Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP407 What We Talk About When We Talk About Gareth Southgate
Leadership is one of the most important and yet misunderstood topics in sport.
This summer, it has dominated the headlines. Performances of the England football team have mainly been analysed via the lens of its manager.
So what is leadership and what are the mistakes we make when talking about it.
Ed Smith is renowned thinker on sport, leadership and decision-making. The former professional cricketer with Kent, Middlesex and England, he was Chief Selector for England men’s cricket from 2018 to 2021.
Ed is Co-Founder and Director of the Institute of Sports Humanities which offers the Leadership in Sport Masters degree co-delivered with Loughborough University London.
Joining Ed is Dr Eddie Mighten, a Teaching Fellow in the Institute of Sport Business at Loughborough University, with research interests in leadership and professional football exploring ideas that explain the influence leaders have on those they interact with. This field of research emerged from a career in football, media and the voluntary sector. He was a former professional footballer at Nottingham Forest, as is his son, Alex Mighten.
Leadership in Sport MA 2024 Applications Open
Applications for the next intake on the 2024 Leadership in Sport Masters are open.
The Leadership in Sport Masters is designed for sports industry executives to study part-time alongside their careers.
The programme is co-delivered by Loughborough University London and the Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH), experts in leadership education.
Loughborough University is ranked best university in the world for sports-related subjects (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2017-2023).
Find out more https://www.sportshumanities.org/masters-uk
or contact tom.rann@sportshumanities.org
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Hello, and welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. I'm Richard Gillis This summer, we've been talking about leadership in the form of Gareth Southgate management of the England team at the euros. What are the mistakes we make? When we talk about this subject. This is the question I've put to Ed Smith and Eddie Mighten. Two experts in the field. Ed Smith is a renowned thinker on sport leadership and decision-making the former professional cricketer with Kent, Middlesex and England. He was chief selector for England's men's teams. From 2018 to 2021 Ed is co-founder and director of the Institute of sports humanities, which offers the leadership in sport master's degree co delivered with Loughborough University London. Applications for the next intake on the 2024 course are now open. Joining ed is Dr. Eddie Mighten a teaching fellow at the Institute of sports business at Loughborough university with research interests in leadership and professional football. Exploring ideas. Explain the influence leaders have on those. They interact with this field of research emerged. From Eddie's career in football media, and the voluntary sector is a performer professional football at Nottingham Forest as is his son, Alex.
Ed Smith:But more recently, of course, we now see a team of players who are starring in outstanding Premier League teams or, Real Madrid, like Juventus. And the question becomes How can these players be so good and so dazzling and so great to watch and yet when they come together as a team for England, it does, it looks a bit pedestrian and flat and unexciting, even though they got to the final.
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Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:I want to start with you, Eddie, because I know a bit about Ed, but I don't know much about you. And I want you just to place you in the minds of the listener. Before we get going, just tell us a bit about yourself, what you're doing and a bit of background.
Eddie Mighten:I think to frame myself in this debate going back quickly and going fast forward. So I was a young aspiring footballer, Nottingham Forest never good enough, didn't make the grade, went to uni, left uni, went to the States for six week holiday and came back 20 years later. Now in that time, I did the traditional footballer goes into coaching coaching a university, collegiate set up, and that was the first time leadership knocked on my door in the sense that I went from an assistant coach and then got my own program and I brought all these ideas because where I was an assistant, I was instrumental in, you know, Getting this team from a rubbish team to a really top team. And I brought all the ideas, all the methods to this team. I was now in charge as I'm now the head coach and nothing worked. And I couldn't understand why it was so successful over here. And I couldn't get it going over here. So I started to read everything about leadership and football and mentors went to conferences because I thought I was the reason why it wasn't failing. Eventually, five years later, got this thing going and we became a top, top team. But there was my fascination with leadership. And then when I came back to the UK, 20 years later, reinvented myself as a A quote, academic, that was the obvious area for me to focus on. And sport was always going to be my domain. Leadership found me keep going with a PhD, learn more about it. And I'm just fascinated by the whole subject from that day, really.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:It's interesting, isn't it, how much we talk about leadership and we're going to be talking about leadership in, in sport, but, you know, across other realms as well. And. We've just had a month where leadership is just virtually what anyone, everyone was talking about via the lens of Gareth Southgate, the England football team, the Euros. Ed, just bring you in here. As you know, we've talked previously. I'm just fascinated by how we talk about the subject what's your reading of the last month? You're now, am I allowed to say you're in football
Ed Smith:One of my hats in football, you know, obviously what brings us together today is the Institute of Sports Humanities and its partnership with Loughborough University and my work with Eddie on the Leadership in Sport Masters Program. But I also have a foot thing in my first steps in football, Mo Bobat, who was performance director at England cricket when we worked very close to get closely together when I was selecting England teams. And he and I are helping Derby County and it's our first kind of immersion. In, in football and I'm learning a huge amount, so every time I visit the training ground or, or chat to the manager, Paul Warren, or the guys involved with the club, but I think the fascination of the Euros is that I think in Eddie's work touches on this very strongly, is that we talk about leadership, but, but leadership is nearly always entirely bound up with context and context is always changing. So if you think about people who are perceived to be successful leaders. It may be the environment they're in. The other leaders in that set up, when I think about times it's gone well or gone badly for me, I often think about, particularly if I was to say, some better spells. I know I couldn't have done some things without the people around me, and they were a massive part of what may have ended up looking like quite a successful period or whatever. Now in the case of Gareth Southgate and England football although he stayed in the same role from 2016 I think to 2024, The context of the team actually changed a lot, and he was part of changing that context, because he did change the culture, he did have a great effect on the environment the players naturally evolved and some new talent came in. And I think that presented a big leadership challenge, which is, I think, the initial phase where England had a very disappointing period in major tournaments with high profile players who hadn't performed on the big stage. He then brought in a group of players who seemed to be, Happy to be out of the limelight, who didn't seem to run their own media campaigns through their preferred outlets. There didn't seem to be riffs in the camp. He seemed to have a much more open approach to the media, which was partly, I think, he and Dan Ashworth worked together at the FA. And out of that environmental change came some very good, or certainly, At the same time, of course, it's always difficult to disentangle, but it would appear that had a big influence on helping him to play better at major tournaments and, you know, his record stands for itself. But more recently, of course, we now see a team of players who are starring in outstanding Premier League teams or, Real Madrid, like Juventus. And the question becomes How can these players be so good and so dazzling and so great to watch and yet when they come together as a team for England, it does, it looks a bit pedestrian and flat and unexciting, even though they got to the final. So I think, for Gareth Southgate, who, who leaves office with, you know, highly respected and with his His reputation as a, as a man of integrity and intelligence, very securely established. It still nonetheless shows that even in the same job, the context is always changing. And it would appear to me as a relative outsider and someone who, who admires a lot of what he's done. It appears to me that he did some aspects of the job extremely well. And somehow other aspects of the job he found much harder and progressively got more difficult. Eddie will tell me as a football insider, whether that's correct or not.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:do you agree?
Eddie Mighten:Well, I think, I think Ed, I'm glad you mentioned the partnership we have, Ed The module I teach, I come at it from Purely theoretical. Okay. So I'm going to, in this debate, stay on the theoretical side of it. And obviously Ed you're in it now in the practice. So this is a beautiful way to frame it. So what you've just talked about, there are a lot of problematics in it. So let's just deal with one. So oftentimes when you talk about leadership with someone, it's amazing. You actually could be talking in cross purposes. So, good scholar, a brilliant scholar, Keith Grint developed what he called a typology of leadership. And it's a lovely way to think about it in terms of what are we actually talking about when we're talking about this issue? So Grint talked about When we talk about leadership, are we talking about the person, in this case, Gareth Southgate? Are we talking about his results? Are we talking about how he goes about it? The process? What he does? Are we talking about his position? As England manager and Grint 10 years later added another dimension. He called purpose. What is the purpose of this thing we call leadership? So often when you've talked to people, and I'm not saying it's that clear cut, they could be talking about one or many of them or all of them, but they have an intense focus on one part of it. And a lot of it I'm finding with Gareth at the moment is. Either the person, lovely guy, carries himself well, communicates with his results. didn't win anything, you know, how he goes about it. People think, Oh, he's a great guy. He's taken them from here to here. So that's the first problematic. What are we actually talking about when we have a discussion about leadership? And oftentimes it can be very different what people have in their heads.
Ed Smith:I agree with that entirely, actually. And so, the U. S. Army's sort of leadership training program released a book of essays about leadership drawn from sort of hundreds of years, and it was reviewed in the, in the New Yorker about 10 years ago. And the reviewer said, it's amazing how many books are published about leadership without anyone else being able to define it. And that's, that's a very good point. And often it's actually someone who comes from a humanities background. And my dad was an English teacher. Yeah. It's very interesting, even in more scientific or technical areas, how often language unlocks some of the problems. Because we're talking about different things that might have overlapping meanings, but we're not really disentangling them very well or defining them very well. So if we just take some of the things that go into it, and Eddie, you know, your experience as a coach and a player and now an academic in football will be interesting. You know, football lumps together a lot of powers, which in other sports are sometimes separated. So, you know, in the case of cricket, the captain has a lot of power, much more power than a captain in football. They have these weird people called selectors, you know, and they, they sort of survive. Sometimes they get abolished, but they kind of come back. So they have these things called selectors.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:They're like cockroaches,
Ed Smith:No, you just can't kill them off, you know. I mean, you know, eventually they'll get there. And then of course there's the coach, which is actually a relatively recent innovation in cricket. So there's the three sort of office holders all sharing power. In football, although there's a, there is obviously a board and an owner and sometimes a director of football or some other structures inside the club, a lot is vested in the manager. So the manager is setting the environment, you know, he's, he's picking the 11. He might also have a significant influence over the squad too. And then he's also making the tactical changes in game. If you like, he said, he's not only the formation into the game, but then he's obviously making substitutions and and juggling things around in the 90 minutes, 120 or whatever. Exactly. As you say, when you're talking about how good a leader is, they which part of it, and actually in the case of. Gareth, and this is an outsider's perspective some of my colleagues know him very well, but I don't. I think he was very good at some things and probably, you know, less strong than others. So in other words, some of the narratives which appear to be in conflict might both be true. And I certainly think it shouldn't be forgotten that, you know, in your framing, which I know you were characterizing a popular view rather than endorsing it, Eddie, He's not alone in not having one on their thing. That's, that's pretty much all of them. Certainly in my lifetime, born in 77. So I think that's a, an unfair definition of not succeeding. I would say he succeeded very well in some areas and less one in others.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:There's a question there though, about the cricket football comparison, and you might throw rugby into this as well, because you've got this sort of era where you've got in football. Over the course of 20 years, probably, and if you use Man United as an example, you've got the, you know, the Ferguson figure who is a sort of the, the manager of synonymous with the club. And you didn't really know who was above him in the, in the organization. And now there has been a sort of an undermining, is that the right term of the way the, the, the
Ed Smith:wrong
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:football manager has sort of been. Move down. So you know, you've got directors of football, you've got CEOs. I was looking at the Man United structure the other day that they, you know, because it's very of the moment, you've got Brailsford in there and you've got Jim Ratcliffe and you've got a CEO. And then you have to go quite a long way down before you get to Eric Tan Haag and the sort of money. And he will be the one that is tasked with performance. And you've got Dan Ashworth in there, which is again, the data box, which is being ticked. So. Is it becoming less about leadership and more tactical management thing? Because we talk about Gareth Southgate as the big plus that everyone agrees with, that he did the culture thing really well, which feels like a leadership issue. Culture is really hard to change. That's really difficult. Actually, on a club day to day level, the manager's role is,
Ed Smith:No, I'm not sure about that. I know what you mean. I'm not sure about that because I think ultimately The manager is so on the hook for the here and now that they're always absolutely central. I think the way I would put it is this that Some things in sport have changed and unavoidably so. So for example, the marketplace for talent is now international. There's, there's no point pretending that everyone's not in the business of trying to find talent wherever it might be. And obviously undervalued talent being particularly attractive. So. You're going to need to have the ability to find and then assess and then form a 360 view about players that aren't in your backyard. So, it's, leagues aren't just looking at players inside the same leagues all the time or their own league. And also, the demands of players have changed and grown exponentially. I'm just about in touch enough, you know, Retired in 2008. And then I was finished as selector in 2021. That if you look at how a top player now prepares to play elite sport, they have excellent nutrition support. They have psychological support. They expect superb physiotherapy strength and conditioning technical coaching regarding their specific skill, not just general like a football or cricket person, but specific to their skill. Now someone is managing and leading all those. services and demands. So in other words, what a club does or what a national team does has grown exponentially. And I would say one of the challenges in leaderships in sport today is to find clarity and simplicity amid all that complexity. Cause there's a real danger that as clubs and organizations gain new functions, Their ability, their ability to knit them together and to produce a coherent system in which the parts are all functioning and communicating effectively gets harder and harder. So in some ways, I don't think you can turn back the clock and have one person doing everything, but the ability to have clear thinkers who have a general sense of direction and the ability to take action. different forms of technical expert with them on that journey. I think that's very important. And I know as I'm saying that, I think that's something that Andrew Strauss did very well when he was MD of England cricket. He had the ability to have a broad sense of direction. Get experts in, in their different positions and then sort of bring them along on that same journey, you know, in, in the jargon alignment and
Eddie Mighten:So theoretically, and I'm going to stay in that world, I'll chuck in another problematic, which again, we conflate. So you've got leader on one, one side of it. In between, you've got this thing we focus on and we use and we have a common understanding called leadership. Then the other side, which is particularly relevant to sport is an outcome, a result of performance. So again, It's one of those misspecifications. Are we talking about the leader? The process that goes in between to influence people? Or are the results? Now, for me, Gareth Southgate, unfairly, is being undermined, pulled down slightly because he didn't win. Everything else that people can mildly agree he's done a reasonable job on. And we know in football particularly, it's a results driven business. It's the way it is. You don't get in academia, we focus on Fergie and Pep and Klopp, and there's an intense focus on managers who win. What about the ones who don't? And there are more who don't, because only one person can win the league, one trophy. But they still are good leaders and exhibit good leadership. We're not bothered about that. So it's the result that draws people because we link another problematic a person as the reason why they won. So manity are serial winners because of pep. It's the old attribution theory, isn't it? But then the problem matter is how much of PEP and what he is, what he does. As resulted in those litany of trophies. How do we separate peps import into this result? I don't think we figured that out yet, but it's a natural way of thinking about leadership. We first draw to success. No one wants to consider failures and then we link it to a person. And that's how we, the narrative is being shaped at the minute. And all of it means you have these complicated debates where you can't ever get to. The thing we're trying to get to as academics, a truth. All we have to wade through is self evident truths. So I'll give you one. You can spot a good leader when you see one. Things like that exist in the world. These are self evident truth and people actually believe, yeah, I can spot a good leader when I see one. But there are no empirical basis to support things like that. But when we have this debate about leadership, Because we conflate a lot of things, these things take a life of their own, so
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:and the incentive in that in terms of, I know a good leader when I see one is for the leader to perform leadership in front of us and in football, particularly, I mean, the manager has become this, look at me, I'm leading and I'm, you know, prowling the sidelines and, and, you know, There is a name rugby. They sit in behind, you know, laptops as though it, and the players are sort of moving around a chess board and they are the sort of all seeing power. It's interesting that in terms of how that manifests and how we talk about leadership, which runs straight into that, what you just said,
Ed Smith:we're in the heart of it now. I think that first of all, Eddie, Eddie's comments, obviously Richard relate to your work and the question of the leadership myth and your book about the Ryder cup and, and sort of associated books like the halo effect. Also, you know, I'm interested in randomness and one of the things that You know, I wrote a book about luck and I think your point about the inability or the difficulty of disentangling outcomes from personalities means we tend to attach too much agency to the person who's on camera, which gets to the heart of the sports industry because you know, if you speak to investors in sport, they'll use phrases like sport is a media business, you know, and the media properties that they're selling. And of course, Sport is ideally suited to television, which has really powered its, you know, its wealth and its globalization. And television is very good at making you think that the person on the screen is in control of something, but whether they are or not is a very different question. I used to, you know, When I was involved with England, you know, we'd sometimes have a big support staff and the camera would kind of pan on to 10 people and if you were just sitting at home, you'd think, you know, there they are working out like what's going to happen next and who's and they're probably not because one of them is the fielding coach and he's done his incredibly tough building session that day and he wants to let the players get on with it. Another one, something else, and he's busy with something behind the scenes as well. They're not all pulling the strings, but television creates that impression. It attaches agency to the, to the heroic figure on our screen. And then of course, the logical conclusion of that is, as you say, Richard, that he starts to play that role. Even subconsciously he gets drawn into having the mannerisms. Associated with leadership, whether they're actually leaderful or not, there's a third layer to this, which is that, is that an actual fact rational? So one of the things that I think coaches have come to realize, or let's say protagonists in sports leadership who speak to the media, which is mostly coaches, but not exclusively coaches, they realize that when they're speaking to the media, they're actually speaking to the dressing room first and foremost. and what they convey in the media, which may not necessarily be about praise or criticism, but will often be about mood, tone and command, is one of their central levers of power. So it's not superficial to say we want a leader to be an effective communicator. That sounds superficial, but actually it's not. It's increasingly fundamental. If you find someone who's, if you appoint someone who's rattled, and gets frayed easily in the media. You'll probably have problems closer to home than you think.
Eddie Mighten:And I love it, Ed, when we're in the classroom and this topic's been studied for over a century, and I love it when I see theory. Coming to life. And what you describe Alverson says nicely, he calls it the Hollywood narrative. And when I teach one of my, I start my leadership classes, I do that classic Al Pacino that American football thing, one last day or whatever. It's a famous speech and he Any given Sunday, and I love that. I just love the Hollywood thing about it. But that's what we're in the way society is. We are looking for a savior, a personal inspiration, and we buy into it because we feel we can benefit from it or they will help us, or we'll get what we need out of it based on this person. And it's the whole idea of. Where leadership started in terms of the study, an intense focus on what leaders do, what characteristics they have, the charisma, the transformation, all these things, but all wrapped up in an individual. And sadly, we haven't moved too far away from that focus. Eric Minder, a theorist, called for a shift away from this intense focus on individuals and looking at leadership more as a collective. Eric. More as a relationship. I don't think we've still gotten there yet, you know, and it's more, it's sexy, isn't it? To say, let's look at this person and unpack them and look at the political debates and all these things we've had in plain out in front of us. They're all focused on people, one person.
Ed Smith:My personal experience shows me that systems operate better when the various leaders within that system attend very closely to their area of contribution and the time frame it's on. Let me give you an example. So if you sort of, If I describe a selection meeting to you two, in the room will be head coach, captain, selectors. So when I was there, myself and James Taylor, performance director, Mo Bobat head of scouting and the head of data. So there they are. Now, the people in that room are operating on different time frames and their ability to influence comes at different moments. You're probably not going to be able to influence much as the person who coordinates all the scouting at the last minute because you're not going to be picking a new player for a World Cup for a World Cup tournament. They've got to make the case and influence much earlier and the best people I've worked with. Know when their moment is and they have to be organized to contribute to the system within a big project and I'll, you know, give you an example, you know, someone I'm working with now, Moe Bobat, when he was, he created the scouting system that England cricket benefited from and now he's director of cricket in Royal Challengers Bangalore. And Mo knew how to influence early because he knows he's not going to be in the room when he was, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago. He's not a head coach. He's not director of cricket and he's not captain. So his ability to win the day at the last minute and say, let's do this, guys, that's going to be someone else's role. So he's got to get things ready early so that the things he believes in and the systems he believes in and the ideas he believes in come to the fore early. And I think going back to your point one of the problems with the way we, about leadership always, or nearly always being a collective. One of the problems with the concept of accountability is it's very zero sum. Who are we going to blame? That's what people nearly always mean. It's like, well, we want an accountable system. So the manager wants it, not the manager, the line manager wants an accountable system so he knows who can blame below him. And the media wants accountability so it can know who to splash on the back page, turn into a turnip. But in actual fact, good systems never are zero sum. Because if people are really good at their job and they believe in what they do, They take more responsibility than if you like they're accountable for. They want to believe that if they do their bit well, they can make a disproportionately positive influence on the whole. So you actually get a situation where there's a surfeit of responsibility and it grows the collective stock of courage and ability in the organization. So I think that by focusing so much on accountability, We actually create a kind of comeuppance culture where it's almost like where are the arrows pointing so we know who to get really angry with if it goes wrong. I've never seen that work and I've always been struck that in good systems and good groups, almost people are putting their hand up when things go wrong. They're almost saying, no, no, no, blame me, you know, because that's the environment they're in. They believe they have more responsibility than is written down on their job description. But
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:On that Ed, one of the, one of my life mantras, career mantras has been try and get a job with a dotted line where you're attached to it rather than a straight line, you know, a field in line. So you have, you don't have any direct, people can't blame you completely for success and failure that you're to the side. So that might be a coward's way out, but you know, it works for some
Ed Smith:that, you've framed it mischievously, let's turn it into a positive. You always know whether you've done a good job or not. And, you know, Graham Gooch, the, the great England player and captain said success is an inside job. I think that's a great line is that people might enjoy external validation or a bit of praise or whatever, but very seldom, you know, for a grownup, is it actually going to affect how they assess their own performance. And if it does, you've probably got a narcissism issue. I think,
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:I'm not sure about that.
Ed Smith:go on.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:I'm not, well, that last bit might be true, but I, there's a, I think that quite often. Well, are people good judges of their own performance is a tricky one, I think. Okay, you can put, you can say, right, I worked really hard at that, but I could have been doing the wrong things and worked really hard at it. I could have been completely deluded in terms of my impact. I could have been just fundamentally wrong. So I I get what Gooch is saying there, but I'm wondering if it's, it's more complicated than
Ed Smith:think eventually is probably the word I missed out. Eventually they form an accurate opinion of what they do. Sorry.
Eddie Mighten:we can separate this things and conceptualize about these things, but it's so difficult to not link a person to a performance in certain environments. Football is it. So when I did my research, What I was interested in was understanding, I'd played for football managers, observed them. Why did, were some of them so good at moving people and powerfully influencing them, getting results? Why were some non plushy, you don't even remember them, and why were some so disreputable? disruptive really to people could demotivate and destroy lives at times. And I started with on the other side of the river, Ed, with Brian Clough. And way back then, and you mentioned power Cluffy was just that he was the power. Guy who got things done because he was in charge of the whole club. But ever since then, I've been fascinated by people like him. When you think about football, you cannot decouple leadership from performance. It's an impossibility. So you've got to try and frame it. with that performance outcome with a good or bad in mind. So I totally get what you're saying that the success is what we crave. You know, we don't want that zero sum failure idea. We want the model that works really. So leadership and performance are linked. They're problematic. And they actually detract from the debate about what is leadership.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:Okay. I've got, there's a question I've got, which sort of moves us slightly forward, which is does data help? Or in what way does it help? We've all agreed, I think that there is something at the center of this question. It's the same with marketing. There is something that we don't know. There's something that, you know, the attribution question, we're quite often getting that wrong. So we then land on data and say, right, okay, here is part of the answer. Okay. One of the arms races in football, in sport across the board. We're just running into an Olympics where actually a lot of the winners will be down to who is, whose systems are the best, you know, and, and there's a, there's a process question, but let's just get to the data data point. Where and how does it help between defining what good and bad leadership
Ed Smith:Well, the first thing to say is that you have to be mad not to want access to the best data if you're in a leadership position. That said, data is only ever part of the story. The data actually suffers from its own narrative myths now, that when a team loses that's perceived as being reasonably data savvy, it's the data that lost it. And then if a team that's considered to be reasonably data savvy wins, the people who like data in sport come out and say it's the data who won it. Well, it's never as simple as that. And if we substitute the word data for the word manager, it's the same problem. There's always other influences in the team too. Look, the reality is that the ability to capture, store in a clean way without errors, And then analyse data is accelerating exponentially. Things that used to take forever to build and model, and now can be done almost instantaneously. Now the paradox of the speed at which we can collect and analyze data and find correlations in the data that that help us understand winning better. The paradox is that the faster and more efficient we get at that, and as AI comes into sport it's becoming incredibly efficient, is that it's more and more about the quality of the question. In particular, the imaginative and creative qualities of the question. So that swings The value right back to the human, you know, and as I was writing, making decisions, it took me to the very end of the book to realize, which is often the case, what it was about. And the subtitle ended up being putting the human back in the machine. Because I could see all the ways in which, and obviously machine there is in two senses, the systemic sense and also machine learning, you know, AI. As machines get cleverer and cleverer, our value is increasingly going to be the ability to direct them in surprising and useful ways. In ways that we don't always understand in intuitive ways and not to actually be snobbish or, or suffer from a kind of scientific view of the world, which is completely blind to the idea that analogy and metaphor and intuition have value. So I think that data, very simply, yes, it's going to be central to decision making approaches in sport in the future. But at the same time, it's never the answer on its own. There are always other influences and it's our ability to actually. Find creative approaches to asking the right question of the data, which increasingly is where the age resides.
Eddie Mighten:I love it when you, you've come from a decision making framing there, Ed. I'm framing it in terms of leadership and put simply, we know it's a well known saying, leadership is in the eyes of the beholder. So I think we're so far away, if we're trying to understand this phenomena, I think we're so far away from data even contributing because it's the most subjective. thing. It's people's perceptions of a good one, a bad one. What they're looking for in leadership. You know, we've been seduced really to in society and say, look, most of us are incapable of leading. We need elite, powerful, intelligent, brilliant people to look after us. Wow. So how do you shape that with the use of data when we've been set up? Really organizations are set up where they put the most powerful at the top on the assumption of the rest of us are incapable of leading ourselves. Well, it's not true. But that's how we set up. But when we're trying to understand this thing we can't see called leadership, I don't think AI will help us in the near term. I don't think data, it might help the performance of the role, but understanding the relationship and how people influence others. Not sure if data is the answer here.
Ed Smith:I know what you mean. I think I was saying as a leader, what informs your decisions and it will be a range of different things of which one will be relatively objective data. Eddie, you raise a really interesting point there about the idea that it conditional, my read of what you said was that we're conditioned to believe that leadership is done to us by someone who's very brilliant at the top. And actually, If we look at the history of sport, we know that's very, very seldom the case. I mean, the great movements in sport, the great eras in sport, the great teams, usually they were kind of happening. And then a leader provided a catch phrase or sort of rode the wave or captured the moment and they became associated with it. you know, for example, there was a period of time when Australian cricket was Unbelievably good. You know, we, I spent my career as a county cricketer kind of collecting the ball from the boundary that was hit there by the 20th best player in Australia. You know, they couldn't get in the team, but they got 300 every week against us in county cricket. And we were like, Oh my God, how many of these guys are they got? You know, Bevan, Law, Lehman. It was just like, you know, we go watch one Australian get a hundred and then the next one. Now they were, they came out of a system which was incredibly tough. State cricket was very, very good. Grey cricket below that was very, very good. And then they're all competing with each other to get in the Australian team. And then they get there. To stay in the Australian team, they have to get 100 every week because the next guy is getting 300 playing for, you know, in county cricket and in state cricket. Now, at the top of that, there are leaders and coaches and selectors. And they seem to be doing an amazing job. But in actual fact, it's kind of bubbling up rather than being. You know, I'm not in any way taking away from Mark Taylor or Steve Waugh or John Buchanan, but they are, they have incredible tools at their disposal. And the real engine is internal competition, rivalry, emulation, creativity, they're looking at each other almost like sort of, it's a kind of a city states in the renaissance, they're kind of like trying to outdo each other and in doing that you get incredible creativity as a result. So, I agree that, that leadership can often, Mislead us or the term leadership because we assume it's been top down and funnily enough in sport I think that sport has a tendency to think that there are kind of Soviet communist style solutions in which we first of all work out what it all needs to look like Then we write it all down and then we go away and build it Well, when is success ever been like that? In actual fact, we really want talent Opportunity, mystery, good, you know, good internal competition and off it goes. But that's pretty hard to capture in an organizational chart.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:This is where the sport and business thing I think becomes very interesting just off the back of your point there, Eddie, I think that sport is important because it's so influential when it's defining how we talk about leadership. And we've just talked there about the top down nature of it. If you think about football, particularly, but other sports as well, if you ask people, well, what is a leader? They might point to. Football managers and say, okay, well, they are, male, they're authoritarian, they're white. There's a whole load of stuff that goes within that. What sport is selling, I think, is always an interesting idea to keep in our heads because it's just takes, takes this conversation and broadens it and deepens it. what does it mean organizationally? Ed, you were just on some really interesting. Territory there in terms of, okay, well, what about the rest of us? If we're talking about this, the leadership industry is selling this idea of, of the person at the top we focus so much of our attention. What does it mean for organizations in terms of how we get good organizations? What do we need to do? followership here, which again, is an underrated idea. What'd you think?
Ed Smith:think in 1988, Leonard Cohen said, in the 1960s, music was the mode. That was the most important form of communication. And now it's sports. That's the way we understand the heroic ideal. In actual fact, I think that's incredibly prescient. So that was in the late eighties. And here we are now, you know, 2024, I think sport has become an increasingly dominant way in which we make sense of the world. And of course, I In that ascent it also creates and throws up plenty of myths too. One reason why I think sport has become a dominant metaphor for leadership Is even though leadership in sport is incredibly difficult and Eddie and I never shy away from, uh, saying that with our students that it's incredibly difficult and it's never an exact science and you always feel you're getting it wrong and you could be doing it better. All that given, nonetheless, adding value to the performance of a team in a bounded game with defined rules and a space in which the game takes place. is a hell of a lot easier than leadership in many areas of life. So if we look at, you mentioned it earlier on, Richard, I mean, I hesitate to say, you know, in, in late democracy, but in western states today, political leadership seems to be getting close to being impossible. And what do I mean by impossible? I mean, we seem to want our political leaders to promise us things, And then we seem to be unable to give them enough money to deliver them. And then we blame them for failing at an impossible task. Now I'm oversimplifying of course, and I'm not making excuses for some recent, you know, failures of leadership, but it seems to be incredibly difficult in continental Europe, in America, in England, everywhere. We seem to be stuck. I'm not sure it's tractable at the moment without a reset, but sport at least, which is. Although fascinating and broad in some ways is also very defined and narrow in other ways. It gives us the opportunity to get our hands on a project and really try and shape it. And most importantly of all, it gives very clear feedback. And I think when I think about. Sports role within a life. What is the bit of sport that I'll speak personally for a moment that I can't let go of? I love the ambience of sport. I love the friendships. I love the meaning it gives to life. But actually, probably most of all, I love the jeopardy. I love being on the hook. And I love the feedback, which is another way of saying you're addicted to trying to win. so I think sports ability to, to force skill and uncertainty into sort of manifestness. I think Stephen Conner said that in a very good book about philosophy in sport is what draws us to it as a, as a way of thinking about leadership.
Richard Gillis Unofficial Partner:I was hoping you'd have a, a cutout and keep guide to leadership. A sort of tick box of things. If I, if I just do that, I become a great leader. That's what all the books tell me.
Ed Smith:Well, funnily enough, and the problem with all the books is that they end with those boxes, which summarize the chapter. And I'm like, well, if you could summarize the chapter in a box, why would you read the chapter in the first place? It's always the context, always the nuance. And always, you know, one of the, the, the fascinations of leadership is that if you do try and wrap it up too simply and say, it's all about X, it's also perfectly. Easy to make the case that it's about the opposite. It's usually about balancing those tensions. You know, Mike Brearley said that the job of a captain is to understand all the ways in which a team could go wrong and then navigate those tensions tolerably badly. You know, so you're kind of keeping it not too individualist, but not too kind of collective. You're keeping it, you know, not too over trained, but not too under practiced. You know, you're keeping all those things in a kind of tolerable level of, compromise. and if you can get. More right than wrong. And if you can get the crucial tensions in an acceptable place, you're probably doing okay. Mo Bobat has this great line that the team that wins is less dysfunctional than all the others, which doesn't sound very, idealistic, but is actually true. Or as Bill Belichick puts it, the team that loses last wins.
It's not a hope poster, is it? You know, it's not, it's not as catchy, but we'll live with that. Could be, that could be our motto, How do you teach this stuff? Just give us an idea of the job and that we've talked about the problems of talking about leadership. Just distill that back to a lecture hall or a classroom or a seminar. Yeah. So my only ambition when I talk about leadership, teach leadership is to broaden people's minds, really, and shift people's thinking. So first stop is understanding. the journey of leadership, how it's been studied, where we started, where we are now. So the landscape, then secondly, problematizing it, which means challenging assumptions about the way we think about leadership. So moving from this intense focus on individuals, understand what it means to the collective, all these things that we don't just accept. Assumptions about what we're talking about. But finally, I just, all I want these students to do is open their minds and enter the debate with an open mind that shifts them from what they may have believed to other places of ways of looking at it. So it's, it's just about disrupting our thinking and challenging assumptions in my view.
Ed Smith:I agree with all that. All leaders are different and very few things cut across all of them or unite all of them. But I would say to stay good at leadership, people tend to stay curious and somehow they combine the ability to have self belief and confidence. With an equal understanding that they don't have all the answers and they need to keep looking and keep growing, Who was it who said that reading a good book is like someone reaching out and holding your hand? Was that Alan Bennett? I think sometimes in leadership, one of the difficulties is it feels daunting because for all the reasons we've talked about today, Leaders feel, you know, the way leadership is presented to us, particularly in standard media narratives, They seem to have all the answers and they're talking to us as though they've solved it all. In a good and healthy educational discussion of leadership, you get to the difficulties and the problems and in getting to the difficulties and the problems, people understand that it's normal to feel them and the very best feel them too. I remember when I was selector for England Cricket, I'd have breakfast with the investor Howard Marks, you know, once a, Six months or a year. What I found so inspiring about those meetings was that he was making big investment decisions But he never thought he had the answer He just thought he had good questions and he was weighing them up with his skills and that was all he could do And hopefully you get more right than you get wrong in his case. He does
Right? Listen, great to, have the conversation. Thanks for making the time. Eddie and Ed goodbye. And thanks a lot.
Ed Smith:Thanks so much. Great to see you, Richard. Thanks, Eddie
Thanks Richard. Take care.