Danny CowleyIn May 2020, Leadership Relay spoke to Danny Cowley, the then football manager at Huddersfield Town. Alongside his brother, Nicky, Danny combined a full time teaching role with managing in Non-League with Concord Rangers and Braintree Town. Danny became head of the very successful PE department at FitzWimarc School before becoming a full time football manager with Lincoln City in 2016. In Danny’s first season at Lincoln he oversaw the club’s promotion back to the football league, winning the National League title. That season also saw his Lincoln team become the first Non-League team in over a century to reach the quarter finals of the FA Cup. In 2018, under Danny and Nicky, the club had its first trip to Wembley winning the EFL Cup. The following season in 2018-2019, Danny led the team to the League 2 title. In September 2019 Danny and Nicky took charge of Championship side Huddersfield Town. In this interview, Danny told us about how he was able to transfer his teaching and leading skills to football management. He tells us the importance of making the subject matter as fun as possible to promote a curiosity and love of learning within children. Danny talks about establishing his values and philosophy with the team and about how he is working hard to empower his players so they are able to become independent problem solvers on the pitch. Danny also discusses how his parents were fantastic role models and how they taught him the importance and value of hard work. Working with the whole community is an important part of Danny and Nicky’s work and he talks about the inspirational journey with Lincoln FC. Danny’s love of football shines through throughout this fascinating interview. Leadership Relay really appreciates Danny’s time at what is a very busy period of time for him and the team. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as us. Thank you so much, Danny. |
The Interview
LR- You developed your leadership skills through teaching and leading a team in school. Which of these skills have you transferred to your football management career?
DC- I’ll be forever thankful for my journey really and in terms of football it’s quite unique. Certainly the opportunity to practice and develop your pedagogical skills. My Dad would have coached my team and Nicky’s team, when he was younger, one of us would play in the morning and the other would play on a Sunday afternoon. It was from there that he gave us the interest in coaching and teaching and ultimately leading and managing.
We were lucky enough to work at a school, FitzWimarc school. Nicky, myself and my wife, Kate, all worked at the same school eventually. It had a big extra curricular tradition. We were able to compete at County, National and even International Level. There was a huge demand to try and be competitive. Our day would start very early and the kids would come in before school and then we’d be teaching for the 5 one hour periods and you’d teach at lunch time and after school. You get a lot of opportunity to practice and hone your skills, and maybe make some mistakes along the way.
I always look at the nature of Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard who have had unbelievable football careers and then they go straight in at the top level almost and have to manage. I'm full of admiration for how they do that. For myself, obviously we started right at the bottom in Step 5 in Non-League and we had a lot of opportunities away from the public eye to develop skills and make mistakes. I'll be forever appreciative of the journey. I do genuinely believe that a lot of my teaching skills are quite transferable, particularly to coaching and managing people.
Everyone always asks me what is the difference between managing a player on £50 per week at Step 5 in Non-League compared to managing players at Championship level and ultimately human beings are human beings. Virtually every player started their footballing journey because they loved the game. Naturally you have some common ground. For us it’s just about relationships.
Whether it’s a player-coach relationship or it’s a teacher-pupil relationship, firstly you have to try to understand the person, you have to try and build a level of respect and then you try to gain their trust. Once you can do that you can then start to have an impact and start to influence them. Whether it’s skills on the pitch, whether it’s their inter-personal skills or life skills or whatever it may be.
For me,first and foremost, it’s about building relationships. I look at all of the successful managers and not just in football, but across sports, normally they are just really good human beings. You take Bobby Robson, Clive Woodward and Eddie Jones, all of these guys, they have a real sustainability as they’re good people and they’re able to, as a consequence, nurture the players and get the very best out of their talent and ability allowing them to fill their potential.
LR - If you were going back into teaching are there things you would do differently as a result of your experiences in football?
DC -That’s a good question. I’d happily go back into teaching tomorrow. I love teaching and I love sport and I really enjoy working with children. I’m much more patient working with children than I am with adults. I love the enthusiasm that children give. I really miss that the early mornings at 7.30 am to start practice at FitzWimarc school. We were just a comprehensive school. I think we won somewhere near 20 national titles across different sports and we actually finished 4th in the schools’ World Athletics Championships during our time.
In 2012 we were voted State Sports' School of the Year. I was lucky enough to be Head of Department and I had brilliant staff. We would regularly have 200 children in at 7.30 am. I was managing in Non-League at the time. In our last year of teaching we’d have been at Braintree which was the National League so we could be travelling up to the North West of the county on a Tuesday night, have not much sleep and be back in work on the Wednesday morning. The children would bring so much energy and enthusiasm. I could always thrive off that and that would always energise me.
There are skills that I would take back. This new experience for me at Huddersfield has been great. It has been the first time I've had such a diverse changing room, with players of all different cultures. I’ve really tried to open my mind and learn about different players and their cultures and try to gain an understanding of them as human beings and what drives them. We are all different and I like differences. It would be really boring if we were all the same! That has been interesting and a challenge.
I believe that anything is possible in this world. I think that only we control our destiny. I see a lot of people put a lot of barriers, especially in young peoples’ way and I think we should encourage every child to try to be the very best they can be. They should strive to achieve what they want to achieve, even if the goal might seem a long way away and pretty hard to get to. I think you have to think big.
The bit that I'm interested in at the moment is just around learning and I think the best teachers do this really well. Learning is a skill and it’s a skill that nobody really teaches. We just all think that we can develop that skill through the different subjects as the vehicle almost. I actually think that trying to teach people to be good learners is something that we are working towards. That to me is about creating curiosity, and to do that you have to make something fun and enjoyable. You have to get people to love what you are trying to teach.
I watch coaching at grassroots level all the time, my daughter plays football and my little boy does gymnastics and rugby. Whenever I get a chance I watch their training and watch their coaching and sometimes we’re so keen to teach the children about techniques, tactics and the rules of the game and we should just make it fun. Once they love it and they really enjoy it then they will naturally want to learn more. They will naturally become curious. You will have them in the palm of your hand and then you can start to add to it. You’ve got to get them to love it first.
For me and my subject of PE, I can visually see how I would do that and maybe historically, I was so keen to try and make sure I was following the National Curriculum and the guidelines and giving the children the learning they should have had, but first and foremost, get them to love it and really enjoy what they do. When they do that then you create that curiosity. We've done this in education for many years now, but try to give them the skills that they can learn independently. Reading and writing are obviously two important skills in doing that, but if you can keep trying to teach children how to learn well. I genuinely believe there is no better skill to give human beings.
LR - You have discussed working with the players to discuss values and establish a code of conduct. How is this then shared with all once agreed?
DC - We are all human beings and we want boundaries. We don't always realise and know it at the time, but generally we want to know what we can do and what we can’t do. I am always trying to work towards empowering the players. I think rugby does it very well. Eddie Jones does it brilliantly, Stuart Lancaster does it fantastically well. They are fantastic at really empowering the players. I personally believe this can be incredibly effective. Part of that is it’s their game, they are having to make 100s and 1000s of decisions every time they step over the paint.
We have on-field coaching and off-field coaching, obviously there is only so much on-field coaching you can do, particularly with the nature of 46 games in a league season, a somewhere near 60 game season if you’re successful. I want to get to a place where players are leading the meetings. Where they’re driving the individual meetings with the group, the department meetings, the defenders meetings, the midfielders meetings and the forward meetings. We are already doing a lot of this with our off-field coaching, but I want to get to a place where with the on-field coaching, they’re actually leading the sessions.
This is just one way and I don't think this is a style that you could use 100% of the time, but I definitely think it’s a style we can utilize a lot more than we do in football. We could get to a place where the players are driving and leading some of the sessions. I think that would really allow us to develop the players’ leadership skills. If you can do that, when the whistle goes you’ve got to have enough problem solvers in your team. No game is the same. I want to get to that place.
In terms of our code of conduct, it’s the players environment. I know my values. My parents brought me and Nicky up to have working class values really. Probably by the end of our childhood we had middle class benefits. We really believe in hard work. When we were very young my mum worked at McDonald's all the way through. I can remember her coming home and her telling us about getting an extra star and me being delighted. That was up until I was around 7 or 8. She then went back into investment, which is what she started in prior to having us.
My Mum went from working at Save and Prosper and she did 27 years without having a day off and ended up Vice President of JP Morgan which is a big American Investment Company. I can genuinely remember, she would get us up and ready for school. All of our packed lunches would be ready and all of our uniforms would be ready and she’d then get the train to London. We’d go to school, she’d come home about 6pm, she’d cook dinner, she’d do the ironing and we’d always used to laugh because she would sit down and within 5 minutes she would be asleep.
She did it day after day. I think everybody needs role models in life. That showed us how to work hard really. Hard work is definitely a key value to us. Having that resilience and determination. I just believe that everyday if you wake up, you should try to be the best you can be and you never give up. I say it to my children all of the time. If you can have those 2 qualities, wake up in the morning, be the best you can be and never give up then you’re not going to go far wrong.
Those values are important to us as is humility. I really like people that are successful. People that achieve success and then want to have further success. People who are always willing to learn and always willing to try to improve and never get ahead of themselves. Those values are the foundation of everything for us. The stronger the foundation, the stronger your organisation is going to be. Once you’ve got those values, you all agree to those values because again the working class ones are ours, but they’re not everyone's values, particularly some of the footballers who we have inherited at Huddersfield.
They’ve had very different journeys to us. Some of them have been at the top clubs all of their lives and as a consequence they are a product of their environment and they just have different values. That doesn’t mean that mine are right and theirs are wrong. You try to find some common ones that you all agree with and once you’ve got those common values, then the rules and boundaries just protect them and if anybody breaks those breaks the values then you put sanctions in place because nobody is bigger than the team, the environment is everything.
LR - So if one of your rules was that ‘you need to be 5 minutes before training’ for example, would you write that down or would you tell the players know verbally at the start of the season this is what we’ve all agreed?
DC - As a collective group we have the values. Then the Leadership Group we have, put the rules in place and they then get signed off by us really. They are agreed by us and the players and then they’re available to them. In 13 years, I think I've fined 3 people. The reason it’s so few, I have to say, is because of the people. I’ve been lucky enough to work with really good players that all bought into the environment and the way we worked and I think alignment is everything isn’t it?
If you want to have success, you've got to get people to understand. If you get people understanding and you get everybody aligned then that in itself is really powerful because once you get alignment you get real commitment and there’s a difference isn't there? It comes from a sense of belonging and that is the thing that I had at Concord 100% and we had it at Lincoln 100%. We had a real sense of belonging and everybody felt valued and everybody felt part of the journey. It was really powerful because once you create that then everybody is willing to do a little bit more and go the extra yard. Without it you get this discretionary effort where people do what they are expected to do or what they perceive they are expected to do and don't do anymore and I don't think that allows you to achieve the success that you want to.
LR - At Lincoln it appeared, from the outside looking in during your time, that the football club was a very important part of the community with working with schools, universities, media etc. How did you go about building these relationships?
DC - Lincoln is an incredible part of the world.It’s a bit off the beaten track. It’s kind of one of those places that you don’t just pass through, you have to have a reason to go there. It’s a beautiful place, a really wonderful place. The people have such an allegiance with the city and with the county. There are not many places which get a sausage named after them! There is a real pride within it.
We felt that really early on in our tenure and I’ve told this story before about Nicky and I being in a board meeting. It would have been around May half-term and we’d just been at the club for a couple of weeks. There was a Lincoln City Soccer School going on on the astro-turf which just backed onto the stadium. There were maybe 40-50 kids at this Soccer School and only one of them had a Lincoln City kit on. There were Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona kits, but only one Lincoln kit and that definitely hit home with us.
I can remember saying to Nicky ‘we’ve got to make it cool to support Lincoln.’ I can remember we went out onto the pitch and we spoke to the little boy who had the Lincoln kit on and it was almost like he was a little bit embarrassed. He was kind of talking out of the corner of his mouth and at that time the club had been relegated to the National League and had been in there for 5 years and not finished above 13th in the division. We wanted to make it cool to support Lincoln and that was our ambition.
We went into literally all of the schools. The supporters liaison officer, a great guy, a real club man, he took us around all the schools. I can remember leading assembly after assembly just trying to create a bit of human connection with the young people really. We managed to have that cup run which definitely definitely helped. We had 1300 season tickets when we arrived with crowds of around 2000 to 2500. By the end of that season we were playing in front of 10,000.
The next season we had 7000 season ticket holders. Again, I go back to it, it was a sense of belonging. The supporters played their role, we wouldn’t have got promoted or did what we did in the FA cup that year without their support. That to me is what football is. Of course I love the game and I love the competitive nature of the game. For me, what I love about football is that it's an opportunity for people to come and feel part of something, an extended family if you like where they’ve got a sense of belonging. I love 3pm on a Saturday where you look around and you see generations of the same family all coming together and spending quality time with each other. That to me is special.
We are West Ham supporters and I can remember my Dad. He’d be at work and he was an accountant and it bored the life out of him. He’d come home and it would be a Tuesday night and he’d have his suit on. He’d come in and West Ham would be playing that evening and he’d have tickets in the top pocket of his suit. You wouldn't be able to see him, but he’d come in and he’d ask us how the day was and he’d pop them up and we’d go ‘yesss.’ We’d get into the car and we’d go and watch West Ham and we loved it. Some of my best childhood memories are doing that travelling up and down the country. I think we went to 35 or 36 of the games one year. I don't think we won one away game that year at West Ham, but we still loved it!
LR - You are always looking for new ways to improve your skills. How do you use your experiences and the new things you learn to help you and the coaching staff to implement your philosophy?
DC -I think we are always trying to evolve and make things better. Whenever I go on a course there is always a take away from it. I’ve actually really enjoyed this period in terms of being able to get out, do some exercise and everytime I go for a run, I'll try and listen to a podcast. Most of my ideas are taken from somewhere, I'm not sure I'm that good at creating my own new ideas. I'm quite good at taking someone else’s ideas and then maybe putting my own personality on it and maybe adding to it.
I think for us at Huddersfield it was a new experience for us. In 13 years as manager, I'd never taken over during the middle of a season so that was very different. When we arrived, the club had been on a crazy journey really. They had the highs of being promoted to the Premier League which in itself was a football miracle. Then they had what they call Premier League 1 at Huddersfield. That first season they’d done brilliantly in the first half of the season and taken the league by storm. Then probably from Christmas onwards found it more difficult. They stayed up on the penultimate game of the season I think and the next year they found it really difficult.
When we came in they had won 4 games in 18 months I think so it had been a hugely difficult period. Just understanding the journey that the players and the staff had been on and the toll it had taken mentally. In sport we train the players’ physical health and put huge focus on that, but it’s important to try and train people’s mental health as well. We know that the psychological side of the game is so important and I genuinely do believe you can train players to be more mentally robust and train them to build their resilience,determination and their grit which are certainly 3 qualities we look for in human beings.
Through the way we train and practice we can put people in positions where they need to be really resilient and really determined. You can build on that and also create some soft landings around it, that if they don't quite get there you can protect these characteristics as well. For us in terms of football, people talk about philosophy about having this philosophy and I'm never quite sure that football is that complicated. Without a doubt we have our values and processes that are very important to us.
Communication is vital. As a football manager you have a lot of difficult conversations unfortunately and that’s the nature of the job. Within any management or leadership role you have to have a lot of difficult conversations and just to have them as quickly as you can and the more difficult the conversation, the more quickly you have it. Just to look in the whites of people’s eyes and tell them, even if it’s bad news that you’re delivering. You tell them, explain the reason why and even if they don't agree with it at least you've fronted up and I think that always carries some respect. I've always tried to do that.
In terms of our philosophy, for me that is just the style of play. So the way you play is a way that’s ever evolving. I think the nature of your philosophy is closely linked to an ideal. I think you have to be quite tactically flexible because of the nature of football, particularly when you manage in the lower leagues. You inherit a group of players and you have to try and find the best way of playing for them and for that group. Then, as you have success, you can slowly work towards the philosophy or the ideal that you want to get to. Then it’s about how you implement that.
Nicky and I have done a lot of work in this period about trying to break the game down and linking our coaching library to all the different parts of the game. So if you think about football, ultimately there are 5 cycles; in possession, out of possession, the defence to attack transition that we call the counter attack, the attack to defence transition that we call the counter press and then you have your restarts and set pieces. You think about the 5 cycles and you kind of break the game down into the different phases. So in possession it might be the build phase or the create phase and we call it the finish phase and we try to break the pitch into 3 parts.
Then linking the training and coaching library to each phase and trying to find the very best way of delivering it to the players whether it’s on the pitch on-field coaching or off the pitch with the off-field coaching. Trying to link that up and also finding the best way to communicate your philosophy to the players. I always find that part is think is quite easy because it’s incredible the amount of detail.
If you're trying to deliver your philosophy to the board or to the powers above then they don't want the same level of detail. They want an understanding of it,but they don't want all of the detail so you've got to work out how to make it sexy really, even if it’s quite pragmatic at times. We are trying to find ways of bringing that to life. The bit that we are continually working towards is the empowerment of players and that is the bit that I think we can learn from other sports.We’ll definitely continue to look for ways of trying to empower the players and giving the players the skills to be able to lead, develop and promote learning.
LR - Finally, do you have one book or podcast that you would recommend all leaders read or listen to?
DC- Clive Woodward’s book ‘Winning’ had a real impact on me in my early days as a Head of Department. I would have been starting out at Concord Rangers and I really like the way he took his business model and then some of the ideas he had. He had a successful company and he successfully implemented some of the ideas to create an environment for his England group and it’s obvious the outcomes of that were pretty special.
Michael Calvin's book, Living on the Volcano, is very good. He actually came in and spent a couple of days with Nicky and I when we were at Lincoln which was great. We were picking his brains because he has met some top top managers. It was great, he thought he was coming to interview us, but we ended up interviewing him and I really find his work interesting.
LR - Was that experience similar to Mic’d Up, the TV programme with Jake Humphrey on BT Sport?
DC - Yeah to be honest we did that right at the end of the season. We’d just got promotion and we’d won League 2, but the way our bonuses were structured, the players and some of the heads of department the players were part of the bonus scheme, but not all of the staff. We offered to do that so we could create some money which would allow us to then create a bonus pot for the staff. For us they’d worked so hard so it was important that they felt valued and were able to get some of the benefits of the success that they’d worked so hard towards.
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You can view interview number 3 with the coach of Great Britain's Womens' Olympic Gold Medal winning coach, Danny Kerry here - https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/danny-kerry.html