The importance of confidence

Grant Leboff: So Damian, of course one of the things that I think everyone knows you’ve got to try to have if your going to be a good leader in business is confidence. But its not always easy to maintain, when lots of things are going on around you, and not always going right. And you really pick a period in Ferguson’s career, in 2005 when it started to unravel a bit at that point and actually, people were even calling for his head. They were calling for him to get the sack. And yet he managed to maintain himself through that. If you could perhaps expand on that because I think there are some good lessons for business leaders.

Damian Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. So the winter of 2005 in often referred to in Ferguson’s is as the winter of his discontent. He lost his captain Roy Keane in a very public falling out. His star striker Ruud van Nistelrooy had started to express disenchantment with life at Manchester United, José Mourinho was in the ascendancy and it was 3 years ‘til the club had been able to call themselves champions. And Ferguson went through a very difficult time where he felt that the fans had lost a little bit of faith in him. And as you say, there were even calls for his sacking.

Significantly, Ferguson describes the most important trophy he won at Manchester United was the little heralded 2006 League Cup, which they won in the February of that winter. The reason it describes it so good is because, if you view of the footage of the celebrations you’ll see Ferguson was front and centre when it came to the celebrations. He was dancing like, one journalist described as a “drunken uncle at a party”, with a lot of the young players. And the reason he did that is because he felt that that was significant in giving the confidence to both himself and his younger players. For example, it was Wayne Rooney’s first ever trophy that he had won. It was Cristiano Ronaldo’s 2nd trophy that he had won with the club. And he felt that it gave confidence to him and those younger players in that their methods were working.

So sometimes it doesn’t pay, and this is where a lot of business leaders can learn from it, sometimes we focus entirely on performance – are we hitting our targets? When sometimes that may take a little longer to get there, and what Ferguson wanted them to have the confidence was the process, the steps that they were taken with the right ones and celebrating, what you might call small successes, along the way on that journey are often really, really, important in enabling you to reach that big picture. Which is what he felt that the team achieved 3 years later when they won the Champions League again in 2008 with many of those same players being important characters of that stage.

Grant Leboff: And that’s important isn’t it because you talk about Ferguson having this outlook of these 4 year cycles. So clearly, he was always looking to the future and knowing where he was trying to get to with the team. So, celebrating those small successes, I think something business leaders perhaps don’t do enough. They know what the prize is and they’re just full steam ahead in trying to get there. What are the other things that Ferguson did to try and maintain confidence in himself and with the players around him?

Damian Hughes: Well one of the big things that he would do was, that again it goes back to when we spoke about feedback, he would trust people implicitly within his circle. So, he was prepared to listen to them and that was where a lot of people described that he was increasingly open to feedback from people that really counted, that he felt could reinforce it. Another good way he was doing was he would harp back to the successes that he had achieved previously and look at the characteristics of it. So rather than discount the things that might have been relevant to that time, he would look at the kind of characteristics that were important to it. Rather that was courage or whether it was determination or it was grit, there things that he felt he was imbued with naturally. So that he would go back and look at his signature strengths, rather than allow the rest of the world to remind him of his weaknesses, which at that time was growing to quite a deafening din for him.

Grant Leboff: That’s interesting isn’t it, learning from your successes because you think a lot of business leaders probably, they look into failures when they don’t work, but the deals you get, the things you achieve you tend to gloss over and go “Oh we did that, we succeeded” and perhaps not learn the lessons that you can use in the future.

Damian Hughes: Absolutely. I mean you ask any business leader about it. You look at what they measure. They measure what were the targets we missed, what are the lost time from accidents that have happened, what’s are absence rate? And that talents that what Ferguson did, and what most business leaders can do, is rather than say, for example in a business worry about having a 5% absence rate, he would ask “Why do 95% of our staff turn up on time? Why do we hit those targets rather than what we focus on the bits that we’ve missed.” And its from focusing on your strengths, rather than focusing on your weaknesses. Your successes, rather than your failures. Where that real deep well of confidence really does come from.

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