Manchester Disunited
Manchester Disunited
The terrific trouble with leader-driven cultures
This story will use football (soccer, for fellow colonials) as a device to illustrate something. But I promise you needn’t be a football fan to get something out of this.
Making the transition to leading huge teams is one of the toughest sequences in any leader’s career.
When I talk to people about this, one of my main themes is about what I call expanding your personal surface area. It is a mistake to try to be everywhere yourself. You won’t scale by being over-involved in too many things, nor by imposing additional reporting to force more awareness and connection.
You have to work through others. Your intent, values, and left/right limits have to be present in the operating environment even when you’re not. You have to be less a direct conduit and more a beacon.
Or do you?
Is it possible to achieve scaled results as a leader without expanding your personal surface area?
Let me provide an example which answers yes to that question, but with an important caveat. Then we can decide whether and how much it matters to us in our own particular situations, since all of leadership is situational.
Manchester United
Manchester United Football Club (“United”) is the biggest brand in all of world football. Ask any kid anywhere on the planet to name one football club aside from their local team, and most often you’ll get Man United as a response.
Across a few decades during the rise of football as the world’d biggest sport, United went from being a Manchester phenomenon to a national sensation, then to an an elite global franchise.
Thirteen times between 1992 and 2013, the Red Devils won the Premier League, cresting what is widely acknowledged as Earth’s most competitive football division. These honors competed for real estate in a crammed trophy case which absorbed 38 major trophies in that span of time.
The club’s manager in this heyday was the titanic, talismanic Alexander Ferguson, known today simply as Sir Alex. He is by far the most successful manager in the history of England’s top flight.
Ferguson took the reins of the club in 1986 and held them tight for 27 years. In that time, he established United as a dominant force, amassing 894 wins and 20 league titles. His achievements earned him a knighthood. Most of the records he set will never be approached.
Having risen through the coaching ranks after a storied playing career of his own, Sir Alex’s credibility was his number one quality. The respect he earned with players, supporters, and the wider community grew to exaltation across those decades of United greatness.
United helped put Manchester back on the map. Football became the city’s trademark as it roared back to cultural and economic prominence. The club’s home stadium grew into a theater of dreams, shaking with enough Saturday afternoon force to set off suburban seismographs.
Season after season, the red giant towered taller, electrifying audiences far and wide with some of the most scintillating, spectacular renditions of team excellence the Beautiful Game has ever produced. Legends were forged as football renewed its lease as England’s ultimate community and convivial touchstone.
The Premier League and, to a lesser extent European football, are today very much the houses United built. Globally relevant and financially immense, the sport reflects decades of tradition carefully bridled as everything around it has modernized almost unrecognizably.
Football has stayed timeless and largely changeless, but introduced itself to hundreds of millions of people over the years who have instantly understood and tended the obsession football so often catalyzes.
And a majority of those new adherents, when they had the chance to buy their first football jersey, donned United’s red, not uncommonly with the names and numbers of Ronaldo, Rooney, or Cantona emblazoned across their backs.
Since Sir Alex retired from a direct role in the team in 2013, performance at United has fallen off drastically. The club have four trophies in eleven seasons. They’ve rattled through five permanent managers and a smattering of caretakers pressed into temp roles after performance-driven sackings.
They haven’t won a league title. They haven’t threatened deep into the top tier of European competition. They’ve been surpassed by rivals and tumbled toward the middle of the table. There is a feeling of malaise and inconsistency around the team, with downbeat mood music and frustrated supporters.
In the current season, United must finish with a flourish against tough opposition to salvage anything like a respectable season by the club standard it has set.
The obvious question this raises is why?
How does a team with a three-decade run of superior results find itself in such a long languish, even as its loyal fan base continues to pack the stadium and feed the revenue stream it needs to stay competitive?
Let’s reflect on that.
Alex Ferguson’s Leadership
Former United captain Ashley Young revealed a lot about this in a recent discussion. If you watch this from 1:50 until about 2:30, you’ll get the gist.
Young’s assessment sounds simple, and that reflects Ferguson’s approach to management.
He assembled great players. He inspired each player to be at their best for each other and the team. He got them working hard on the training pitch so they were in sync and mutually supportive. They rose to meet the standard he set.
Then, rather than complicate on-pitch performance with tactics, he provided a basic game plan and let his players deliver to it. When they needed moments of magic, they more often than not found them because they were playing with semi-autonomy, with the respect of a manager they idolized, and were surrounded by the most talented and driven teammates in the world.
Ferguson’s spirit inhabited the players. He inspired and motivated them. He addicted them to winning. When players cycled out, he meticulously secured the most ideal replacement and then set about managing new additions to their best individual levels of play.
Ferguson’s focus was almost entirely on his personal influence, his players, and relationships. Between himself and players, between players and one another, and between players and the shirt they wore, which symbolized the city they were representing.
There was no other source of identity or cohesion for the team. And there didn’t need to be.
Sir Alex inspired each individual. He built an individual relationship with each player. He earned trust and credibility with each player. He fostered a team environment where players would fight tenaciously for him, and because he expected it, for one another.
He gave his stars a master sun to revolve around. A center of gravity to keep them in orbit.
And it worked. This simple formula changed football and moved worlds.
Unplugging the Sun
When Ferguson stepped away, there was an immediate and noticeable drop in the level of play at United.
The club recorded its lowest points total and worst finishing position in the Premier League era in the season following Sir Alex’s departure (though to be fair, United are tracking to finish the current season worse on both counts).
His immediate successor, David Moyes, was dismissed just 10 months into a six-year contract. But replacing him wasn’t the answer. A string of short-tenured appointments followed. But the team’s average finishing position was 4.7th in the first seven years post-Ferguson, down from 1.3 in the seven before.
Swapping out players didn’t work either. In an insane carousel of transfers in the post-Ferguson era, United have spent more than $1.3B on high-priced acquisitions — 18% more than the next highest spending team and 15% of the league’s entire transfer fee total in that time.
Many of those players were subsequently sold or released at a heavy loss. United executed an average of 30 contracts per year at an annualized loss of $130M, reflecting a clear trend of players regressing in performance and value while at the club. This is a 180-degree reversal of the prior tradition, when stars fought their way to United to become superstars under Sir Alex.
Despite hemorrhaging money on bad bets, United has remained a profitable business thanks to its many other revenue streams, all fed by a loyal fan base seeing just enough flashes of the club’s former brilliance to keep believing in an eventual revival.
But as the current campaign draws to a close, there are three clear observables in the pattern of United’s on-field performance.
Low discretionary effort. United’s lack of consistency and intensity reflect flatness. They lack enthusiasm. Players are doing a job, but not filling in the spaces between roles with the additional effort required for smooth and seamless performance. Attackers are not sprinting back to recover defensively. Players not directly involved in the action are often caught lethargic and unfocused.
Dysrhythmia. Players are not in sync with one another. There is a lack of anticipation. It has the feel of being made up as everyone goes along. While some of this is injuries driving team instability, that doesn’t fully explain it. It’s as if training time isn’t being fully exploited by players to discover potentially asynchronous moments and iron them out in advance of execution. Passes are going to places players didn’t run. Defenders are out of position and seem confused. Body language is tentative. The players look less experienced than they should, which could mean they’re not training close enough to the scenarios they’re encountering in live passages of play.
Missing Moments of Magic. The trademark of Ferguson’s United was composure and clarity in the tough moments. When the chips were down, the best players in the world stepped up. They came up with big plays when seconds mattered, calm under pressure. This is a special level of professionalism; it reflects visualization, forethought about how those moments could play out. It reflects a level of obsession and restless premeditation in order to arrive the moment and navigate it as if you’ve been there before. These days, if the ball lands anywhere but Bruno Fernandez's feet in the key moments, fans preemptively cringe, gnawing off what remains of their fingernails.
With these tendencies, problems of will rather than skill, even the most talented group of players in the world are likely to deliver mediocrity.
Which, by United standards, is exactly what we’re seeing.
What’s Missing
In three words: Sir Alex Ferguson.
When Ferguson stepped away, it became immediately evident that United’s long run of incredible success flowed from and was dependent upon his direct influence.
Without that, United had no defining identity or sense of itself. His absence left it formless and dissolute. The rampant shuffling of players and managers through the club in the next years only made things worse.
Ferguson’s preference to forego a tactical template engendered a “pick up” culture, with training sessions deemphasized as pathways for chemistry and shared development.
Ferguson’s reliance on his ability to stir the passion and emotional commitment of his players left them vacant without such a strong leadership presence in the managerial role. This left players without that magic well to draw upon in big moments, where the calm channeling of loyalty-infused adrenaline previously swung so many results in their favor.
This all demonstrates the platinum value of Ferguson’s unmatched mental, moral, and physical uplift upon his club.
His superb leadership wasn’t just the difference between good and great. It was the club. He was the club.
And this brings us to the punchline.
Ferguson didn’t truly scale himself. He didn’t really expand his personal surface area so that his intent, values, and left/right limits were present in the broader environment even when he couldn’t physically be there.
Whatever he instilled in the club was gifted to players and direct staff, through his personal engagement.
Those who had a direct role in on-field performance were inspired practically beyond belief. But Ferguson didn’t manage to create an architecture of values and principles capable of outlasting his tenure.
The values he instilled and propounded were no bigger than he was. They didn’t transcend him or reach beyond him. They didn’t get baked into the club’s culture so that everyone who cycled into the team had a clear path to assimilation.
This illustrates the dangers of a leader centric culture. If the leader is the megastar and everyone is in orbit, they will spin off in different directions when that star burns out and its gravity is no longer there to hold them together.
A collection of ego-driven, world-class athletes without anything to unify them results in an every-man-for-himself situation. Each person may work hard and make an earnest effort to perform well, but no one is filling in the spaces between to pull it all together into something coherent.
The result is disunity. And from that, with time, follows disharmony. We see this beginning to encroach on United with endless disquiet from inside the dressing room, players fussing at one another on the pitch, and the current manager criticized anonymously in the media.
Had Ferguson been able to scale himself beyond the dressing room and instill his winning values in the boardroom, the operation, and into other elements of the club and organization, we might have seen less of a plummet when he departed.
But this itself raises two interesting questions.
Does it matter? Ferguson gave United three decades of unparalleled organizational success by focusing squarely and narrowly on what he thought was most important. In this scenario, is it important whether that all continues after he leaves?
Had Sir Alex succeeded in building a strong culture not dependent upon his personal influence, how would this have impacted his role at the club? Could he have been seen as less relevant or even surplus to requirements? Managers beyond the realm of football contend with this age-old question all the time. Making yourself redundant is necessary, but you need to be adding value in some other way to avoid being seen as a spare part. This nudges people into keeping themselves relevant and essential.
So What?
So if what I’m saying is there has to be a better way for a leader than to build something dependent upon them only to watch it crumble … then what is that way?
Well, I’ll be honest. I don’t know. And I’m guessing you don’t either. Because this is tricky and contradictory and nuanced and circumstantial. If we knew, we’d have done it already.
T.S. Eliot gives us a wonderful way to ruminate on this endless search for elusive comprehension. “We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time."
What most organizations try to do in a situation like this is find another star to keep everyone orbiting. United have tried this for a decade and it hasn’t worked. It likely won’t ever work, because there is only one Sir Alex.
Leaders like Ferguson don’t come along very often. This just underscores the danger of becoming overly dependent on them.
The other thing organizations try to do, with better success, is to absorb the sun's energy while they can. Let it bake into the overall environment. Store the energy.
Build a thousand cultural solar panels so long after that leader goes, the lights of everyone around the club are still burning bright and reflecting its energy until another megastar is born. The light and gravity and harmony in the organization get crowd-sourced.
In other words, in a football context, make it about everyone and not just the on-field representatives of the club. The values have to be seen and believed as bigger than any individual, including the individual who came up with them.
Every sales person, concessionaire, car park attendant, ticket taker, usher, and hospitality rep. Every groundskeeper, community liaison, and stadium engineer. Everyone on the PR team, community relations team, every chef and steward in the academy, every kit man and A/V technician. The guys who replace the beer barrels and stick the numbers and names on the back of jerseys in the stadium shop. Every one of these people is a beacon of culture once they absorb and reflect a value system.
Player development, recruitment, academy operations, training standards, nutrition regimens, routines, pre- and post-game cadences. Every one of these processes is an opportunity to inculcate and sustain a culture long after its progenitor has moved on.
When every surface of the organization has absorbed the culture for long enough, it is baked in. No matter what shifts and pressures arise, it will be stubborn to change.
This keeps the sky bright until the next generational standout manager arrives to inspire, raise the bar, and spark new levels of obsession.
After Ferguson, a number of managers passed through the club, each putting a slightly different stamp on roster, recruitment, and style of play.
But there was nothing underneath all this instability for anyone to tether themselves to. Had the residue of Alex Ferguson’s heart and mind made its way into that foundation, we’d be telling a much different story.
Whoever you are and whatever you do, if you’re in an organization, there is a message for you here.
Going back to the top, the core message here is about how to take effective leadership from a smaller team environment to bigger scale. How to be there when you’re not, and make others into beacons re-transmitting your influence.
But it’s also a caution that at some stage, it can’t be all about the leader driving the culture. It must become self-replicating.
And that only happens with time, sustained effort, and an earnest energy to unconstrain a value system and allow it to become real for everyone. When they feel it’s theirs, they’ll become evangelists. This will allow the leader to step back, engage in other strategic activities, and let the culture unfold.
How much any of this matters to you depends on your organization and circumstances. Because what worked for a football club likely won’t work in a commercial operations network, futures trading house, supply chain management node, or trucking company.
I stand by the basic idea that scaling for a leader is about expanding your personal surface area. But that idea is complicated and situational, like all of leadership. How you do this and to what extent depends on your circumstances and organizational realities.
For Manchester United, it’s tough to argue that Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t do enough to create a lasting culture. Without him, there would be no decade-long decline to lament. No perch from which to fall.
But it is another thing, and a more valid thing, to suggest that United became overly dependent upon Sir Alex. His tenure needed to be seen as the first movement in a lasting legacy.
If not Ferguson himself, someone at the club needed to be thinking about how to bridge between his United and the next, and making certain there was enough ballast to keep everyone tethered down until that next version revealed itself and took shape.
Sadly, by the time Ferguson departed, the club’s traditions were getting displaced by an unhealthy commercialism not necessarily conducive to a healthy custodial impulse.
But with new ownership, may those traditions soon return and long last.
The world is a better place with an ascendant and mighty Manchester United carrying the banner of its greatest sport.
TC is an independent writer and expert in organizational leadership with three decades of experience leading teams of all sizes in some of the world’s most dynamic environments. He is also, as it happens, a supporter of United’s cross-town rivals, Manchester City Football Club.