In our latest excerpt from Carlo Ancelotti's acclaimed 2016 book Quiet Leadership: Winning hearts, minds and matches, the Everton manager discusses the teammate whose professionalism and team ethic provided a "great example" to follow, and the manager he counts as the most influential figure in his career...

When I started to play in the professional team at Parma my first leaders were the older players who gave me orders.

I was the kid and I would have to carry their bags everywhere, sometimes clean their boots as part of my apprenticeship.

I didn’t know if it was fair or not. It was an unspoken rule that the youngest just did as they were told, so I didn’t argue. I also heard the young players at Manchester United used to have to clean the boots for the first-team players.

The famous Class of ’92 – Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham and the rest – said they did this under Sir Alex Ferguson when they were young, but I don’t think this happens any more.

I wasn’t happy to take the loudest person who gave the most orders as the leader. I looked around for the real leader, the most important player in the team.

I knew it would be the player who had more personality and influence, who was a real professional and an example to the rest. At Parma this player was Lucio Mongardi.

At that time Parma were in the third division and Mongardi was one of only a few players in the team to have played in Serie A, with his previous club, Atalanta.

He took care of me because I was younger and he saw the qualities in me to be a professional. Sometimes he invited me to his house to have lunch or dinner with his family.

He was my reference as a man and he was also my reference as a player, because he was the playmaker in the team, the position I wanted to play.

QUIET LEADERSHIP: WINNING HEARTS, MINDS AND MATCHES - ORDER NOW

I realised that this was the way to lead. I knew that to just give orders did not feel correct.

It was not fair, because I wanted to be treated like the others. I was young, OK, but I was a player like everyone else.

If I was not worth as much as the others then why was I in the team? Maybe I did not earn as much as the others, but if I played in the team then surely I should be treated as an equal.

Mongardi was the only one who thought that way. Everyone in the team should be equal.

Mongardi was not an arrogant player. He didn’t use his power to bully the young players, and this was an important lesson for me.

Maybe he was also empathetic because he had been in Serie A and come back down. He’d done it all and didn’t have anything to prove, so his ego was in the right place.

He was the leader of the team but he was not the captain. As was traditional in Italy at the time, the captain was the player who had spent the most years at the club.

I saw this, that the captain was just a senior player, and could equally see that Mongardi was what I now call the technical leader.

He had the experience in Serie A, the most knowledge on the pitch, and he was a great example to the rest of the team.

I followed his behaviour and, when my chance came to play in Serie A with Roma, I knew what would be expected of me there thanks to him.

Managers

When I arrived at Roma I didn’t need to look for the leader among the players because the leader was the manager.

Agostino Di Bartolomei was the captain, born in Rome and from the Roma academy, but only appeared to be the leader to those outside the squad. He was, perhaps, the political leader.

He had a strong relationship with the press, the supporters and the club, and maybe the manager saw him as a leader, but among the players he was not viewed in the same way.

For me, it was the manager, Nils Liedholm (pictured, below), who led the squad, which was unusual. He was quiet but strong.

When I became a manager myself later, I met him and it was a little bit uncomfortable. He was still my father. In Russian they say the boss is not always right but he is always the boss, and this is the way it was for me with Liedholm.

Because of his natural authority he would not even answer if you challenged him; he would simply pose a question back to you and you would know what he wanted you to do.

At the end of my first season at the club I decided to rent an apartment with a friend in the squad and move out of our accommodation at the training ground.

We went to see Liedholm in his office and explained our plan.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ we said, ‘we are sure.’

‘OK, no problem for me,’ he said, ‘but I think that you both need to train with the academy, not with the first team.

If you want to train with the first team, you have to stay, to live at the training ground.’ We looked at each other and said, together, ‘OK, we’ll stay at the training ground.’

Sometimes in a squad, players get unhappy and complain about the manager, but no one spoke badly about Liedholm.

Everyone had complete respect for him. When the Brazilian player Falcao arrived, Liedholm gave him his blessing and the power to lead.

Falcao was a player with great professional quality. You know immediately when you see a leader – it’s the personality, the character. It’s not the technical skills. Falcao was one of the first foreign players I had come across and it was like he was from another planet.

He was not used to our style of training, so he had to adjust. In Brazil they trained with the ball a lot, while in Italy, at that time, not so much.

Liedholm slowly began to alter our training sessions, not only to help Falcao, but also because he was learning from the player. We began to have more sessions with the ball and fewer without it.

Liedholm changed our training a little and Falcao a little, so we could meet closer to the middle.

When a squad contains players from several different cultures, the top managers take the best from each. What Falcao brought was an attitude of, ‘Why is the ball not here? Why are we not training with the ball more?’

Communication is key here – it is the basis of every relationship.

What you say, how you say it and when you say it. Everybody has their own character and their own style of communication.

There are players who need to be stimulated and there are those who prefer to delegate, while other players are foot soldiers who just want to execute orders.

A manager has to take into consideration all these differences in personality and must listen to what each player thinks, because for players to give their all they have to be convinced about what they are doing.

The manager has to be willing to listen and change his ideas if it means the chance of greater success. It is a lesson I fully embraced later in my career when I did things like change Andrea Pirlo’s position in the team and talk to Sergio Ramos about playing in midfield.

Liedholm had such confidence in his own power that he gave the players a lot of responsibility. He was not strict in his tactics. He would give us some information, not a lot, and the players had freedom on the pitch, which, of course, created a better relationship with the manager.

In this way he was creating new leaders. Falcao became a coach, I am a coach and Liedholm was our guide.

He was never afraid to delegate, whether on the pitch to the players or off the pitch to the trainers for the physical preparation. Although he loved to be on the pitch he interfered only very rarely, if he saw something badly wrong.

Even then it would not be with anger, but with care. It was a different style of training compared with today and he really loved to be on the pitch to teach the players about technical rather than tactical aspects.

He loved to fine-tune the players, and with top players this is all that is necessary. He could stay for two hours just working on a technical exercise.

He was always professional even when he was joking, which couldn’t always be said of the players, but that is how it was in those days.

Now I can say that the players are more professional – they can sometimes see it as a job. When I started we just thought it was great to play and get paid. Life was good. It is important to remember this because, even today, ultimately the players just want to play.

The big change today is a player’s status. Now they make their own choices, but when I played we were the property of the club.

We didn’t know from year to year what was going to happen to us because it was not our decision – we were owned. I didn’t know if I would be able to earn more money in the next year or if I would leave the club.

QUIET LEADERSHIP: WINNING HEARTS, MINDS AND MATCHES - ORDER NOW

Now the players take more care of themselves and are closer to being masters of their own destiny. Because the situation regarding contracts and salaries is now so different from in the past, I have to recognise that players should be treated as individuals with a personal agenda.

Would a manager like Liedholm manage successfully in today’s game? Yes, of course. He would adapt.

He would understand that this new professionalism is more intense, that there is less opportunity for fun. On the training ground the players always work hard because it is their profession.

For me, professionalism is linked to the intensity that you use when you train – physical intensity, but above all mental intensity. This is what the modern manager must deal with at all times when the players are working.

Of course, today there are very different off-field pressures on both the players and the coaches. As a manager I cannot control the player when he is away from the club.

All I can do is give information about the type of behaviour I expect, which is to eat sensibly, drink responsibly and get enough sleep – to live a normal life and be able to integrate with others.

Everyone is entitled to a private life away from the club, but if a player does these things and works hard at his job, then I am happy with him.

It was while I was at Roma that I was first asked to be a leader. Sven-Göran Eriksson had taken over from Liedholm and Agostino Di Bartolomei had left the club, so Eriksson asked me to be captain.

I thought, ‘All I have to do is take the armband, talk to the referee, toss the coin, choose the way to play and talk to the press after the game; does this make me a leader now?’

I always thought the captain should set an example for the team, not in what he says, but what he does.

Becoming captain didn’t change my idea of professionalism, of the right behaviour, but I did feel more responsibility, of course.

It wasn’t so much with my immediate teammates – with them nothing changed. I was the same before and after getting the armband.

The biggest change for me was with the younger players who came up from the academy. I could be a reference for them in the same way that Mongardi had been for me as a kid at Parma.

Just as he had taken care of me, I tried to have conversations with the younger players and to take care of them as well. I remembered what had happened to me as a kid and I didn’t want our younger players to have the same bad experiences.

I tried to give these young players both information and support and, of course, they didn’t have to clean the boots.

Even in the short time that I was captain at Roma I started to realise the responsibility that came with being a leader. I began to understand that leading is not about how you see yourself, but how others see you.

My responsibility was to be a role model. Every team has its rules, written or unwritten, and the first one who has to respect the rules is the captain.

The manager would set the rules, but it was my job to show respect to them. With Liedholm, as I have said, there was flexibility, but with Eriksson it was more strict.

Roma was a big club for Eriksson, so maybe he used the rules to bolster his confidence; Liedholm had so much self-confidence that he was able to be more relaxed.

Liedholm’s self-belief stemmed not only from having such a great knowledge of the game and his success as a manager, but also from enjoying the status of being one of the best players in the world during his playing career.

He used to speak about his playing days in a really funny, self-deprecating way. He played for Milan with two other great Swedish footballers – Gunnar Gren and Gunnar Nordahl – and together they formed the famous Gre-No-Li.

He would tell us, ‘I didn’t misplace a pass in the San Siro for three years and when I finally misplaced one, the whole crowd was so shocked they let out an, “Oooooh!”.’

Impossible, we would say, laughing. But he was such a legend among the Milan faithful that they still all tell the same story: At the end of his career, the entire San Siro stadium applauded for five minutes after he misplaced a pass – an acknowledgement of years of infallibility, but mostly an acknowledgement of love.

As relaxed as Liedholm was, there were still issues about which he would be very strict: you have to respect your teammates; you have to respect the manager; you don’t fight in the training ground; and you don’t speak badly about your teammates.

These were his non-negotiable rules.

As must be obvious, I learned a lot from Liedholm. He was, and still is, my most important reference in football.

QUIET LEADERSHIP: WINNING HEARTS, MINDS AND MATCHES - ORDER NOW