Legacy

by James Kerr

Successful leaders balance pride with humility: absolute pride in performance; total humility before the magnitude of the task.

There are no histrionics. The team prepares silently, many in headphones. Above, 35,000 voices chant, ‘Black! Black! Black!’ The coaches hang back as the players prepare. There is no rousing rhetoric. A word here, a backslap there. Now it is all about the players. About ‘the being of team’. The talking is done. It’s time to play rugby.

The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best.

Sweeping the sheds. Doing it properly. So no one else has to. Because no one looks after the All Blacks. The All Blacks look after themselves.

‘It’s not expecting somebody else to do your job for you. It teaches you not to expect things to be handed to you.’ ‘If you have personal discipline in your life,’ he says, ‘then you are going to be more disciplined on the field. If you’re wanting guys to pull together as a team, you’ve got to have that. You don’t want a group of individuals.’

His success, he said, was based on what he called the ‘Lombardi Model’, which began with a simple statement: —— Only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader. For him, it all begins with self-knowledge, with the great ‘I Am’; a fundamental understanding and appreciation of our own personal values. It was on this foundation that he built his teams and his success. From self-knowledge, Lombardi believed, we develop character and integrity. And from character and integrity comes leadership.

‘You get nowhere without character. Character is essential to individuals, and their cumulative character is the backbone of your winning team.’ Create the highest possible operating standards, develop the character of your players, develop the culture of your team and, as the title of Walsh’s book proclaims, The Score Takes Care of Itself.

‘that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team.’

‘The challenge of every team is to build a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another,’ said Vince Lombardi. ‘Because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.’

— Performance = Capability + Behaviour The way you behave, he argues, will either bring out the best or worst of your capability, and this applies to businesses and teams as well as to individuals. ‘Leaders create the right environment for the right behaviours to occur,’ says Eastwood. ‘That’s their primary role.’

‘The Public Domain’ means those areas of a player’s life when he is under team protocol – whether at training, during a game, travelling or on promotional duty. Professionalism, physical application and proficiency are demanded here.

‘The Private Domain’ is the one in which we spend time with ourselves and where our mind-game plays out. This is the biggest game of all, as daily we confront our habits, limitations, temptations and fears.

‘The paradox,’ he says, ‘is that, though every organization thinks they have unique problems, many change issues are centred on one thing. The ability – or inability – to convert vision into action. Sometimes it is through a lack of a vision itself. More often through the inability to translate vision into simple, ordinary, everyday actions.’ Actions like senior leaders who sweep the floor.

We used matrices to back intuition, because there are certain stats in rugby that determine the player’s character and that’s what we were after. So we picked high work rate, strong body movers, guys that were unselfish and had a sacrificial mindset.’

A values-based, purpose-driven culture is a foundation of the All Blacks’ approach and sustained success. But, as any business leader knows, value-words like integrity, sacrifice, determination, imagination, innovation, collaboration, persistence, responsibility and so on seem powerful in the abstract, but can be flat and generic on the page. The challenge is always to bring them to life, and into the lives of those you lead. As we shall see, the All Blacks are a world class case study in how to do this. Their management are past-masters at turning vision into everyday action, purpose into practice.

In fact, in answer to the question, ‘What is the All Blacks’ competitive advantage?’, key is the ability to manage their culture and central narrative by attaching the players’ personal meaning to a higher purpose.

To become an All Black means becoming a steward of a cultural legacy. Your role is to leave the jersey in a better place. The humility, expectation and responsibility that this brings lifts their game. It makes them the best in the world.

This management technique – which begins with questions – is of the ‘Socratic Method’, so called because Socrates used a type of interrogation to separate his pupils from their prejudices. The goal? To help them find self-knowledge, even if the truth turns out to be uncomfortable.

A culture of asking and re-asking fundamental questions cuts away unhelpful beliefs in order to achieve clarity of execution. Humility allows us to ask a simple question: how can we do this better?

Rather than just instruct outwards, the coaches began to ask questions; first of themselves – how can we do this better? – and then of their players – what do you think? This interrogative culture, in which the individual makes their own judgements, and sets their own internal benchmarks, became increasingly important.

It is a facilitated style of interpersonal leadership in a learning environment concerned with adaptive problem solving and continuous improvement and in which humility – not knowing all the answers – delivers strength.

It should be our acts that remain after us, the whakairo remind us, not our vainglory.

St Augustine said it best: ‘Lay first the foundation of humility . . . The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.’

These conditions help shape the culture and therefore the ethos – the character – of the team. Humility begins at the level of interpersonal communication, enabling an interrogative, highly facilitated learning environment in which no one has all the answers. Each individual is invited to contribute solutions to the challenges being posed. This is a key component of building sustainable competitive advantage through cultural cohesion. It leads to innovation, increased self knowledge, and greater character. It leads towards mana.

GO FOR THE GAP When you’re on top of your game, change your game

Four Stages for Organizational Change: ° A Case for Change; ° A Compelling Picture of the Future; ° A Sustained Capability to Change; ° A Credible Plan to Execute.

Everyone had been locked in their own little islands feeling the same thing.’ They had lost, to use Gilbert Enoka’s phrase, ‘the being of team’. There was a strong case for change.

Compelling Picture of the Future. In the next chapter we look at the role of purpose and personal meaning,

(as reported in Final Word and repeated in interviews) as the creation of ‘an environment . . . that would stimulate the players and make them want to take part in it’.

He reasoned that an active focus on personal development and leadership would create capacity, capability and loyalty.

Sustained Capability to Change. This meant eliminating players who were seen as hindering the chance for change and, more importantly, building the capability of those who remained and those who joined.

A winning organization is an environment of personal and professional development, in which each individual takes responsibility and shares ownership.

the creation of a learning environment, which acted as a stepladder of personal and professional development. The creation of a ‘Leadership Group’ as well as ‘Individual Operating Units’ in which players took increasing responsibility for team protocols, principles and culture, gave structure to this strategy.

Steered by Henry, the men were able to develop and deploy a self-reflective, self-adjusting plan that developed the technical, tactical, physical, logistical and psychological capabilities of their collective.

Though it is tempting to see life, business, society and success as part of a linear progression of constant and never-ending refinement and growth, the opposite is true. Like most things in nature, cultures are subject to a more cyclical process, of ebb and flow, growth and decline.

In the Learning Phase, we often experience dips in actual performance as we feel our way through the unfamiliar.

Then once the learning has become embedded and momentum builds, so growth accelerates. This is the Growth Phase. Rewards follow. Praise and blandishments too. Soon we’re on top of the game and on top of the world.

The key, of course, is when we’re on top of our game, to change our game; to exit relationships, recruit new talent, alter tactics, reassess strategy. To make what Handy describes as ‘Sigmoid leaps’, a series of scalloped jumps along the Sigmoid Curve, outwitting inevitability.

As a leader this is one of our primary responsibilities, and the skill comes in timing these leaps: when to axe your star performer; when to blood new talent; when to change your game-plan altogether.

‘To maintain an accurate or effective grasp of reality,’ he argued, ‘one must undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with the environment to assess its constant changes.’

Observe This is data collection through the senses; visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, taste – as well as more modern metrics.

Orient This is analysis, synthesizing all available data into a single, coherent ‘map of the territory’

Decide This is the point of choice; where we determine the best course of action.

Act We execute; acting swiftly and decisively to take advantage of the moment. We then go back to the beginning and observe the effect of our actions.

To prevail in conflict, Boyd says, we ‘must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself begins to change’.

‘It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.’ Charles Darwin

‘It’s about going for the gap.’ It’s about adapting quickly to change by creating an adaptive culture.

Graham Henry identified his key areas of focus: ° Sufficient leadership, knowledge and confidence to implement the game plan ° The transference of leadership and therefore responsibility from the coaches to the players ° The development of leadership ability and composure ° The necessity for the group to understand their identity – who they are, what they stand for, and their collective and individual responsibilities as All Blacks

One moment we’re on top of the world, the next falling off the other side. The role of the leader is to know when to reinvent, and how to do it. The Sigmoid Curve means that when we’re at the top of the game, it’s time to change our game. The key is not losing momentum.

The teams that will thrive in this VUCA world are those who act quickly and decisively to seize competitive advantage; adjusting and readjusting along the way.