Cover photo: I'm standing with the finalists for the Sir Alex Ferguson Leadership Award. These are some of the most inspiring leaders in the UK. Read more about #SirAlexAward here and read the winning post, written by Matt Watson about his nominated leader, Jason Bowler. 

Part of the way you develop excellence in an organisation is to be careful about the way you define success. I was always careful about setting specific, long-range targets. I 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

There’s a balance that needs to be weighed when conveying a sense of what’s possible with the reality of the circumstances. You have to set up each individual for success, which requires considered thought. It’s so easy to set unrealistic expectations and I learned this early in my career. At one point in my first season at St Mirren, the team had won eight games in a row and were well placed in the second division. I was feeling buoyant and told the press that we would not lose a game for the rest of the season. Instead, we won only one of our remaining fixtures, and the club finished the season in sixth place. 

At United the press would always ask me at the start of the season what I hoped to achieve. My canned response was to tell them that we wanted to win one trophy and we didn’t care which one it was. I was careful not to build up false expectations or place too much pressure on everyone. It is counterproductive. However, we never went two consecutive seasons without a major trophy between my first piece of silverware at United and the end of my career, a period of 23 years. 

I was also lucky that, with one exception, I never had an owner or director tell me that they expected me to bring home a piece of silverware. The only time it happened was just before I got fired from St Mirren, when a director told me (even though we had been promoted the season before and had a very young team) that he expected us to win the League in the following season. It was the only time anyone ever said to me: ‘We need you to win a trophy.’ What he failed to acknowledge was that to achieve that we needed two or three new players that the club did not want to buy. 

Winning anything requires a series of steps. You cannot win the League with one giant leap. So I 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 I would avoid communicating any particular objective with the players. My comments to the press about wanting to win a trophy were reasonably generic and the squad were used to these expectations anyway. I 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. The book is available now in the UK. It will be released on Octo