Football's a funny old game, as the cliché goes, and English football is funnier than most. Some of the most successful managers in the world have tried their luck in the Premier League and been chewed up and spat out - think of Jose Mourinho or Martin Jol.

And conventional ideas of what constitutes good management seems to bend and warp once you step into the dressing room. Sir Alex Ferguson is brilliant at identifying and nurturing talent, but he has a notoriously short fuse when things aren't going the way he wants – an attribute that perhaps wouldn’t serve him as well in a normal working environment.

But perhaps standard management practices do still have a place on the football pitch. Take these two quotes from the post-match interviews after Swansea City played Norwich City:

1. Norwich City manager Glenn Roeder: "It's just diabolically poor play, poor defending… it's totally unacceptable. It's so disappointing when they don't do what they're told. It bothers me that some of them are quite experienced players. It's just a total lack of football intelligence."

2. Swansea manager Roberto Martinez: "In football everyone must have a dream and ours is to play in the Premier League. But it could take us five years or even 10 years to achieve. Expectation levels are always very high in south Wales, but at the moment all we are trying to do is to consolidate at this level.”

Of course these may be selective quotes. Perhaps Roeder (the losing manager) also accepted his share of the blame for poor preparation or a game plan that didn’t work. He did make some comments about his team’s bad luck in not converting more of their chances. And it must be hard to find positive things to say when your team has just lost a game at home after being a goal up.

But let’s stop bending over backwards to make allowances. The bottom line is that Martinez, still in his first full season as a manager, communicated a clear vision (‘we aspire to reach the next league up’), injected a note of realism (‘it could take us five years to get there’), praised his team and ensured his players would stay motivated by holding out a carrot. Superb leadership and textbook emotional intelligence.

I know which style of leadership I’d rather be following, and which I’d bet on to deliver for the long term.


* The author of this blog would like to declare an interest as a supporter of Swansea City Football Club. For more on long-term sustainable performance, see CIPD Shaping the Future