Johnson said there is plenty of crossover between running a team and running an embassy. It’s all management, and it’s all about getting buy-in from the most important people so that everybody is pulling in the same direction.
That did not always appear to be how things were functioning in London. Last summer, the State Department’s internal watchdog wrote a report that said Johnson had “sometimes made inappropriate or insensitive comments on topics generally considered Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)-sensitive, such as religion, sex, or color.” The department’s Office of Civil Rights conducted an inquiry and concluded the allegations amounted to unsubstantiated workplace harassment. The story made for a few days of ugly headlines back home, but Johnson does not want to discuss details on the record, beyond saying his wife was furious that he was accused and the allegations go against everything he has been about. He considered them so baseless he has not addressed the accusations with players or coaches.
Even in strictly football terms, successful management hasn’t been much easier to attain. A series of shotgun marriages, consultant-advised hires and which-way-is-the-wind-blowing decisions created a franchise that felt perpetually out of sync, with competing agendas sometimes scuttling any hope of progress. The view from across the pond gave Johnson enough distance to recognize when there wasn’t synergy — his word — between…
