How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson

The Business of Winning and Managing Success

Damian Hughes

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781781313800

' How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson is an insightful and interesting book packed with leadership ideas and real life examples taken from the cutting edge of sport that apply in leading any top team or business. I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those currently in leadership positions and those aspiring to get there, as Damian Hughes draws out the inspirational qualities required from one of the greatest managers in football.'

Stuart Lancaster, FormerEngland Head Coach, Rugby Football Union

Delve deep into the mind of one of the world's most successful leaders and discover 10 powerful and practical lessons for leadership and business, with this unique and inspiring handbook for anyone looking to improve performance in turbulent, changing times. Distilling the primary lessons of Ferguson's phenomenal success as manager at Manchester United and showing how you can apply them to you own personal goals, this book explains Ferguson's approach to people-management, changing mind-sets, visualisation, building confidence and embracing change –all techniques at the heart of turning Manchester United into a winning machine. Discover how he remained at the forefront of one of the world's most competitive industries and how to make this count with your own ambition, as well as learning about the techniques he employed to extract the finest qualities from his team, and how to lead other individuals and teams in their pursuit of success within changing times. With exercises for you to work on, drawing from Professor Hughes's practical and academic background within sport, organisation and change psychology, this is the perfect handbook for the business of winning and managing success.

Change Your Confidence Levels

Flatter me, and I may not believe you.

Criticise me, and I may not like you.

Ignore me, and I may not forgive you.

Encourage me, and I will not forget you.

William Arthur Ward

Sir Alex Ferguson recalls the winter of 2005 with all the affection reserved for appendicitis: early elimination from the Champions League, the abuse he suffered from his own fans during a defeat to Blackburn Rovers, humiliation in drawing with non-league Burton Albion in the FA Cup, the breakdown of his relationship with Roy Keane and the skipper’s subsequent dismissal, the near incessant speculation about his future, and the eroding of the bond with his star striker Ruud Van Nistelrooy, resulting in the player’s departure. ‘This was supposed to be the autumn of Ferguson’s career but it felt more like its winter, harsh and unforgiving,’ Daniel Taylor wrote in the Guardian. ‘It was the season when his own fans called for him to be sacked, the press parked their tanks on his lawn and his relationship with the media hit an all-time low. It was the third year since they could call themselves champions. It was the season of Chelsea, led by Jose Mourinho.’

The press found Ferguson in his most combative, fight-the-world mode. They were continually braced for the Ferguson who didn’t suffer fools. The Ferguson who responded to a Daily Telegraph reporter’s innocent question, after one trophy-less season, ‘Where did it go wrong?’ with the withering retort, ‘That’s a good question. But it would take a whole interview to get it and that’s an interview you’re never going to fucking get.’ In The Times, Simon Barnes wrote that Ferguson was ‘a sad self-caricature’ and ‘a failure [who] got where he wanted to be but didn’t stay there’. Ferguson, he declared, ‘should have gone 18 months ago. Staying on was the wrong decision for the team and for himself.’ Even Ferguson’s great friend, Hugh McIlvanney, the journalist who helped him write his first autobiography, Managing My Life, suggested that retirement was imminent. He wrote the following words of advice in The Sunday Times: ‘He must never run the risk of being dispatched … Eventually, there comes a moment when the best and bravest of fighters shouldn’t answer the bell. That moment may be upon us.’

Despite the swirling winds of discontent that swept around him, Ferguson’s demeanour within the club was never less than sunny. One morning, Daniel Taylor witnessed him coming down the stairs at the training ground, singing an old Josef Locke song to Kath, the receptionist:

Hear my song Violetta

Hear my song beneath the moon

Come to me, in my gondola

Waiting on the old lagoon

Fellow journalist David Meek, who covered Manchester United for thirty-seven years, nodded knowingly upon learning of this. ‘He’s always sunny, regardless of results,’ said Meek. ‘He’s especially at his best when there’s a problem, when he’s backed into a corner and needs to come out fighting. He shows supreme self-confidence and that attitude is reflected by his players and gets United out of scrapes.’

In his autobiography, Ferguson wrote: ‘I work hard at making sure my worries do not manifest themselves in the dressing room and I felt my demeanour was good.’ He did this because ‘Belief and confidence are very important, and instilling the right outlook is my priority.’ Ferguson stressed, ‘It’s not something that can be built overnight but that is what I work towards and I love every minute of it.’

Former Manchester United striker Mark Hughes recalls that when he was at the club, the United players would wait after a defeat for the first broken crest to appear on the back page of any newspaper. Beloved by tabloid sports editors, it is a favoured short-hand visual device to illustrate United’s problems. ‘Not that United merely have problems,’ suggests Hughes. ‘This is not a club that has defeats. It has crises.’

This shouldn’t be a surprise. In the world of the newsroom, the phrases ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’ take on the opposite meanings to those they have in the real world. For a journalist, a ‘good news’ day is a day filled with mayhem, murder and mischief. A ‘bad news’ day is a day when nothing in particular happens. This is why Ferguson claimed to pay no attention to what was written in the papers: ‘I have a mechanism that says, “Forget it,” and I don’t read the tabloids. Although my lawyers do,’ he added ominously.

This negative focus is not solely confined to our emotions, either. At a deeper level we generally seem to be hard-wired to focus on the negative. A group of psychologists reviewed over two hundred newspaper articles and concluded that, for a wide range of human behaviour and perception, a general principle holds true: bad has a stronger influence than good.

Here is a little puzzle. Look at the following sentence:

OPPORTUNITYISNOWHERE

What did you see?

Opportunity is nowhere?

Opportunity is snow here?

Opportunity is now here?

If you read it as it was intended, you would have seen ‘opportunity is now here’. But if you are like the vast majority of adults you probably read ‘opportunity is nowhere’. What’s my point? Most of us are conditioned to read with negative eyes. This is significant for a number of reasons.

Dr Shad Helmstetter, an American child psychologist, estimates that in the first sixteen years of our lives, people say no to us about 148,000 times. Get a calculator out and divide 148,000 by 16 and then by 365; it comes to 25 no’s a day. He also estimates that on average, parents speak to their children in a negative manner over 90 per cent of the time. No wonder that in related tests, 90 per cent of UK children have a positive self-image at the age of four and yet this figure drops to just 5 per cent by the age of sixteen. This problem-seeking mindset is a shortcoming in each of us. Psychologists who have studied our instinctive attraction to the negative have reached some fascinating conclusions. In an exhaustive study, the English language was found to contain 558 words that describe emotions; 62 per cent of them are negative versus 28 per cent that refer to positive feelings.

It seems fairly obvious to suggest that humans are programmed to focus on failure and disappointment far more than on success and achievement. Usually, it is so automatic that we don’t even notice it or the effect it has on our moods and feelings. When we are low on confidence, the voice in our head is typically negative and irrational and we find it very easy to recall all of those disastrous days in the middle of change when everything went wrong and we were left feeling embarrassed and incompetent.

Whenever we find ourselves in a similar situation, our brain quickly recalls these previous catastrophes and regenerates the same awful feelings of despair and anxiety. This type of thinking, of course, sends us off into a spiral of negativity, causing us to lose confidence about how well we can cope with change. We are then trapped in a cycle of low confidence that contributes to a poor performance, which results in further damage to our self-confidence and even more disappointing results.

Avoiding this cycle was something that Alex Ferguson would continually monitor, moving quickly to address the signs before it became an issue. Ferguson had a metaphor he used to describe why he did this: ‘I tell the players that the bus is moving on. This club has to progress. And the bus won’t wait for them. I tell them to get on board. Or they’ll miss out. At this club we don’t stop, we don’t take rests, we don’t feel sorry for ourselves. We go on and on.’ As Gary Neville once explained, ‘At the training ground he’s never one to lead the sessions but somehow he never misses anything. He’ll suddenly appear, walking up and down the sidelines, chatting to coaches, but always alert. There’s nothing that his eyes and ears don’t pick up.’

Managing your relationships with the significant people in your life is hugely important in helping you to maintain a positive attitude towards change. The approach adopted by Ferguson and his coaches is supported in a study carried out in the early 1980s by psychologist John Gottman, who researched why some married couples stay together whilst others break up. Professor Gottman watched a series of couples closely as they went about their daily interactions and found that the answer he was looking for lay in the tiny details of those apparently inconsequential everyday exchanges. Banal as they seemed on the surface, at another level they were highly nuanced emotional exchanges. Psychologists suggest that during the conversations we have with others, we make signals or ‘bids’. A bid is something that invites a response. Often, we don’t notice how we are responding – until it is too late and the damage has been done. The good news is that these bids are very easy to spot and pretty easy to change if we know where to look and are willing to make the effort. The impact of Gottman’s work was enormous. Based on his insights a whole new approach to marriage counselling was developed. So how does this work, and how did Ferguson use the principles in relation to creating change?

Picture the scene. You see one of your players make a silly mistake, which costs the team a goal. The player acknowledges the mistake. At this moment, Ferguson would watch the reaction of the other players to their struggling team-mate. They now have the chance to respond in one of three ways:

1. They could acknowledge the mistake and reply to it in a positive way: ‘Come on. You’re better than that.’ Or ‘Don’t worry. Let’s put it right.’ In psychologist-speak, this is called a ‘turning towards response’ or a ‘response bid’.

2. They could acknowledge it in a negative way: ‘You are useless. What are you doing?’ or, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ Unsurprisingly, this is called an ‘against bid’.

3. Or they could just stay silent: ‘!’ This is called an ‘away from’ bid. They don’t engage with what you’ve done. In effect they ignore your bid.

Whatever response they choose will determine what you do next. But only the first one is likely to encourage you to make another attempt. Faced with an ‘against’ or ‘away from’ response we are more likely to make an unconscious mental note not to bother next time. The research shows that, when we use plenty of ‘turning towards’ bids, the effects are enormous. Couples where the exchanges are predominantly ‘towards’ stay together. In fact, there is even a magic ratio. If we manage a ratio of 5:1 positive (‘towards’) responses to negative (‘away from or against’) responses, we are likely to have a healthy, long-lasting partnership.

This ratio is also important both in sports teams and in the workplace. In a recent survey, 99 out of 100 people reported that they wanted to be around positive people and nine out of ten reported being more productive when they were around positive people. This is supported by another recent study which found that workplaces with positive-to-negative ratios greater than 3:1 are significantly more productive than teams that don’t reach this ratio.

Ferguson and the assistant coaches carried this principle into training sessions and the dressing room. They would only emphasise positives in what they saw: ‘There is no room for criticism on the training field,’ he said. ‘For a player – and for any human being – there is nothing better than hearing, “Well done.” Those are the two best words ever invented in sports. You don’t need to use superlatives.’

Failing to do this makes it easy to become dragged into the pessimism cycle, something which the Australian cricket team perfected as an art form which they called ‘sledging’. Former captain Mark Waugh speaks with pride about achieving the ‘mental disintegration of opponents’ before a ball was even bowled by reminding them verbally and in graphic detail of all their previous failures, weaknesses and mistakes. They knew that this didn’t help them deliver their best.

Many commentators suggest that Alex Ferguson was not averse to employing this tactic to unsettle his rivals, a suggestion that he partially refutes. ‘I did not set out to master the dark arts. It was more important to concentrate on ourselves but I did try the odd trick.’ Some examples of this include his annual declaration that Manchester United were always stronger in the second half of a season. ‘I did it every year. “Wait until the second half of the season,” I would say. And it always worked. It crept into the minds of our players and became a nagging fear for the opposition. Second half of the season, United would come like an invasion force, with hellfire in their eyes. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Ferguson stopped using this line when then Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti challenged its veracity. ‘Alex is saying United are stronger in the second half of the season, but we are, too,’ he claimed.

Perhaps the most notorious example of Ferguson’s psychological ‘sledges’ was the concept known as ‘Fergie time’ – the well-established idea among football fans that an extra helping of added time would be given when Manchester United were losing. The phenomenon of Fergie time originated in 1993. United were playing Sheffield Wednesday, who were leading 1–0 after ninety minutes. The referee gave seven minutes of added time, during which Steve Bruce scored twice, clearing the way for United’s first topflight title in twenty-six years. ‘Ever since then, every time United have been given quite a bit of injury time, it’s been flagged up in people’s heads and they’ve said, “Oh, United have got more Fergie time again,”’ says Duncan Alexander of Opta Sports, which collates data from the games. Ferguson would symbolise the concept by standing on the touchline and tapping his watch. However, he confesses, ‘I didn’t keep track of the time in games. It became too hard to work out how long might be added for ...