Legacy

by James Kerr

Personal meaning is the way we connect to a wider team purpose. If our values and beliefs are aligned with the values and beliefs of the organization, then we will work harder towards its success. If not, our individual motivation and purpose will suffer, and so will the organization. Good leaders understand this and work hard to create a sense of connection, collaboration and communion. ‘Purpose relates to an overarching goal beyond the practical missions that are pursued day in day out,’ writes Eastwood. ‘This drives the individual’s intrinsic motivation, and gives a reason to belong, and a reason to sacrifice.’ The subject of ‘identity’ is so big in organizational culture,

‘Humans, by their nature, seek purpose – a cause greater and more enduring than themselves.’

‘What man actually needs,’ argues Frankl, ‘is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.’

‘Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.’

‘People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.’

If you want higher performance, begin with a higher purpose. Begin with asking, ‘Why?’

‘people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it’. He argues that, because of the limbic – a nerve centre buried deep within the pre-linguistic core of our brain – the way we feel about something is more important than what we think about it.

‘What I’m interested in is what gets people up every single day to do something, maybe pay a premium, maybe suffer inconvenience, maybe sacrifice because they’re driven by something else. What is that thing? What I’ve learned is it’s that question, why. It has a biological imperative, it drives us, it inspires us.’

Inspired leaders, organizations and teams find their deepest purpose – their ‘why?’ – and attract followers through shared values, vision and beliefs. As Nietzsche said: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’ It’s at the core of the vision and value-based mindset.

They play for something greater than themselves.

‘Team-First’ is at the centre, surrounded by the Crusader’s other fundamental values: ‘Loyalty’, ‘Integrity’, ‘Respect’, ‘Work-Ethic’ and ‘Enjoyment’. Across the central plinth is one word, ‘Excellence’, the ultimate aim. Connecting the foundation with the apex is a series of columns, each of which has a title: ‘Nutrition’, ‘Physical’, ‘Technical’, ‘Practical’, ‘Teamness’ and ‘Mental’. It is these six pillars upon which excellence – and success – is built.

the Proteas found success through the self-discovery of a common purpose.

‘My army won because they knew what they were fighting for,’ said Oliver Cromwell, ‘and loved what they knew.’ For a warrior tribe from New Zealand, it was the beginning of the being of team.

Play with Purpose Our fundamental human drive comes from within – from intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations. Leaders who harness the power of purpose have the ability to galvanize a group, aligning its behaviours to the strategic pillars of the enterprise. Using vivid storytelling techniques, including themes, symbols, imagery, rituals, mantras and metaphor, and bringing them to life with imagination and flair, leaders create a sense of inclusion, connectedness and unity – a truly collective, collaborative mindset. It begins by asking ‘Why? Why are we doing this? Why am I sacrificing myself for this project? What is the higher purpose?’ The answers to these questions have the ability to transform the fortunes of a group or enterprise – activating individuals, providing a cultural glue, guiding behaviours and creating an overall sense of purpose and personal connection. It is the beginning of the being of team.

PASS THE BALL Leaders create leaders

Leaders create leaders by passing on responsibility, creating ownership, accountability and trust.

This can clearly be translated into business, where the leader sets objectives and parameters, then ‘passes the ball’ to the team, handing over responsibility for implementation and detail. Leading by creating leaders.

Shared responsibility means shared ownership. A sense of inclusion means individuals are more willing to give themselves to a common cause. ‘We had to grow more collaborative, so that together we grow,’ says Gilbert Enoka, ‘together we advance.’ ‘We changed totally from unilateral decision making to dual management and the players had a big part of setting the standards, the life standards, the behaviours that are acceptable,’ Wayne Smith says.

‘Leaders don’t create followers,’ Tom Peters famously wrote, ‘they create more leaders.’

Language is pivotal to winning, language sets the mental and the physical frame for victory . . . A team of ‘followers’ is immediately on the back foot. A team of leaders steps up and finds a way to win.

The competitive advantage is nullified when you try to run decisions up and down the chain of command. All platoons and tank crews have real-time information on what is going on around them, the location of the enemy, and the nature and targeting of the enemy’s weapons system. Once the commander’s intent is understood, decisions must be devolved to the lowest possible level to allow these front line soldiers to exploit the opportunities that develop.

I’m very keen on it being a learning environment. The result of this is that people get better, they’re always improving . . . how can we make this better, how can we improve this?’

In Drive, Daniel Pink lists the three factors that he believes creates motivation in a human being: mastery, autonomy and purpose.

student of success; his motivational company, Front Row Leadership, is constantly busy. His message: ‘Be the best that you can possibly be.’ Success, he says, is ‘modest improvement, consistently done’. For him, it is about an unrelenting focus on the big goals – winning and leaving a legacy – but also constant attention to the details of practice and preparation.

‘Business people should practice too. They should go home at night and analyse their day’s performance. They don’t and they need to. To be good at something takes practice, and lots of it.’

Excellence is a process of evolution, of cumulative learning, of incremental improvement. ‘Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence,’ wrote Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos, ‘only in constant improvement and constant change.’ He argues that success is the result of a long-term commitment to improving excellence – the small steps leading to a mighty leap.

‘We’re always challenging the status quo,’ says Graham Henry. ‘Always challenging the way we do things, both as an individual and as a team – how can we do things better?’ In fact, one of the pillars of the All Blacks environment is that it is devoted to learning; the management are students of the game, constantly looking for the edge.

The All Blacks have an advantage over most business teams. They play most weeks. The feedback is immediate – on the scoreboard and

Perhaps as a consequence, few businesses structure their working week as carefully or as effectively as the All Blacks. If they did, a Monday morning review over coffee and croissants might become a discussion about a more detailed, personal pathway: ‘a map of self improvement

a living document,’ as Henry calls it. Few companies really interrogate the connection between strategy and structure, between an overall vision and the actions that take place over a working week; but with the transparency, metrics and human connectivity that are now available through technology, there are many more opportunities to do this.

There are, he says, tremendous ‘synergies between the values, the vision and values based culture’, and also in the approach to individualized development. In both situations, ‘if you don’t get the kills, mate, you’re out .

Where is the soul of this company? What is Harcourt’s all about? . . . what are the values that drive your behaviour? . . . we came up with People First – they’re always important . . . So doing the right thing became important, being courageous at a micro level, and encouragement at a micro level, us going into new areas, and fun and laughter. And those values . . . underlie everything and are the soul of the company. And it’s all about learning. ‘Just because it’s common sense,’ he says of the process, ‘doesn’t mean it’s common practice.’

A map of daily self-improvement acts as a powerful tool to develop teams and organizations; this ‘living document’ provides fresh goals and develops new skills so people push themselves harder, become more capable and achieve more for the team.

The All Blacks display an institutionalized system of continuous improvement, one that works on the super-structural level (the season and the four-year World Cup cycle), the team level (selection, the tapering of performance, tactical preparation, etc), and the individual level (‘Things I Do Today’). And like the original meaning of kaizan, it begins with self-empowerment; developing the individual’s ability to stand up and take the lead when called upon. But it goes one step further. It becomes about the sporting buzz-phrase du jour – ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ or ‘the drive to perfect every controllable detail in search of optimal performance’.

‘We need people who will work hard and work hard for their brother,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘We know that is a pretty good formula – because that way you get contribution.’

The definition of a great team, says Kevin Roberts, the global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, is one that is ‘in flow more frequently than the opposition’. For collective flow to occur, he believes, organizations must be of ‘one mind’.

‘This is the struggle that every leader faces,’ Jackson says. ‘How to get members of the team who are driven by the quest for individual glory to give themselves over wholeheartedly to the group effort.’ Jackson would quote Rudyard Kipling: For the Strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. ‘On a good team there are no superstars,’

‘It’s about thinking about the team’s interest before yourself . . . if it’s not good for the team, don’t say it and don’t do it.’

Owen Eastwood says that if the first steps in developing a high performance culture are to: 1. select on character, 2. understand your strategy for change, 3. co-write a purpose, 4. devolve leadership and 5. encourage a learning environment.

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. In fact, all the coaches mentioned so far – Bill Walsh, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Phil Jackson and Clive Woodward – began their tenure by implementing a set of high, non-negotiable standards. These standards are how they identified the expectations and set the ethos, the culture, of the team.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins argues for the primacy of the ‘who’ before the ‘what’; the ‘we’ before the ‘me’. He quotes Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: ‘You’re either on the bus or off the bus.’ His research shows that ‘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’.

He implies you don’t have to be ruthless, just rigorous. As the saying goes, if you insist on only the best, you very often get it. In the All Blacks they are both rigorous and ruthless; they insist on the best and they always seem to get it.

‘People get scared by the phrase fear of failure,’ he says, ‘because they think it inhibits their performance. But, if you’re actually honest with yourself, if you actually use that as a motivating factor – to prepare well and not the night before – you know, the [business] pitches that fail are the ones where the people are up at 3 o’clock in the morning preparing

We don’t play to win, it seems, we play not to lose.

‘The history of All Blacks rugby has been so successful that the expectation in New Zealand is that we win every Test,’ says Graham Henry, ‘and I think that is good for the team. If you didn’t have that expectation, I’m sure we wouldn’t reach the standards we do.’

a good All Black. Be a great All Black. Don’t just be satisfied to reach your targets. Go higher.’

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

Successful leaders have high internal benchmarks. They set their expectations high and try to exceed them.

Muhammad Ali began calling himself the greatest before he had any real right. ‘It’s the repetition of affirmation that leads to belief,’ he says, ‘and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.’

Daniel Kahneman reminds us that these affirmations don’t even need to be true: ‘A message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability . . . Whether the story is true, or believable, matters little, if at all.’ By setting even the most unrealistic self-expectation, ‘the aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger (even) than the desire to reach it.’ It seems that, even in Nobel Prize-winning economics, the clichés are true: ° If you can conceive, and believe, you can achieve. ° Visualize to actualize. ° Fake it till you make it.