If You Want to Be Successful, You Have to Know What Success Means
If You Want to Be Successful, You Have
to Know What Success Means
According to Sir Alex
Ferguson Part of the way you develop excellence in an
organisation is to be careful about the way you define success. He was
always careful about setting specific, long-range targets. HE would never say,
‘We expect to win the League and two pieces of silverware this season. First,
it conveys the wrong message, because it sounds cocky and arrogant. Second, it
applies a lot of additional pressure on everyone without any real benefit.
Third, it sets everyone up for disappointment. It was much easier to say, ‘At
United we expect to win every game,’ because that was the case from about 1993
and it also conveyed the spirit of the club. Making sure everyone understood
that we expected to triumph in every game set an agenda of excellence and
allowed me to regularly administer booster-shots of intensity
You have to set up each individual for
success, which requires considered thought. At United the press would always
ask him at the start of the season what his hoped to achieve. He canned
response was to tell them that we wanted to win one trophy and we didn’t care
which one it was. He was careful not to build up false expectations or place
too much pressure on everyone. It is counterproductive. However, they never
went two consecutive seasons without a major trophy between his first piece of
silverware at United and the end of his career, a period of 23 years. Based
on his story, winning anything requires a series of steps. You cannot win the League
with one giant leap. So he would be careful to divide everything up into
digestible chunks. Nobody is going to take a climbing team to the foot of
Everest, point to the summit and say ‘Okay, lads, get up there.’ At the start
of the season he would avoid communicating any particular objective with the
players. His comments to the press about
wanting to win a trophy were reasonably generic and the squad were used to
these expectations anyway. He would only start to become less vague in November
as the shape of the season and the form of our rivalries became clear. At that
point, as the afternoons shortened, I would say to the players, ‘If we’re
first, second or third, or within three points of the lead, on New Year’s Day,
we have a fantastic chance.'
This post is adapted from new
book Leading,
By Sir Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz, and published
by Hodder & Stoughton.
