Quiet Leadership: Winning Hearts, Minds and Matches

by Carlo Ancelotti

There is power and authority in being calm and measured, in building trust and making decisions coolly, in using influence and persuasion and in being professional in your approach.

My approach is born of the idea that a leader should not need to rant or rave or rule with an iron fist, but rather that their power should be implicit. It should be crystal clear who is in charge, and their authority must result from respect and trust rather than fear.

my character and an essential element of my personality. Leadership can be learned but cannot be imitated. It is possible to observe other great leaders at work, but if your natural inclination is to be quiet, calm and take care of others it is unwise to try to be anyone else.

comparing them unflinchingly to Ancelotti’s direct experience. As the professional landscape changes radically across all sectors and markets, business leaders have to be better armed to deal with managing diverse and highly talented – and often problematic – workforces.

Ancelotti goes about his business in a calm but authoritative way that can go under the radar of a media desperate for scandal.

Understanding and accepting that I was the boss was very difficult for me. I knew my own inadequacies, my own vulnerabilities, and I could not believe that others could not see that. Maybe that’s the most difficult element of the transition from worker to boss for most of us.

The end of an arc can be instigated by the leader, just as it can by the organization, and it is important to be philosophical about the manner of the arc ending. Sometimes you leave on your own terms, sometimes you don’t. That’s football, just as it is in business.

This was another episode which taught me how to deal with this different kind of president; again, I chose not to meet aggression with aggression, it is not my way. I like to think through difficult times, address the problems coolly and with reason.

They hire me to be kind and calm with the players and then at the first sign of trouble along the way that’s the very characteristic they point to as the problem.

If I don’t do a good job then just fire me, but don’t give me stupid ultimatums. You are the boss, so of course you have the right to sack whoever you want – just be a man about it.

I’ve learned that getting sacked – and getting recruited, for that matter – is rarely just about you. It is always about the person hiring or firing you. Do your job to the best of your ability and let others judge you because they will anyway.

Leading may sometimes involve compromise, especially at the biggest clubs, but not when it comes to your expertise and you have the conviction of your decisions. While

The transition from member of staff to leader is not as straightforward as you think.

Sometimes a relationship just gets tired and it’s time to move on. Don’t over internalize this, everything has a cycle. The key is to be as productive as possible in each cycle.

Find a solution, don’t waste time looking for the guilty.

He is so very nice all the time and he never gets upset for more than a minute. He can tell you strongly about something he is not happy with, then it is done. This can be a weakness because if you are too nice, people might start to think they can take advantage of you. But it’s a positive weakness, if you know what I mean, and I certainly don’t look on him as being weak.

Wherever I go, I am always myself. My personality or style does not change, and ultimately I am hired for who I am.

In England there is much more aggression and less obsession with possession. English teams and players have a strong fighting mentality. If I had to go to war, I would go with the English, not with the Italians or the French. It

Leaders cannot afford to stand still, they must always be developing, progressing.

You need to trust in order to delegate.

José Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person.

Carlo is a natural leader. His style isn’t ostentatious – it’s quiet. He is not pretending; there’s nothing false about it. You

It is said that in academia the arguments are so fierce because the issues are so trivial; it is the same in football. In

When you lose a game and then you have a day off afterwards, many people ask, ‘What are you doing?’ Their reaction is to get the players in and push them after a bad result, but this is wrong. The reverse is true. When you lose, of course you have to analyse what went wrong and how to address it next time, but you have to put that game behind you. You have to try to forget the defeat as soon as possible so you’re in the right frame of mind for the next game. It is at times like this that the president and the press will begin to say, ‘You’re too weak, you’re too nice. The players aren’t performing so you have to show them the whip.’ Every time we lose, that’s what they say.

My opinion is that players do their best when they are comfortable, not when they are uncomfortable.

He spreads serenity because he is a serene man.

Managing the talent, then, is at the heart of the leadership challenge in any organization.

For me, the solution is never to sacrifice talent by diminishing it, but always to enable it to flourish, because this is always the best for the team. So, the balance must be not lowering the talent to fit the team, but rather raising the team to fit the talent.

When you first engage with the people or talent you will work with forget about the ‘X and Os’ of how to do the job. Take time to understand them as people; what makes them who they are; who influences their life; who has shaped who they are. The ‘How do we drive this bus?’ comes after ‘Who made the driver of the bus?’.

Your job is not to motivate the talent – they should find this within themselves – your job is not to demotivate them.

It’s often only when a great manager like him leaves a club that everyone realizes just how influential he was when he was there.

characters – and a great example for the others. I set about creating relationships with each of these players separately. I like to speak with players not only about tactics, but also about personal things, and to joke around. Everything should not always be so serious at work. The

Leaders can only lead if followers believe in them. It doesn’t matter why they believe in them. It

These laws of the dressing room are encoded in the same way as any workplace – people know what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. It all harks back to culture. The difference between culture and climate is that we want the former to be permanent but we know that the latter can be changeable. It is the same with implicit and explicit rules of the workplace. Explicit rules are changeable, but implicit rules represent the underlying, accepted culture.

You have to communicate what is expected of the players at all times, even when they’re away from the team, not only with words but also by showing them.

Of course, I could make new, explicit rules. I have that power, in theory. I could tell the players, ‘We now train at seven in the morning,’ but this is not the right way. This is just to show power. It is always best to use soft power, quiet power with the players, to influence and have them follow the implicit rules because they believe in them.

Ultimately, it is the owner who owns the brand and sets out the policy and the strategy. In one way we are lucky in football because we mostly have very clear ownership. I look at companies like Volkswagen and see complex ownership, and maybe that’s why it’s in so much trouble with the emissions scandal.

Managing the conflicting ideas and egos of talented players and owners is one of the core attributes of a quiet leader. It is my guiding notion that it is simply rational to concentrate only on those things you can affect. Those that are out of your control must be rejected for consideration.

Patience is not always a virtue; don’t wait too long to make a difficult decision.

Soft power is the most effective. Dictatorships don’t last.

You often have to change formation to work around injured players or to accommodate new ones. Sometimes this is where the best ideas come from – from constraints.

When I was talking with Billy Beane, of the Oakland Athletics baseball team and Moneyball fame, he said that his revolutionary practices gave him an edge for maybe one year and then everyone else copied and improved.

need to spend a lot of time with these kind of players. They are the low-maintenance team members who allow you the time to spend on the high-maintenance ones. They self-motivate 100 per cent of the time.

Character is often more important than technique.

Know your business. Those you lead expect nothing less. If they observe less, they won’t be led by you for long.

which have been acquired through years of experience. We need both analytics and instinct because eventually those who do not understand the data will be eaten by it.

Leaders do not emerge fully formed from the womb with all the skills needed to take on the world. Every experience along the road to their eventual success, or failure, adds to the person the world sees when the mantle of leadership is assumed.

You know when you are rich because you don’t know exactly how much is in your bank account; my father knew to the exact penny what we had. We needed to be organized.

Because of his natural authority he would not even answer if you challenged him; he would simply pose a question back to you and you would know what he wanted you to do. At

But nobody would question the coach. This is not a good environment. We came home from Mexico quickly.