Alex Ferguson: the angry coach who changed his ways

Are today’s NHL players coddled?

In the wake of Toronto Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle’s sacking, that’s the question the Toronto Star asked, quoting various old-school NHLers who all agreed that kids these days just can’t handle being yelled at.

A rough and tumble guy like Carlyle didn’t stand a chance, unless he changed his ways and started handing out participation trophies during practice.

Everyone agrees the angry coach is finished, especially with Carlyle and anger-addict John Tortorella struggling to find work. Even in the NFL, Greg Schiano’s red-faced tantrums and John Harbaugh’s tired-toddler escapades seem to have cost them their jobs.

In sports culture it’s always been a given that screaming and yelling are prime motivational techniques but what if that was never the case? What if all that shouting was actually doing more harm than good?

When he was manager of Aberdeen FC in the early 1980s, Alex Ferguson once barged into the treatment room and shook the whole foundation with one of his legendary, face-blasting tirades. He spat curse words and threats. He got way too personal. He moved in close to the player — this time it was John Hewitt — and blew his hair back with pure fury. By the end of the diatribe, players nearby were shaken and Hewitt’s wages were to be docked that week.

The crime? The player had been driving a new car to training and had passed the boss on the highway.

At half-time Ferguson once swept cups off a table, knocking over a tea urn. As the manager raged, one player sat stony-faced and terrified as hot tea dripped down the wall onto him.

Before he was Sir Alex, king of Manchester, he was Furious Fergie in Aberdeen.

He went on to be one of the greatest coaches in sports history, but it wasn’t because of his old-school tactics at half-time.

Before he retired, the Harvard Business Review studied Ferguson’s approach to leadership and found he ran his team like a Fortune 500 company.

By the end of his career, Ferguson had reconsidered his tantrums, realizing that his job wasn’t just to strike fear into the hearts of his players.

“Fear has to come into it,” he said, but “as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see that showing your anger all the time doesn’t work. You have to pick your moments. As a manager, you play different roles at different times. Sometimes you have to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a father.”

Make no mistake, Ferguson still ran his team like tyrant and he talked in detail to the Harvard Business Review about the manager’s need to be dominant in the dressing room. Any time a player crossed the coach he was punted out the door. David Beckham, Jaap Stam and Roy Keane, among others, can all attest to that.

Though Furious Fergie never quite left entirely, his focus shifted to encouragement and loyalty.

“Once they know you are battling for them, they will accept your way. You’re really fostering a sense of family,” he said.

In 2012, the Globe and Mail reported on a three new studies published by sports scientists.

One study had 12 rugby players participate in a film session with a coach. Some players would get clips of themselves performing well, with a coach providing positive feedback, and some players watched video of their mistakes, with the coach criticizing them.

The players in the positive session showed much higher testosterone levels and the effects were long-lasting, helping the players perform better when the team played a week later.

The study showed that, however the coach chose to express it, positive feedback got positive results and negative feedback caused a dip in performance.

The angry coach, if he managed to succeed, was doing it despite his temperament, rather than because of it.

There’s always been two sides to Alex Ferguson. In the early days at Manchester United, he got wind of a house party at winger Lee Sharpe’s house and stormed the premises.

Some accounts have Ferguson dragging his treasured young star Ryan Giggs out of Sharpe’s party by the ear. Others have Giggs cowering in a cupboard. Ferguson knew the teenager was going to be a phenom and needed him to replace the oft-injured Sharpe on the field. With Giggs, Ferguson was the father and teacher. With Sharpe, who was soon transferred, he was the tyrant.

“The job of a manager, like that of a teacher, is to inspire people to be better. Give them better technical skills, make them winners, make them better people, and they can go anywhere in life,” he told the Harvard Business Review.

For John Hewitt, and the boys at Aberdeen in the ‘80s, inspiration came in the form of creative insults and cursing. By the time Ferguson retired, as players changed and the game changed with it, he was a very different man. He knew, unlike Carlyle and Tortorella, one trick wasn’t enough.

“You can’t always come in shouting and screaming. That doesn’t work.”