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When the environment is dedicated to learning, the score, as Bill Walsh says, takes care of itself. Leaders are teachers – our job is to lead people through uncertainty and confusion and into self-knowledge and self-possession. ‘The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals,’ says Walsh, ‘underlies the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most – teacher.’
‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,’ to paraphrase the Greek statesman Pericles, ‘but what is woven into the lives of others.’ Your legacy is that which you teach.
In creating a coherent learning environment, it pays to both eliminate unhelpful elements – clearing out the furniture – and to introduce insightful and inspiring influences.
A flock of birds – kawau, a kind of cormorant – carve a graceful V across the breaking day. One bird leads, another follows, another takes the lead, in an endless synchronized support system, much like the peloton of professional cyclists. Ornithologists say that flying this way is 70 per cent more efficient than flying solo. If a bird falls out of formation, it feels the wind resistance and rejoins the flock. Should one fall behind, others stay back until it can fly again. No bird gets left behind.
Whānau means to ‘be born’ or ‘give birth’. For Māori, it means extended family: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, children and cousins. In the vernacular, it has come to mean our family of friends: our mates, our tribe, our team.
Fly in formation. Be of one mind. Follow the spearhead. This is the ‘being of team’ and the essence of the successful organization.
‘A great player can only do so much on his own,’ said Jackson in his book Sacred Hoops. ‘No matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.’
‘On a good team there are no superstars,’ Jackson’s mentor, Red Holzman, taught him. ‘There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team . . . they make sacrifices; they do things necessary to help the team win.’
The sixth and arguably most important step is to begin to turn the standards into action. The best way of doing this is through peer-to-peer enforcement. ‘Respect as a value is vague,’ says Eastwood, ‘but has impact when players decide this means no phones in meetings, no talking over each other, etc. Values alone risk becoming wallpaper and meaningless.’ But, he adds, ‘defining and enforcing these standards needs to be from bottom up.’
In its simplest form, this involved the mentoring of younger players by the senior figures. It involved the Leadership Group in collective decision making in areas such as: community appearances, advertising approvals and which charity the team would support. It also involved the Leadership Group being left (and trusted) to sort out internal problems within the team.
— This is a classic example of the dual management structure operating within the team: a lecture from a grumpy manager wouldn’t have had half the same impact of the two players as facing their peers had. Young men hate letting their peers and team mates down, on or off the field.
The being of team begins from inside. High standards must come from within. Leadership works best when your team takes the lead.
‘Whilst there is a lot of pressure on them to enhance the jersey and pass it on in a better state, if you enjoy the experience it actually makes it easier to achieve that goal,’ Smith says. Fun, with a serious purpose. To win. The strength of the wolf is the pack.
It’s better to have a thousand enemies outside the tent than one inside the tent.
Setting high standards – and putting the measures in place to maintain them through peer-to-peer enforcement – is a critical component in successful team culture.
Phil Jackson’s goal was ‘to find a structure that would empower everyone on the team, not just the stars, and allow the players to grow as individuals as they surrendered themselves to the team effort’.
John Wooden said that a player who makes the team great is better than a great player.
‘good to great leaders began by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it’.
Great leaders ruthlessly protect their people, encouraging connection, collaboration and collective ownership, nurturing a safe environment of trust, respect and family.
all successful teams, whether it be in business or in sport, the ones who prepare properly are the ones that normally win.’
‘The key,’ Fitzpatrick tells his audience, ‘is to understand that there is a world of difference between fear of feedback or failure and harnessing that fear to positive effect.’ Embrace expectations.
It is this internal benchmark that sets apart the great from the good. ‘I challenge myself to be the best basketball player every moment I’m playing the game,’ Michael Jordon tells MVP.com.
‘The standard you measure yourself against is high. The debriefing is fairly brutal, not in an aggressive way but in that the team measure their own standards against much higher standards than are measured externally. The public’s opinion is not what we’re measuring – we’re measuring something way, way higher.’
The truth is that the story we tell about our life becomes the story of our life. The narrative we tell our team, business, brand, organization or family becomes the story others eventually tell about us. This internalized narrative – triggered by words, images, movement and memory – is a phenomenon popularly known as the self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s called the ‘Florida Effect’ and, though the results are still being debated, it indicates that perhaps our sense of free will is neither free nor always wilful, but rather a response to the stimulus around us, to our physical and psychological environment; to the way our world is posited through language. It is a response to a story.
the Ancient Egyptians believed that the seat of the soul is our tongue. Using it as our rudder, and words as our oar, we steer our way across the waters to our destiny.
From ancient theology to contemporary psychology, our words shape our story and this story becomes the framework for our behaviours; and our behaviours determine the way we lead our life and the way we run our organizations.
On game day, the first words in McCaw’s book are always the same – ‘Start Again’ – a reminder that you have to prove yourself again, today.
The language we use embeds itself and becomes action, so it is critical to respect it, shape it and deploy it strategically.
Inspiring leaders use bold, even unrealistic goals to lift their game and the power of storytelling to ‘sing their world into existence’. They tell great, vivid, epic stories of what is possible to themselves and their teams – and soon the world repeats the story back to them.
Training on Thursday is all about intensity. The players don’t stop for mistakes as they once did. They reason, quite rightly, that opposition teams don’t stop for All Blacks’ errors – they try to take advantage of them – so they should train that way.
He explains: ‘By throwing all sorts of problem-solving situations at them and randomizing situations, we found we were getting better long-term learning. If you are not over-extending yourself you’re not going to get much learning . . . there’s no point in ducking the challenges.’
Intensity of preparation – ‘training to win’ – conditions the brain and body to perform under pressure. It lets peak performance become automatic. It develops the mindset to win.
We have clarity. Accuracy. Intensity. Train to win.
‘The work we do is all about the control of attention,’ says Brosnahan. In pressure situations, he says, it is very easy for our consciousness to ‘divert from a resourceful state to an unresourceful one’, from a position of mental calm, clarity and inner strength into what he calls ‘Defensive Thinking’.
We’ve all felt it – the sensation as our shutters come down, our horizons narrow and we find ourselves in an ever-tightening corridor from which we feel there is no escape. In this state we’re thinking about survival, says Brosnahan. ‘A negative content loop’ forms and our perceptions create feelings of being overwhelmed, tightening and tension. This in turn leads to unhelpful behaviours – overt aggression, shutting down and panic. We let the situation get to us. We make poor decisions. And we choke. In Gazing parlance, we are H.O.T. ° Heated ° Overwhelmed ° Tense
The opposite they call ‘Blue Head.’ This is the ability to maintain clarity, situational awareness, accurate analysis and good decision-making under pressure. It’s a resourceful state in which we are able to trust ourselves to deliver, to be flexible, adaptable and on top of our game. We can see the big picture as well as the important details and our attention is where it should be. To have a Blue Head means to remain on task, rather than diverted, and Gazing’s parlance allows us to ACT: A. Alternatives: to look at our options, adapt, adjust and overcome C. Consequences: to understand the
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The idea, however, is not to do too much too soon. A surfeit of pressure applied prematurely will leave us floundering, disoriented and modelling the very emotions we’re training to avoid.
So, we focus on the technique, increase the intensity, and then add pressure. Before we finish, we reduce the intensity and focus once again on the technique, as if we’re cooling down at the gym. Repeat. And keep repeating until it’s automatic.
If we can control our attention – avoid the Red and stay in the Blue – we can focus on controlling the things we can control, without worrying about the things we can’t. We can stay in the moment. We can lead with clarity.
Research has shown that both our body and our brains respond positively to a diet of accelerated, intense learning, which leads to dramatic improvements and competitive advantage.
Just as core body exercises are vital for physical conditioning, so core psychological training is essential to develop mental toughness and resilience.
‘Under pressure, your attention is either diverted or on track. If you’re diverted, you have a negative emotional response and unhelpful behaviour. That means you’re stuck. That means you’re overwhelmed.’ On the other hand, if your attention is on track you have situational awareness and you execute accurately. You are clear, you adapt and you overcome.
Bad decisions are not made through a lack of skill or innate judgement: they are made because of an inability to handle pressure at the pivotal moment.
‘Instead of just doing it, using the subconscious part of the brain, which is a very efficient deliverer of a complex task, [people who choke] exert conscious control, and it disrupts the smooth working of the subconscious.
RED HEAD Tight, inhibited, results-oriented, anxious, aggressive, over-compensating, desperate. BLUE HEAD Loose, expressive, in the moment, calm, clear, accurate, on task.
Red is what Suvorov called ‘the Dark’. It is that fixated negative content loop of self-judgement, rigidity, aggression, shut down and panic. Blue is what he called ‘the Light’ – a deep calmness in which you are on task, in the zone, on your game, in control and in flow.
It works like this: where we direct our mind is where our thoughts will take us; our thoughts create an emotion; the emotion defines our behaviour; our behaviour defines our performance. So, simply, if we can control our attention, and therefore our thoughts, we can manage our emotions and enhance our performance.
In recognizing his triggers – bad pictures – and controlling his attention – keeping the bad pictures at bay – he is able to stay in the present, remain clear, accurate and on task.
Like meditation, it begins with the breath: ‘Breathing slowly and deliberately . . . shift your attention to something external – the ground or your feet, or the ball at hand, or even alternating big toes, or the grandstand . . . use deep breaths and key words to get out of your own head, find an external focus, get yourself “back in the present”, regain your situational awareness.’
