Bring The Noise by Raphael Honigstein (March 2018)
Taking home the bronze medal in this year’s TOA Book Award is Bring The Noise, Raphael Honingstein’s profile of current Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. Longtime readers will recall that I fell hard for Liverpool Football Club around a decade and a half ago, hard enough to relegate all other sporting interests to secondary status. Over the years, I’ve watched various managers try and fail to bring Liverpool back to the summit of English football. This leads me to the most surprising result of my laser focus on the club and their affairs - the club's managers have proven to be fascinating case examples of how to lead organizational change. And for most of a decade, these examples have been negative, showcases of various strategies and tactics that have proven at best to bring around another false dawn before a hasty return to the cold darkness of the club's Premier League title drought.
Klopp’s appointment in 2016 proved a decisive turning point in the club’s recent history. He arrived with a big reputation, having built Borussia Dortmund into perennial contenders despite limited resources, and he set to work on replicating the same achievements with Liverpool. My expectation was that Klopp would implement a grand vision, his tactics and strategy fortified by experience and wisdom, and over time the club would edge toward an elusive title. In some ways, this is exactly what ensued. However, what I didn’t understand was how much his approach relied on his relationships with people. Klopp seems to understand better than any other manager that his expertise in the sport has no relevance if he has poor relationships with the players, management, or fans. The ideas in this book stress the point over and over again, demonstrating the ways he supports, encourages, and ultimately elevates the performance of his team through a genuine desire to see them succeed.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall: The note that good managers remember how they wanted to be treated when they were players resonated deeply with me. In a sense, this was my first managerial principle. I suspect most people would succeed as managers if they threw out all the other tips, tricks, and techniques espoused by so-called leadership gurus and simply committed to becoming the managers they needed when they were younger.
Organizational change: The big idea in this regard centers on time. A manager cannot inspire change without acknowledging that major adjustments require time (and even more so if the team has certain established methods or tactics). The only way to lead progress is to focus on offering suggestions for improvement rather than giving reasons for failure. Over time, a team thinking in terms of improvement will improve!
And if a blunt message must be delivered, it's helpful to make sure any blunt message is delivered with lightness, humor, and humility. This makes it more likely that similar messages in the future do not unearth any lingering resentment from any prior comment.
Parting thought: There’s a lot here in terms of leadership tactics but the main idea that stayed with me had almost nothing to do with being on the job. Rather, it addressed how to handle someone leaving the team or organization. If someone decides it’s time to change careers and become a florist, the best thing for the leader to do is be first in line for a bouquet. Buying flowers won’t help the team score goals but it does reinforce that support from leadership is unconditional, a feeling most managers are better at talking about rather than demonstrating through action. A leader supports the team in all facets of life, whether it be on the job or not, and any deviations serve only to undermine any job-related messages.
