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 from scratch. But where to start? Potter carried out due diligence. He looked at the competition; studied what other teams in Sweden were doing, the culture of Swedish football, the recruitment patterns; and looked at ways to compete, and possible advantages that Östersunds could find. If ÖFK competed on the same terms, they would fail, because they had less money than their rivals. So how could they develop an edge?
‘We had to find different players, and give them a reason to come here,’ says Potter. ‘We wanted to improve careers here, and work on players as people too. We used our location in northern Sweden as an advantage; it helped us create a tight-knit group. Swedish football was compact and physical; we looked for players who had different qualities, and came from different areas. This diversity also helped us. We looked at personality attributes and those who played football in a different way to other teams in Sweden. Our style was possession-based. We wanted players who could control the ball, who were flexible [position-wise] and, most of all, who wanted to improve.’
The universal principle of this is clear. Every business would like to create a USP but it can only do so by understanding the market and the competition; only then can it harness advantages for the greater good. This can be as true for the individual as the business. Potter simply asked: ‘What is my distinction?’ By choosing diversity as his USP, he has gone for the polar opposite of Athletic Club de Bilbao, for whom proximity is the USP.
Kindberg reduced the concept of hierarchy by empowering five individual departments to run themselves. He estimates that the board takes 1 per cent of decisions, he takes 4 per cent and 95 per cent are generated by empowered employees.16 ‘Everything we do has the aim of helping us win football matches,’ he said. ‘We use different methods to widen our eyes, improve our social conscience and take responsibility for ourselves. We cannot compete with other clubs financially. So we find other ways.’
One of those ideas came about after a meeting with Karin Wahlén, whose father Lasse Lindin is ÖFK general manager. Wahlén was a bookish child who grew up wanting to be a librarian. She ended up working for a publisher, then setting up her own cultural agency to promote museums and literacy for groups who don’t normally engage with culture.
Kindberg missed his initial meeting with Wahlén, who was convinced that meant he was not interested. When they did meet, she went in heavy with her pitch. ‘Getting the players into culture will improve their performances. It will take them out of their comfort zone and make them braver on and off the pitch,’ she said. ‘When we are brave we can explore our creativity without being afraid of the unknown.’
This chimed with Kindberg’s view, so he set up a two-day workshop where the players met authors, dancers and artists, and shared views on the creative process. It was a success, but nothing changed. So Kindberg asked Wahlén for more. He appointed her ÖFK’s ‘cultural coach’ and, later that year, the whole club put on a play. The coaching staff performed monologues, the players acted a meta-comedy about not knowing how to put on a play, and the youth academy did a dancing and singing extravaganza that required over 20 costume changes. ‘Everyone loved it, and the results improved soon after,’ said Wahlén, a passionate ÖFK fan whose daughters are careful not to stress her out on match-days.
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