Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton

Paulsson, who shouted into the mic, ‘Let’s speed this up!’ and after an impressive beat-box session, sang Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself’ in perfect tune. Curtis Edwards, a former Middlesbrough academy player, then belted out the George Michael song ‘Freedom’.

      The first-team squad joined together in singing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, ‘Human’ and ‘We Are the World’. This one was an emotional one, as drawings from children saying ‘Tack ÖFK’ – thanks ÖFK – were shown on a giant screen behind the stage. The kids weren’t the only ones giving thanks. ‘Football was my saviour, and by that I don’t mean the actual kicking of a ball, but more about what this club stands for and the values it has,’ said Nouri.

      Every member of the squad, including the coach and his assistants, performed during the show. It ended with a burst of red-and-black confetti and the first-team players and youth players wildly dancing to ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’. The mood was joyous. Relief was mixed with pride. The show was sensational.

      ‘It was a wonderful night,’ Potter tells me a few months later, as he prepares for a pre-season training camp in warmer climes than northern Sweden. Potter has guided ÖFK from Sweden’s fourth division to the first division, and survival in the top flight, in the space of six years. In 2017, ÖFK also won the Swedish Cup, the first major trophy in their history. Potter is a hero in the ‘Winter City’, which until recently was more famous for its Nordic sports.

      Östersunds has a cross-country ski stadium and a snow piste. It has hosted several Nordic Games and ski orienteering world championships. But now it has another source of pride. One journalist who visited Potter’s house saw a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table and a note from AnnSofie Andersson, the mayor, saying, ‘Congratulations, you are amazing. We are so glad you live in Östersunds.’

      Potter was an average player (his words), who considers himself fortunate to have been a professional for 13 years. He played in the top flight, for Southampton and Stoke, but most of his career was in the lower leagues. He always had a thirst for knowledge. One afternoon he was idly skimming a newspaper when he realised how much time he had on his hands. He signed up to an Open University degree in social sciences and studied American and European Union politics. When he retired from playing, he wanted to combine his continuing education with some coaching. So he became a football development coach at the University of Hull and continued his early coaching career at Leeds Metropolitan University, where he enrolled in a Masters course in leadership and emotional intelligence.

      He explored leadership theory and how success is related to overall environments. He wrote a thesis on the importance of reflection and self-determination in individual development. Potter learned that self-awareness was the foundation of emotional intelligence; it’s a lesson that remains with him today. He was the only sports coach on the course. His course leader was a former military man, and everyone else was either in the army or a surgeon. ‘They were all highly technically gifted but needed support around emotional management and particularly when mistakes happen and their responses to that.’ It was fascinating for Potter, whose own environment had been based heavily on a blame culture, where coaches would tell him to cut out silly mistakes, and players were castigated for individual errors. Potter decided he wanted to be different.

      That’s when he met ÖFK chairman Daniel Kindberg, who was then the club’s sports director.15 Potter was offered the job of academy head. He turned it down. Over a year later, Kindberg had become chairman. One of his first moves was to return to Potter and recruit him as head coach.

      The duo spoke the same language. Kindberg is a former lieutenant-colonel in the Swedish army. He saw active service in Congo, Liberia and the Balkans. It was there that he learned how stress and fear limit decision-making. ‘It’s simple: if you’re in a combat situation, and you make a mistake, your friends die,’ he tells me. ‘So if you’re stressed, it’s harder to make the right decision.’ When he returned home from tours of duty overseas, he spent time thinking what it was like to be afraid and how it affected him. It made him confront future problems in a different way. ‘We need to take away the stress, to encourage bravery, and to be convinced by your inner self.’ Even if it doesn’t work? ‘You don’t know unless you try!’

      Potter said that there was ‘a philosophical connection’ between him and Kindberg. Sir Alex Ferguson always said that new managers weighing up job offers should not choose the club, but the chairman they work for. Potter liked Kindberg’s vision. The chairman wanted to do something different, to create an identity, to make a difference and to have a football club to be proud of. Even though the club had just dropped into the fourth tier; even though the fans were deeply unhappy and leaving in their droves; even though Potter did not know Swedish football; even though he had a wife and new-born son, he moved to northern Sweden and took the job. This was practising the boldness and risk-taking mentality that he preached.

      It was much harder than he thought. The club was in a negative spiral. There was a strong blame culture. Recruitment decisions were not working. And his wife, Rachel, found it hard to adapt. The climate was fierce, as arctic Kallvastan winds whipped off the giant lake, Storsjön, at temperatures as low as minus 25°C. Potter was working 12 hours a day and Rachel was a new mother who didn’t speak the language. She has now learned Swedish and, along with her three children, is the one who has to encourage Potter to speak it more often. They are now both fluent, as are their children.

      Kindberg’s vision had included ÖFK getting into the top division and eventually playing in Europe. ‘From where we were, you could argue that was an insane target,’ Potter says. It’s not so insane now.

      His first step was to bring some element of joy back to the club. The focus had been outcome-based, valuing results only, rather than performance. Potter tried to create a new environment, one that recognised potential and was built on trust and mutual support. No more blame culture. It related to the values Kindberg wanted the club to espouse, which were published on the club website shortly after Potter’s arrival. It is to the great pride of both men that these values remain in place today, and that their power has had a social impact on the Östersunds and wider Jämtland community. They were: Openness, Long-term, Sincerity and Honesty, Reliability, Professionalism.

      Your organisation may or may not have a mission or values statement. The likelihood is that it does, but you just don’t know it. Such a statement can be a useful tool to generate feedback about whether the business is fulfilling those values, or implementing that vision. It may seem unnecessary but in the case of ÖFK, whose values are a clear source of pride, it has proven extremely beneficial.

      It’s also easy to forget about the importance of relationship-building in today’s workplace, where deadlines are usually yesterday and stress is never far from the surface. We are given short-term growth targets to meet that are inhibiting and stressful. A culture of short-termism and need for profit restricts employees’ risk-taking; they are too scared to deviate from the normal for fear of blame if targets are not reached. How can this be an efficient environment for success?

      It’s much harder, and braver, to look long term and develop deeper respect and connections between colleagues by devoting time to ÖFK’s intangible values. This is particularly true when working with millennials. Simon Sinek, an author on modern management whose work is admired by a coach we will meet in Chapter 3, claims that millennials have it tough: brought up by parents who told them they were special and could do and have anything they want, they often find that not to be the case in the real world of professional business. So they often suffer from low self-esteem, have little resilience and a reliance on technology, rather than real-life connections, as a coping mechanism. ÖFK have found smart solutions.

      ‘We have built a working environment based on hard-core values that we all have to follow,’ says Kindberg. ‘It’s a standard of how we look at each other, at people, at society and at football. In this environment, creativity, initiative and courage blend with competing every day to be the best. The same is true if you are the striker or a clerk in the office. Everyone here is the same.’

      The pair embraced the need to create an identity, practically