Meet the new boss, not quite the same as the old boss. Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the 46-year-old caretaker manager of Manchester United football club, has seen his temporary appointment become a permanent one.
Having arrived in December after the departure of Jose Mourinho, the Norwegian former Man Utd striker was only supposed to be in charge until the end of the season.
But the team has had an extended run of form. They were unbeaten in the league for 12 matches until finally losing to Arsenal earlier this month. The sluggish, joyless players in red of last year have become dynamic, creative and successful once again. The probation period is over. The L-plates have been ripped off.
Solskjær’s impact on the team is a good example of what caretaker (or interim) managers can do. In the first instance a change of personnel can be positive in itself. It can wake people up. It gives everyone, especially those who are jaded or in a rut, something else to think about.
A caretaker manager may have less baggage than the outgoing one, bringing in a fresh perspective and a change of tone. Caretaker managers may be able to remind people what they used to enjoy about their job in the past. People, and bosses, get stale. A new face can reinvigorate.
Sometimes a caretaker is needed just to get you through an immediate crisis. Last Sunday we were told that a Westminster coup was under way, and that a new caretaker prime minister – David Lidington, perhaps, or Michael Gove – was about to be installed. This didn’t happen. But the discussion around the need for a caretaker was a kind of admission that the Brexit morass needs a special – perhaps even a divine – intervention. Whoever finally gets to replace Theresa May may well end up being a fairly temporary figure themselves.
The remarkable thing at Man Utd is the way in which the same players who were underperforming for the old boss seem to have rediscovered their temporarily hidden talent. They have remembered that they like playing football and are good at it. Stars such as Paul Pogba and Marcus Rashford seem almost transformed. But they are the same people they were in December. Solskjær has been a kind of catalytic converter.
He is wise enough to recognise what he has done. “Well, that’s my job,” he said in an interview for the Premier League’s in-house media channel. “To create an environment that they want to come into training, they want to enjoy training, they feel that they’re allowed to perform, to express their talents.” Success in football is achieved on the pitch, and morale cannot recover until you start winning matches again. But it helps to win a few battles in the mind as well.
This phenomenon of the caretaker manager bounce has often been seen in football. Ten years ago Guus Hiddink, the Dutch manager, arrived to temporarily take over at Chelsea, when the club was in some disarray. They went on to win the FA Cup that season. Older fans may remember the brief tenure of Joe Mercer as caretaker England manager in 1974, after the long reign of Sir Alf Ramsey had ended in failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup. Mercer shook up a disillusioned squad and encouraged everyone to enjoy playing again. “Let’s all at least bloody smile, eh lads?” he declared at their first team meeting.
The challenge for Solskjær – and any caretaker who is kept on – is that he is no longer just a breath of fresh air, a welcome change from the gloomy and stultifying Mourinho. He has enjoyed a so-called “Hawthorne effect”, where a change in conditions and increased attention paid to staff seem to lead to improvement (this is in fact a disputed theory, albeit still a popular one). But the novelty will wear off.
All managers are caretakers, in a sense. They should be taking care of the people they work with. They should be paying attention to them. And no manager will be in place for ever. Effective interim managers recognise that they have a limited period in which to operate. So they get on with it. How unlike our leaders at Westminster.
Good managers stay fresh, renew themselves in the job, keep learning, and pass on their enthusiasm to everybody else. Perhaps at times more bosses could try and see themselves as an interim rather than a permanent (or never-ending) presence, there to make a difference but not get stuck in their ways. It’s what you leave behind and encourage others to do that counts.
Solskjær has worked some magic before, of course. Almost 20 years ago his then manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, turned to him with 10 minutes left to play in the Champions League final in Barcelona, with Man Utd losing 1-0 to Bayern Munich. The supersub came on and … well, if you don’t remember what happened next, just ask a Man U fan.
• Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management
