Claudio Ranieri is the manager at the now world famous Leicester City football club. Under his leadership Leicester won the English Premier League in May 2016, despite facing near certain demotion from the Premiership table only two years before. It was a huge, and very surprising, turnaround for the club.

Rather than believing he was a ‘special one’ who imposed his personal will on the football team, Ranieri thought he should help the team discover and impose their collective will (Haslam and Reicher, 2016; Percy, 2016). The team appeared to be fearful of his tactics so he told the players that he would speak little about tactics but build the team around the characteristics of the players;

they should be relaxed and expect calm. The team had no ‘star players’ so the team understood that success was dependent on collective, not individual achievement. It was not Ranieri that was special but the team (and football league) he had come to serve.

Questions

1. What are the main lessons from Ranieri’s case?

2. What are the connections with other lessons from the leadership literature?