A friend of mine from university recently won the Financial Times Book of the Month. It is called “No B*llshit Leadership” by Chris Hirst and is available from all good bookshops (and a few bad ones). Please buy it. He owes me a drink and I am an expensive date. Now clearly I have no intention of ever reading it because, as The Smiths so acutely observed, we hate it when our friends become successful. But it has made me ponder on the subject of leadership a little bit and come up with a few thoughts of my own. Pertinent, I think, in a world where our industry is faced with the fallout of ongoing political deadlock; with changing market conditions; and where we are looking to design our digital future.
At this point we should probably agree on our definition of “leadership” because it is yet another word that has been rendered meaningless by overuse. I think we are talking about how best to organise people and stuff to get things done relatively successfully. And that is rarely achieved by just one person.
Rather what you need is a blend of complementary personalities to produce outstanding results. Depending on how you measure it, either Nottingham or Oporto is the smallest city by head of population to produce a team that has won the European Cup. Nottingham Forest won the Cup in 1979 and 1980 under the “leadership” of Brian Clough. Now anyone with even a passing knowledge of 1970s football knows that Clough did not do this alone.
He was, undoubtedly, a man manager of some genius. The night before the 1979 League Cup final, conscious that his relatively inexperienced team would be anxious, he ordered a crate of champagne to calm their nerves - probably frowned upon by nutritionists today but credited by his players as being key to their 3-2 win over Southampton. But this eccentricity and his domineering approach (walking across the training ground yelling at a player “you are a disgrace. For missing from there, you want shooting”) would not work on its own.
After all, when he told the Leeds players to throw all their medals in the bin because they had won them by cheating, he was sacked 44 days later. The difference? At Leeds, Clough was very much on his own. At Forest, and previously at Derby where he won the league, Clough had Peter Taylor alongside him. Taylor brought two things that Clough could not: an incredible eye for playing talent – plucking the likes of Peter Withe and Gary Birtles from obscurity and making them internationals; and the ability to be the trusted back room confidant offsetting Clough’s despotic front of house persona. Clough would challenge, berate and belittle the players to try and draw performances out of them to spite him. Taylor would calm and reassure them. The balance produced unprecedented results.
But is two the magic number? I am not so sure. Take this alternative example. After taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, Robert E Lee led Confederate forces to a series of victories over a succession of Union commanders. Given the relative resources and material at the disposal of each side, an extraordinary achievement. The key to this? Balance. Lee’s two most trusted advisers were his corps commanders Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet. Jackson believed in always taking the fight to the enemy, in looking for every opportunity to attack the superior force. At Chancelorsville Lee gave him his head and his night march to assault the Union right flank was the high point of the war for the Confederacy. At Fredricksburg, the far more cautious Longstreet organised the defences in the “sunken road” and it was the worst day of the war for the Union in terms of the gulf between casualties on either side.
Towards the end of the Battle of Chancelorsville, Jackson was shot by friendly fire and later died. It meant that by the time they arrived at Gettysburg in 1863, the three had become two. Longstreet urged Lee not to fight on ground the Union had chosen. Without his counter balance, Lee over compensated and ordered Pickett’s charge – the moment when, at least symbolically, the South lost the war.
On their own, Clough and Lee were competent but unremarkable figure heads, but with Taylor offsetting Clough’s excesses they delivered what should have been unachievable. Jackson and Longstreet created a middle path for Lee to follow that nearly delivered the impossible. Their differences combined to produce a strength beyond the sum of its parts. It is why, as I understand it, self-help books promote not recruiting people similar to yourself. Leadership is not a solo crusade. Something we shouldn’t lose sight of as we face our own turbulent future.
