Roma manager José Mourinho recently sat down to discuss his values and principles in his coaching career in a recent interview with Forbes as ambassador to XTB.
“To be a good manager, the most important thing is that people must follow you. And to follow you, they must believe in you.”
“Normally, they believe in you if they feel empathetic and honest.”
“In my personal case, as a leader, this means that I have a responsibility not to disappoint people within my team. You must be with them and for them, all the time. They must trust you.”
“The lessons I learned from coaching, I would say that I learned them long before I started coaching. Indeed, I had a university professor who always told me: “a coach who knows only football knows nothing about football.’”
“We need to know the human being in front of us fundamentally, these are words that I still use today. Football players are not just football players. They are men who play football and this is one of the great lessons I learned from the beginning.”
“Another lesson I learned from my experience as a coach is that you have to deal with human beings. In sport there is a human side above all; and it can of course stand out in business and other areas of social life. I think that’s the most important thing that defines leadership.”
On keys to motivation, Mourinho said, “You have to know the players, know them well. They are all different and all need a different way of communicating, a different way of receiving feedback, of motivating themselves.”
“The most important thing is to know their nature, to know everything about them, so that you can then interact with them almost individually.”
“I would say that it’s a bit like when you go to a restaurant and eat à la carte, as they say in French. A la carte, that’s basically what you need to do with players. Don’t look at them as if they were all the same, because they are all different.”
“It’s quite easy to say but more difficult to do. For a team as a whole, you must create empathy with everyone. You must make everyone feel important, that everyone feels part of the team and for that, you must know people extremely well.”
“You need to know how to interact with each of them, how to make them feel important, make them feel that they are part of a team and that they are important to the team. This is essential. So, to return to my previous answer, the human side is the most important thing, you must create empathy with individuals.”
