Here is the follow up piece from Ed Smith on Cricinfo today... I am not sure I agree with all the points he makes - I believe that problem players need to be understood by the leadership - with the Philippe Edmonds story below, it may be that Brearley worked out that Edmonds bowled better when he had a point to prove so frequently held him back...
However it is a very good read.
Why poor leadership is about followers tooPlayers blame coaches for poor leadership, but often it's just a case of them being poor followers, or there being better players available for selection
Ed Smith
December 9, 2014
http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/807817.htmlA leading cricket coach told me a story about a conversation in the shower room at his club. Three or four of his players were describing the situation at another team where the coach, apparently, was a "bad man manager". The players and performance were suffering. The conversation rolled along the usual lines - "It's all just a question of man management, really" etc - before eventually their own coach challenged the assumptions of the debate. "Are you sure he is the bad manager," he asked, "and it's not they who are difficult to manage?"
It's a good question. There is a cult of leadership, but little focus on followership. There is an obsession with the charismatic supremo, but no curiosity about the people and culture that support him. There is faith in heroism, but rarely do we ask, in the absence of a hero, whether it was possible for one to exist.
Language is revealing. Clichés, popular catchphrases and lazy speech expose where our thinking stops and the retreat into evasion begins. When a football manager needs to be sacked, he is said to have "lost the dressing room". When a star player is unhappy, it is because no one at the club sent him a birthday card (you may think I exaggerate, but this was exactly the complaint of midfielder Yaya Touré at Manchester City). In fact, "bad man management" now has no meaning except that it signifies something undesirable (to the speaker).
Let me use some examples of when what's called bad man management is actually something much more precise and definable.
1.The decision has gone against you (the player)
This is called selection and is, alas, an unavoidable and essential fact of life in professional sport. Eleven players take the field, several are left behind. Doubtless there are better and worse ways of telling players they are dropped or omitted. But let's be honest: the facts don't change much, however they are framed. You aren't picked, others are chosen in your place. The idea that this extremely uncomfortable situation can be made to disappear by ingenious "man management" is a fantasy.
Many players are now told by their peers to seek a meeting with the management to "explain" why they were dropped, aimed at agreeing "what they have to do" to get back in the team. I was advised to do this when I was dropped by England. I thought the idea was undignified and ridiculous. What can the management say beyond, "We've chosen someone else" and "Get as many runs as you can"?
2. The chosen tactics don't play to your advantage
Mike Brearley, captain of Middlesex and England, was generally regarded as a brilliant man manager. But not if you asked Phil Edmonds, the highly talented left-arm spinner who played under Brearley. At Middlesex, Edmonds believed Brearley always bowled him last, behind the other four front-line bowlers. He used the phrase "Chanel Number 5", after the famous fashion fragrance, to describe the condition of being the last bowler to be used - an experience he did not think appropriate for his gifts.
The autobiography of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the world's most expensive footballer, was highly critical of Pep Guardiola, then coach of Barcelona. It is seductively written, describing Zlatan's difficult childhood and sense of exclusion, so when the book describes the dreadful way Guardiola treats him, the reader is already nodding along sympathetically.
Only then did I ask myself, "But what exactly would I have done differently from Guardiola?" And I couldn't think of anything at all.
Zlatan complains he has been marginalised to accommodate someone else - the someone else, in this instance, being Lionel Messi, the best player in the world. When Zlatan throws a hissy fit, confronts Guardiola and kicks over practice equipment in the changing room, Guardiola refuses to lose his temper, and quietly restores the displaced equipment to its former orderliness and leaves the room. Coldly unemotional or dignified and restrained? I know which I'd say, but then I'm not a world-class striker being left on the bench.
3. We are losing
This is usually described as a question of bad man management. Indeed, that's why there is so much bad man management around: the unfortunate structure of professional sport (leagues, knockout cups, etc) makes it inevitable that winning is a rather rare event. This fact of losing has to be explained (especially by the media) and it's much easier to blame one easy cause - bad man management! - than to get lost in complexity (intricate tactical nuances or technical failings) or, even worse, the frankly boring truth that there is only so much (i.e. not much) winning to share around among all the teams.
4. The players aren't very good at being managed
This was the essence of the coach's point at the top of this article. Looking back at my career, as a very general rule of thumb, players who complained most about man management were in fact those who were the least gifted at following.
When a team has two or three of these types as its senior players, the people who guard the mood of the dressing room and set its culture, then the situation becomes self-perpetuating. The next generation of players learns the bad example that there is always a ready excuse to hand: blame the manager! I've known players reach their mid-30s having burnt through six or seven coaches along the way, still insisting, all the way to retirement day, that the latest coach was yet another bad man manager. The common thread, the recurrent problem, was not the manager but the managed.
Listen carefully to what good leaders actually say about leadership. They nearly always give credit to the culture that surrounded them, the key allies and lieutenants who supported them. Leadership never exists in a vacuum. It is a collaborative process, not only between leaders and led but often interchangeably. We are all, to a greater and lesser degree, a mixture of leader and follower. We can always be better at both roles. Acknowledging there are two sides to the coin is a good place to start.
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