Using football to find out your management style

While using football as a model for analysing modern-day management appears frivolous it's arguably the most public and widely discussed form of management around.

Why use football as a model?

Analysis of football team management is a useful and convenient method for isolating the general principles of successful management. Information about what goes on inside football clubs is readily accessible and because of its immense popularity, football attracts permanent media attention.

This makes analysing the secrets of their success easier and more productive than a similar study of a blue-chip company, where the inner workings are often shrouded in mystery.

You can easily identify successful football managers whereas politics, perception and bureaucracy frequently overshadow executives’ performance, reality and meritocracy. There are hiding places in football. A great manager persistently wins trophies or achieves respectable results against the odds. A poor manager will be publicly exposed for his failure to maximise available resources and human potential.

Why is self-assessment important?

To find the most suitable support you need a developed sense of self-awareness. You need to identify and accept your shortcomings. Great football managers instinctively understood the need to compensate for their faults and complement their styles with what their dressing room would otherwise be missing. Think Shankly and Paisley, Busby and Murphy, Clough and Taylor, Mercer and Allison - these were all legendary partnerships founded on this principle.

There is more than one style of good management. Sven Goran Eriksson is a polar opposite of Alex Ferguson in the dressing room, but both are excellent managers.

Knowing what kind of manager you are, and what your objectives are, will enable you to select the right people to help you reach your goals. It is this self-awareness which allowed Brian Clough, the inspirational manager, to ask Peter Taylor to recruit the players he himself could then go on and inspire.

It is Alex Ferguson's clear-minded knowledge of his own long-term vision which prompted him to establish such a professional talent scouting and youth management structure. It is arguably Kevin Keegan's failure to appoint someone who could complement his own undoubted gifts as an inspirational manager which has prevented him from succeeding at the very top.