Erik ten Hag, Leader of Men?
Was walking down the street the other day here in Amsterdam, on my way to get an almond croissant from the bakery, when I heard the guy on the podcast I was listening to speculate about Ten Hag not being an ‘inspiring or motivating type of manager’.
I stopped in my tracks. Erik ten Hag not inspiring or motivating? That ain’t my experience.
Sure, he might not be the type to yell at his players like a madman, and no, he doesn’t think a football manager’s primary job is to be some sort of motivational speaker, telling players during half time ‘you can really do it! You simply have to do it!’. But that doesn’t mean players don’t draw inspiration or motivation from being around him, right?
A few minutes later, as I stood chewing my croissant, I pondered the meaning of ‘motivation’ and ‘inspiration’, those esoteric concepts you hear pundits bandy about like free ice cream.
The way I figure, ‘motivation’ and ‘inspiration’ are actually the sum of a simple equation: the answer to the question ‘what will I gain by doing X?’ minus the answer to the question ‘what will it cost me to do X?’
Let’s say X is to train hard. For a footballer, the answer to the question ‘what will I gain by training hard?’ should be pretty easy to answer: if I train hard, the manager will like me and I might get a place in the first XI, and then I might show the world how good I am at football, thusly winning trophies for me team and a nice big fat new contract for meself.
The answer to the question ‘what will it cost me to do X?’ should be pretty simple to answer as well: if I do no train hard, the manager will not like me and I will not get any playing time, thusly condemning myself to a career spent in the margins of the game I grew up loving.
Notice how I saw these questions SHOULD be easy to answer. Because sometimes, they might not be. Sometimes, a footballer might think there’s a chance he can get away with not training so hard, or not caring about his teammates, or showing up late to a meeting…
And that’s where the manager comes in. He needs to take away the vagueness and make sure the questions ‘what will I gain by doing X?’ and ‘what will it cost me to do X?’ are easy to answer. That way, he makes it very easy for his players to exhibit positive behaviour.
I mean think about it, this is probably true for wherever you work as well.
Walking back towards my flat, pigeons now pillaging the pile of crumbs I left behind outside the bakery, I concluded Erik ten Hag is very much the type of manager who is good at this, while Ralf Rangnick was probably the type of manager who was bad at this.
Clarity, consistency and trustworthiness versus mistiness, volatility and double standards.
Cogito ergo sum, Ten Hag is actually very much an ‘inspiring or motivating type of manager’, I said to meself as I settled on the excellent No Question About That podcast to listen to next.