Carlo Ancelotti: in a new book, he describes the benefits of his ‘quiet' approach to leadership

The average tenure of a FTSE 100 CEO is around five years. If you think that seems short, then pity the lot of today's football manager, who lives perpetually in the shadow of the sack. In the English Premier League, the average tenure is just 2.36 years. Remove the long-serving Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, from the calculation and the figure drops to just 1.7 years. In other countries the pattern is similar. A manager in Italy's leading league can expect to last about 16 months, as can his counterpart in Spain.

Carlo Ancelotti knows more than most about football's sack race. He was sacked by Parma after two seasons and sacked by Juventus after two and a half. He was fired after two seasons at Chelsea and left Paris Saint-Germain after one and a half seasons, having been threatened with the sack. And he lasted just two seasons at his last job, at Real Madrid. Indeed his only managerial position of any substantial length has been at Milan, where he spent eight years, an extended tenure that he attributes partly to the good will engendered by his stellar playing career at the club. Yet despite his apparent inability to hold down a job, the glorious football irony is that Ancelotti has become one of the game's most successful managers of all time. He has reached the Champions League final four times, winning it three times (with three different clubs), and has won league titles in three different countries.

Since leaving Real Madrid last summer, Ancelotti has been taking a year out from the game, living in Vancouver with his Canadian wife, Mariann. It's a city he loves, although when we spoke he was unhappy with the weather. ("It's raining all the time, it's like London... No, it's worse than London, because it rains every day!") He's also been having daily German lessons in preparation for his next job, as manager of Bayern Munich. He'll be moving to Germany in July. Ancelotti makes it a rule to learn the language of any country in which he works, which so far has meant mastering English, French and Spanish. German is proving the toughest of them all. "It's almost impossible!" he laughs. "The grammar is very different to the Latin languages, so for me it is really difficult."

Given Ancelotti's previous experiences, he could be forgiven for planning for the short term, but he approaches each new job with optimism. "I was really upset the first time that I was sacked, when I was at Parma," he says. "But after that I considered it part of my job. There are no managers that won't be sacked. Even Ferguson was sacked [early in his career, at St Mirren]. My idea is always to stay in a club as long as I stayed in Milan. I don't mean to stay 24 years, but four or five years could be good. First of all, of course, it depends on the club. You know when you go to manage Real Madrid that you have to win. If you don't win, the history of the club says that the manager has to be sacked. But the problem for a manager is that we can control everything, but we cannot control the result. In football, the result is unpredictable."

That lack of control, coupled with huge expectations, may be familiar to many managers - in business as well as in sport - and it can produce considerable stress, but Ancelotti remains sanguine.

"Sometimes in my position of course I feel pressure - from the president of the club, from the press, from the supporters. But I never feel stressed. And I think the only reason is because I love my job. Most of the pressure is one or two hours before the game, when you have to prepare the strategy and the players, and when you really don't know what is going to happen on the pitch. During the game, you are focused on the match, so you don't feel a lot of pressure. Of course, when you concede a goal, your heart rate goes up, but this is normal. During the game it's difficult to change anything. You can propose something at the end of the first half, but you only have three or four minutes to speak about the strategy of the game. You can't say everything, because you have no time. Above all, I like to be positive during the half time."

So to what can we attribute Ancelotti's remarkable success? He has attempted to explain his approach to management in a new book, co-written with performance expert Mike Forde, formerly of Chelsea, and leadership guru Chris Brady. The book is called Quiet Leadership, and Ancelotti describes it as "a collection of reflections on my time in football and my thoughts and philosophies on what it takes to be a leader in my profession... A 'quiet' approach to leadership might sound soft or perhaps even weak to some, but that is not what it means to me, and it is definitely not what it means to anyone who has ever played with me or for me. The kind of quiet I am talking about is a strength. There is power and authority in being calm and measured, in building trust and making decisions coolly, in using influence and persuasion and being professional in your approach."

In person, Ancelotti exudes calm self-confidence and a sense of bonhomie. He laughs easily and has a keen awareness of life's ironies. He's hugely likeable, and most who have worked with him retain fond memories of the experience. Some of them were interviewed for the book. Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, talks of Ancelotti's humility and honesty. "He's one of the best and most important people that I have met in my entire time in football," he says. Zlatan Ibrahimovic describes him as "the best coach ever" and makes a telling comparison between Ancelotti's people-based approach and the "mind games" of another of the game's successful managers, José Mourinho.

"I went through a lot of adrenaline when I played for [Mourinho]," says Ibrahimovic. "It was like nothing was ever good enough. He gave and he took. José Mourinho knows how to treat a footballer, but Carlo knows how to treat a person."

Personal relationships and a positive working environment are key for Ancelotti, who likes to quote American business writer Peter Drucker's claim that "culture eats strategy for breakfast".

"First you have to build good relationships, good chemistry, with the group you're working with. After that, you can add the strategy," he says. "I think that the most important thing is the relationship with the people, and the relationship with the people makes a better organisation, I'm sure of this. I speak with my players but I know that first of all they are people. So you have to treat them with respect. It's important to have a good relationship on the same level, not them looking up to me or me looking down on them. A manager has an idea of football and he has to transmit this idea to the players. When the transmission is good, when there is a good chemistry between players and manager, you see better play on the pitch. And also the player has to be convinced about what they are going to do. I don't want to force the player to do something they are not convinced by."

This is not to say that Ancelotti is a soft touch. More than once in his book, he namedrops Vito Corleone, the Mafia don in The Godfather, "a calm, powerful man in charge of his situation", but Ancelotti builds authority through respect and trust rather than fear. More than anything, he demands that his players show a "good attitude".

"The player has to be serious and do everything to be a good professional," he says. "And in business I think it's the same. A good attitude means to be serious about your job and to interact well with the people that work with you."

Ancelotti speaks highly of the attitude of the English players at Chelsea during his tenure. "I found them really, really professional," he says. "I don't know what happened outside the training ground, but in the training ground they always wanted to train one hundred per cent." Others impressed him less. One of Ancelotti's former lieutenants, Paul Clement, who worked with him at Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, recalls a Chelsea training session in which fullback José Bosingwa, disappointed to be left out of the first team, was not putting in the required effort. Clement reprimanded him and a verbal confrontation developed. Ancelotti dealt with it in a typically 'quiet' way. "Later that evening at the team hotel Carlo spoke about the incident to the group, telling them that it was unacceptable," says Clement. "He said that he would not allow that kind of thing to occur again and he very publicly made sure Bosingwa was aware of it. We moved forward from that."

On rare occasions, Ancelotti has been known to lose his cool, but only ever behind closed doors. On one occasion in the dressing room after a Paris Saint-Germain match, he was so incensed by his team's performance that he kicked a box lying on the floor and it hit Ibrahimovic on the head. "When he gets angry, he gets angry," says Ibrahimovic.

David Beckham, who played for Ancelotti at both Milan and Paris, has also been witness to one of his shows of temper. "I think the only time I saw him lose it was in the last game of the season when I was at Milan and we were going for a Champions League place," says Beckham. "We were winning the game but playing like crap. I couldn't tell you what he was angry about because when he does lose it, he says it in Italian. It's great and unexpected to watch, but it's kind of scary. Thankfully, I'm not fluent in Italian."

"I don't like to shout every single time when something is wrong," says Ancelotti. "Sometimes I feel the need to shout but usually I prefer to find a solution in a quiet mood." In this and in many other ways, 'quiet leadership' can be seen as an extension of Ancelotti's personality and his upbringing. His father, a farmer in northern Italy, was a quiet man too, he says. He manages the way he does because of the way he is. So his book is not prescriptive. He does not believe that we should all aspire to 'quietness'. For example, when asked if the famously outspoken and combative Ibrahimovic could ever be a 'quiet leader', he laughs. "I don't think so. He doesn't have to be a quiet leader, because it wouldn't be true. Ibrahimovic is a fantastic leader and he will be a manager in the future, but he has to show his own character."

As well as managing a team of players and the playing staff, a football manager also has to 'manage up', dealing with his employers. During his career, Ancelotti has worked for some extremely colourful - and highly demanding - figures: at Parma, Calisto Tanzi, founder of the Parmalat empire, who was later convicted of embezzling €800m from the company; at Juventus, Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli; at Milan, Silvio Berlusconi; at Chelsea, Roman Abramovich; and at Real Madrid, the notoriously difficult-to-please president, Florentino Pérez. At one point in the book he writes that, "The manager is only important when there needs to be someone to blame." It seems a pessimistic view of management, but one born out of experience.

"When you lose a game, you have to find someone who's guilty, and the easiest thing for a club is to blame the manager," he sighs. "And the manager has to take the responsibility. In defeat you are alone. And in victory everyone is together!"

Ancelotti admits that diplomacy can be a key part of his job, but plays down the importance of his ability to manage these particular relationships. Nevertheless, Clement recalls admiringly the way in which Ancelotti was committed to shielding his players from "presidential noise". (Clement himself recently had his first experience of the sacking game, fired from his role as head coach at Derby County after less than nine months, having gone seven games without a win.)

"It's not the key part of my job," says Ancelotti. "Presidents, most of them, are focused on the results. Maybe they don't have the knowledge to understand how I prepare my training sessions and the strategy of a game, and so they judge me only on if I win or if I lose. I don't consider this kind of relationship too important. I'm more focused on what I have to do day by day with my players and my staff."

It's clear that for Ancelotti the players come first. In his book he writes lyrically that, "Working with these athletes, taking care of them and helping them develop and grow, building trust and loyalty, sharing our successes and bouncing back together from disappointment, this is the heart of my job for me. This is why I get up for work every day with a smile on my face."

It's a nice way for any manager, both in sport and beyond, to think about their team.

Just one question remains. Ancelotti has experienced huge success as both player and manager, so which would he rather be? There's no hesitation in his reply. "Oh, a player," he laughs. "One hundred per cent. Then I only have responsibility for myself. For a manager it's a little bit different..."