Former England defender Stuart Pearce joined us at NMP Live where we discussed the importance of creating a culture of respect and passion within a team as well as that infamous missed penalty in the Euros.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Stuart Pearce
Can you tell us about your start in professional football?
I moved from non-league, at the age of 21, to Coventry; so, when I went to Coventry, I set my own electrical business up. I was trading in the afternoon and playing football in the morning.
After two years doing that, I moved to Nottingham Forest in ’85 and I thought to myself well, I need to keep on. I had to take a wage cut, basically, to go from electrician to pro-footballer in the top division in the country – that’s how finances have changed in the world of football. To take a wage cut from doing that!
I had to keep trading because I had to pay a mortgage. When I went and joined Nottingham Forest the first thing I said to Brian Clough was do you mind if I advertise in the programme and carry on working, and he was all for it. He thought it was brilliant, and he brought his kettle in for me to mend, and from there, you know, I carried on trading for the next two years.
How did you get the nickname Psycho?
I think that during the 80’s there seemed to be one person at each club that had a definitive style of play, which was normally reasonably aggressive. There was Julian Dicks at West Ham who was ‘The Terminator’, and I was ‘Psycho’, and someone else was the idiot, you know everyone seemed to have one player. The rest of the nicknames seemed to drop away come the 90’s and mine stuck with me as such.
It was a bit of theatre, lets say, coming on to the pitch and I used to go to the home supporters and buoy them up a little bit, and it sort of generated myself, sharpened my focus and the fans.
But, when you’re out with your wife having a quiet meal in a restaurant and someone starts singing ‘Psycho, Psycho’ across a restaurant it’s not a great place to be, I can assure you.
How did it feel to play for England and was that your ultimate accolade?
It was for me. To have the opportunity to play for England was fantastic.
People ask me nowadays, when I was involved with the England under-21s, they say I wish some of the young players coming through now could have that same passion for the country. I always point out to the fact that you have to have that passion in your heart before you turn up to your first squad, you know? It’s got to mean a lot before you actually turn up.
Just by putting a shirt on for any nation, won’t all of a sudden turn you in to this individual that loves the country, loves representing your country - that was always in me, I think, as a person.
So, to get that opportunity to actually play for my country, on top of that the proudest moment of my career was to captain in England. I think you, in a team sport that I’m very proud to be a team member of that is one individual accolade that you stand alone with, and that was fantastic for me.
Looking back over my career and what I have done I think that’ll always stand out as the one thing that I’m most proud of.
Following the infamous missed penalty in 1990 why step up again in Euro ’96?
I think with myself it’s not fear of failure that’s ever driven me on. Adversity has always been, in a bizarre way, the one thing that spurred me on.
We spoke earlier about as a 13 year old getting released from Queens Park Rangers, the club you support all your life, how that feels and does it spur you on to carry on? Attempting to get in the Army and the Police and failing interviews. Further down my career breaking my leg twice in the same season at West Ham, at the age of 37, but still having that mentality to want to push on.
I think every time I’ve experienced adversity in my career it spurred me on, and the penalty miss in 1990, whilst at the time was a massive blow to me individually, my best season as a player came the following season, when I scored 16 goals, no penalties and in footballing terms, by far my best season.
Now, I sit back and ask myself why is that? What is the question behind that, why is that the case? I think if you can turn round and say that whenever adversity comes knocking they are real learning curves, you learn more about yourself, you learn more about those around you at those given times, and it’s what you take from that.
My experience in 1990 probably had payback in it, I had to wait probably some 17 years I think to get payback. When I took charge of the under-21 squad and I said to myself that these young players can never go through the experience I did of an ad hoc penalty selection process like in 1990, where people put their hand up at the end of a game. Bear in mind we are in a World Cup semi-final with half a billion people watching, and you volunteer to take penalties – that can’t be right!
So, as soon as a young under-21 came into my care we practiced penalties after every training session. Statistically I wanted my team to be the most prepared team for a penalty shoot-out that there has ever been in world football, and I think I achieved that in my time. Now, that only came because I had suffered adversity however many years earlier.
That adversity spurred me on, and the same in Euro ’96. People say to me look, you missed a penalty in 1990, whatever made you offer your services to take another penalty six years later, on your own soil? My answer is always the same – failure is not putting myself forward. Once again we went to another penalty shootout, no prior practice to it, we practiced ad hoc but no set taking order or anything of that nature, so it was down to me to volunteer my services to our manager when we go in to a penalty shootout.
For me, failure is when you don’t step forward, whether I scored or missed that penalty that day would have been, well it wouldn’t have been irrelevant but in some ways it would have been. Failure is standing on the halfway line letting Tony Adams take a penalty, who has never taken a penalty before in his life. So, for me that was the real learning from that – you have got to put yourself forward all the time, you know, for good and for bad.
Is risk taking essential to great leadership?
In some ways yes, risk taking is a big part in leadership, but we are all different individuals in many ways. I’m probably less of a risk taker, as a person, than maybe the next person, but it really is a case of knowing yourself and quantifying that risk.
What we try to do, if someone said a similar question about risk taking I would turn that on it’s head and say I have shown you an opportunity when I missed a penalty and I wasn’t prepared to take a risk by sending my young players into a major tournament unprepared.
So, what you try to do, whether it be in the sporting environment or the corporate environment, is irrelevant, you try to minimize risk. Why would you gamble when you can do your homework and leave no stone unturned?
There are times where you have to go with a gut feeling, maybe in my environment it’s putting a young player in – is he ready, is he not? You have to go with your gut feeling at times and back your judgment. Some you’ll get right and some you’ll get wrong, and on top of that if you get a few wrong you say right, we have suffered adversity, what can I learn by it?
There is always a great learning there. So, if you can put yourself in a win-win situation, whatever you do, I think you have got a chance.
What can managers in business learn from football?
I think there is very little difference between the corporate and the sporting fields. I really do. You are dealing with man-to-man management that’s absolutely vital. You’re dealing with maybe the maverick that works inside the organisation that maybe doesn’t sit particularly well with other colleagues who are maybe more team orientated but can deliver a real high-flying product week in week out and hit their sales targets. Like that super-star in a football team that is a bit of a maverick and disassociates with one or two other team mates, but you know full well that this is the fella that is going to get you a goal at the weekend that is going to win you a game.
I think everything is under-pinned by man-to-man management, I really do. How you deliver with each individual, but showing the full squad of what you’ve got, or the workplace, that everyone is treated equal in this, there is a real team environment, and the trick is to build a team.
I think Leicester, as a football club at this moment in time, are a great point in case to that. They’ve got individuals that have all maximized their potential, which in any work environment is fantastic. The one thing they have done as well is there’s a real team, you can tell from the outside that there’s a real love for each other, and a real affection for each other, that they built a team. And I think the main thing is, as well, on top of that, by the time you’ve ended up washing all that away, they love what they do. They care about their football club, or they care about their work environment, as I did with the under-21s. You’ve got to care about the product you’re delivering and be passionate about it.
How do great leaders create a culture of respect and passion?
I think the big leaders that I’ve seen in my profession, Alex Ferguson – what has he done? He has gone straight into an organisation that had not a great culture, let’s say, over expectation as well, which you have to deal with. I think, he set a culture and he said you’re going to have to get with this culture.
And I think what great leaders do is they set a culture and say this is what we want to achieve, but you hand over somewhere on the journey, once you have started to achieve that.
The culture and the setting of a culture is more powerful coming from the factory floor, or the dressing room, wherever it may be, and great leaders are prepared to do that – they’re prepared to set the vision and say this is how we’re going to do it, but at some stage on that journey they hand over. You hand over to the dressing room when you know they’ve got the message.
Certainly with myself when working with the under-21s it was fantastic. It came to a stage where, probably the players, my staff, and I could almost sit back and whoever got interviewed, or whatever conversation was had, the same messages were coming out of their mouths, dressed up slightly differently, but the power had been handed over to the staff, and the dressing room.
That’s where the real power is, and that’s when, in my opinion, you really know that you’ve got an organisation that is a high-flying organisation, whether it be in the corporate world or the sporting world. Where the leader can almost take a step-back and say look, I have put the initial outlines of a plan down – you have shown me you can run with it, I am going to empower you now, and you deliver the product and the performance that you know you’re capable of.
I think that’s an element of trust as well, where I think anyone working for a real leader knows that he’s valued and trusted by that leader.
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