday without releasing his pages. I assured them he would do it on time. He released the pages for publication from his laptop on the plane just before the doors closed for take-off.

Leading talented people also means representing the organisation to them. If there is a change of spending priorities, which means their pet project cannot go ahead, it is the leader’s job to tell them about it and explain why. They probably won’t welcome the news. The leader needs to explain how it is in the long-term interest of the organisation and encourage the talented employee or team to concentrate on the next project, one that serves the company well. Employees may sulk. Some may threaten to leave, or even do so. It is regrettable, and leaders often dangle pay rises or more exciting projects to entice them to stay. But in the end, in business or sport, no one, however talented, is bigger than the organisation.

It is best if it never reaches that point, both for the organisation and for the talented staff member. As we have already said, from Nobel Prize winners to top cricketers to talented researchers, star players need a team. ‘Clever people need their organisations. They may not always realise this fact or be especially pleased about it, but it is true nonetheless,’ Jones and Goffee wrote, adding: ‘Unlike the traditional company-employee ­relationship, where the individual follower is more dependent on the organisation than the organisation is on him or her, the relationship between a company and its clever people is a kind of interdependence between equals.’

WHEN YOUR CLEVEREST PEOPLE KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO

Alex Ferguson’s greatness as a manager is indisputable: 13 league titles, 5 FA Cup victories and 2 UEFA Champions League titles. But as a football player in his native Scotland before he took up management, the ­Britannica Encyclopaedia describes his record as ‘solid if unspectacular’.9 Jürgen Klopp, the highly regarded manager of Liverpool, has described himself as having been ‘a very average player. Obviously, I was not really good.’10

Many leaders of star performers find themselves in the same situation. They aren’t as talented as the people they manage. And, in some cases, they don’t really understand what their talented performers do or even what they are talking about. Their star employees have knowledge and skills that they do not.

DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that was acquired by Google in 2014, is famous for a range of breakthroughs, from developing a machine that defeated the (human) world champion of the ancient Chinese game of Go11 to a system that can predict protein structures, which could accelerate drug production, reduce plastic waste and boost carbon capture.12

Lila Ibrahim is DeepMind’s chief operating officer. She admits that she came into the job not understanding much of what the company did. Ibrahim had no formal training in AI research. ‘It’s hard not to go through imposter syndrome. I’m not the AI expert and here I am, working with some super-smart people . . .  it took me a while to understand anything beyond the first six minutes of some of our research meetings,’ she said in an FT interview.13

The higher you rise in an organisation, the more likely this is to happen to you. Many people begin their careers acquiring expertise in a certain sector. Eventually, if they are promoted often enough, they become leaders with a wider set of responsibilities, having to manage people who have expertise they do not.

If you have spent your career as an auditor in an accounting firm and are then made CEO, you will be managing people who have worked in areas such as tax advice or management consultancy. You will be familiar with their work but won’t have the knowledge that they have. But you do at least have the credibility of having achieved success in one part of the business. You will have seen what the others do and find it easier to talk to them about their areas of expertise. It is harder when you come from outside the field, like Lila Ibrahim in an AI group, even if she had worked in technology previously – at the online education company Coursera and, before that, for 20 years at the semiconductor group Intel.

But coming from a different work background to the people you manage is not necessarily a bar to success. Sir Simon Stevens studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Yet, when he stepped down in 2021 after seven years as head of the National Health Service in England, Europe’s largest employer, doctors lauded his achievements.

Dame Clare Gerada, a family doctor and chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners from 2011 to 2013, said that it was due to Sir Simon’s ‘brave and independent-minded leadership that we have got through these difficult times and that the NHS is in good shape’. Lord Ara Darzi, professor of surgery at Imperial College London, said: ‘It’s hard to think of anyone who has had a more profound and positive impact on the NHS in its seven decades. As well as ensuring – against all the odds – that the NHS has successfully made it through both austerity and the Covid-19 pandemic with its reputation rightly enhanced, he has initiated and overseen the most important and comprehensive redesign of services since 1948 [the year the NHS was founded].’14

These are impressive medical tributes to a humanities and economics graduate. So, how do you lead those with expertise you don’t have? It is easy to get this wrong and find yourself alienating the people you are meant to be leading. All groups can harbour a suspicion of outsiders, and highly-skilled groups have a particular incentive to sneer at someone without their expertise who thinks they can tell them what to do – particularly if that apparently know-nothing manager is planning to shake everything up and change the way they work.

The first step is to accept that you are not a specialist. You are not there to match their expertise. You are there to make their work, and the organisation, more effective. As Lila Ibrahim put it: ‘I realised I was not hired to be that expert; I was hired to bring my 30 years’ experience, my human aspect of understanding technology and impact, and to do so in a fearless way to help us realise this ambitious goal.’

As Jones and Goffee put it in Clever: ‘Clever people do not expect that their leader’s knowledge should match their own unique and specialist know-how. But they do expect that the leader is clearly and demonstrably an expert in their own field.’ That may be a complementary or related field. But it may be an expert in the field of being a leader.

What does that involve? It does not involve a minute mastering of the specialist field of those you are leading. You are not likely, in the time you have available, to learn what they have spent their entire careers learning. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be interested in what they do. You should. You should read about it, but, more important, you should talk about it, in small groups and, especially, one-to-one.

The key to leading not just experts, but anyone, is to spend time looking at their work and, especially, listening while they tell you what they do. The role of the leader is to facilitate and, by listening, you learn what works best for expert employees and what their frustrations are at what isn’t working. You can start figuring out how to clear the obstacles to more effective work. You may also come across people doing similar work elsewhere in the organisation. The people doing related work may not be aware of what the others are doing. As a leader you are also a convenor; you can use your position to bring people into the same room who were not working together before.

When I was editor of the Weekend Financial Times, I spent my first few months talking to the marketing, advertising and circulation people. I had spent decades as a journalist and wasn’t familiar with their work. As I spoke to them, I realised that each department didn’t always know what the other was doing. There were initiatives to market the FT that weren’t matched by an effort on the distribution side to get more newspapers (the principal product then) into the newsagents. Potential readers were given vouchers to buy the paper as part of a marketing effort, but when I went into newsagents on a Saturday morning to ask how things were going, some frustrated newsagents told me they had sold out by mid-morning and would have sold more papers if they had had them. I started a weekly meeting with the advertising, circulation and marketing people so that everyone could coordinate what they were doing.

Expert people appreciate your leadership if you fight their corner. It comes back to what we said earlier about representing them to the organisation. A BBC profile of Simon Stevens when he stepped down as head of the NHS noted how hard he had battled for the service, winning a longer-than expected five-year financing deal.15

But leadership doesn’t just mean fighting for the people you lead and representing them to the organisation, or, in Sir Simon’s case, to the government. It also means representing the organisation to them: telling them about the financial situation, about how much money the organisation has for their projects and where else it might be needed. Organisational priorities mean that projects sometimes have to be killed off. They may be consuming too much money, they may have little prospect of success or, even if successful, they may not be sufficiently profitable. No one likes to have their pet project ended – even less so if they are expert at what they are doing and you are not.

Whether they accept your leadership in killing off the project depends on how much time you have spent understanding what they are doing, and if you have shown expertise of your own: seeing what is working, what is not and what could be joined up more effectively.

It also means giving them the space and time to succeed in those projects that have a chance of being worthwhile. The leader’s role when dealing with stars is to listen, coach and then stand back and let them perform. That is true whether you lead a health service, a research outfit, a football club or a rowing squad like Katherine Grainger’s.

FURTHER READING

Sir Simon Stevens provided fascinating insight into his background and his time running the NHS in this Lunch with the FT interview ‘NHS chief Simon Stevens: “You’ve got to make the weather”’, available at: www.ft.com/content/3747c7f1-ac3f-4062-998e-4506b4a131f4.

FT columnist Andrew Hill provided an assessment of Gareth Jones’s work on leadership, particularly on the key question of when to get close to your team and when to give them space: ‘­Authentic leaders who lack skill are doomed to fail’, available at: www.ft.com/content/1abac6ab-6fd3-487c-b75f-42cc67b4536f.