Leadership Loneliness & Culture Change

Manchester United leader Ruben Amorim experiences the loneliness of leadership when he perceives that his team don't buy into his plan. Image: ITV

This post isn’t actually about football, despite the image of the Manchester United manager, Ruben Amorim, unable to watch his players' shambolic performance. It’s about the loneliness of leadership and the complexities of culture change, and about 2 simple actions you can take if you see a version of this image in your school or organisation.

I’m a Manchester United supporter. Watching this game was grim - as it so often has been over the last 14 years. But it’s not really grim because the team were poor and the result was bad; that’s unsurprising. It’s grim for me because I see long term patterns - repeated leadership and culture lessons that apply to all of us.

I take 2 main things away from this image:

1. Leadership is lonely. It’s incredibly lonely and stifling when you’re not winning; when the results aren't coming in; when your plan isn't yielding the impact you expected. When you think your team don’t believe you’re doing the right thing. When you have no fellow leaders standing by you and publicly proclaiming their belief in your plan.

2. This organisation’s culture is toxic. We know that because multiple experienced and skillful leaders have come and gone and the culture has remained. Multiple skillful players and coaches have come and gone and the culture remains. The personnel have almost completely changed and yet the culture persists. So it’s not about “bad” leadership or “incompetent” players.

Culture change takes time. And it’s not linear. And it’s not one singular focus. It’s a complex ecosystem where improvements in one area necessarily weaken others. Which in turn have to be strengthened, domino-affecting the weaknesses and even cycling back round until - over many iterations of this whack-a-mole game - they are eventually smoothed out without sacrificing noticeably on the priority strengths.

This process of reshaping a culture can be delayed and completely derailed by some simple mistakes:

• Treating singular events as symptoms of a systemic rot (firefighting)

• Flipping or abandoning priority focuses too soon (another type of firefighting, at strategic level)

• Switching the core mental models - the beliefs and values - that underpin the decisions on what to focus on.

This is not to say that “sticking to the plan” means being totally inflexible to any changes - every plan must have course corrections, and those interim reflection points for correcting course have to be planned for too. “Sticking to the plan” also means making tweaks to the operational implementation as you go, if you see that your previous changes are producing unintended negative consequences.

When in the past 12 years United have bought a flashy expensive player after opening 1 or 2 games of the season have been losses, they have been firefighting a singular event.

When they’ve changed leadership between very different philosophies of leadership and football (each of their last 6 leaders have had very different football values and philosophies to their predecessor) they’ve been changing their core mental models. Mental models sit at the deepest part of the cultural iceberg: they dictate the systems and processes of an organisation; which in turn affect the visible patterns of behaviour - what we believe is “the way we do things round here”.

United and Amorim are in quite lucky positions really: their supporters actually ramp up their vocal and visible support when things go badly. They back their leader. They get louder in their support. They aren’t blind to the visible failures, but they are not afraid to be seen to be propping up the leader and cheering them on.

What United call “supporters”, schools call “parents” and businesses call “customers”. How many of your schools and businesses can you truly say will rally round and support their leaders and staff when they are not performing? After all, support isn’t needed when they’re flying high, smashing it in performance and getting great results - they don’t need support there. People only need support when they can’t stand up by themselves. That’s the very defining concept of the word.

So, when you see a version of this image in your leader, consider two things:

1. Support them. Publicly. Steven Pinker gave a great TED talk about common knowledge recently - people need to know you believe in the plan, then they’ll voice their support too. When you know that others know you believe, and others know you know they know, it cascades. But at the heart of it all is a human being in a lonely place, feeling like the world doesn’t trust their judgement, that their plan isn’t producing the results they thought it would. Be the support for them so they can get back to the plan - either by adapting it or acknowledging a singular event is not a systemic problem.

2. Ask yourself: “was this issue a single event or a repeated pattern?” If it’s a single event - one bad apple, one mistake by an otherwise able performer, or an external factor - address it, repair it and stick to the plan. If it’s a repeated behaviour, then it’s a sign of a cultural issue: dig deeper - what are the systemic processes and mental models that cause or permit those repeated behaviours? Why do people think that’s ok to keep repeating? Address it. If you already have a plan with a clear focus and priority for today, stick to it. If you don’t, make a plan together.

Every school and every company has had an image like this somewhere in the last 5 years, and will have again somewhere in the next 5. But not all of them will have such a loyal support in their “customer” base as this example. If your parents or customers won’t rally round when times are rough, then you need to. And tell everyone that you are. And if you see firefighting or panic changing of priorities and mental models - be the one to say: “slow down, let’s stick to our plan first.” Because panic decisions like this are almost always borne out of a fear of being unsupported.

As for United, I’ll go to Old Trafford on Saturday and steel myself for the inevitable defeat. It’s a form of self-torture, but I’ll still lose my voice shouting my support for Amorim and his plan. Because teams and leaders don’t need support when they’re winning. They need it when they’re doubting themselves.