Legacy

by James Kerr

Richie McCaw tells Greg McGee that he has always kept a notebook. It’s a working document, a library of affirmations, mantras, notes-to-self, reminders, exhortations, expectations, anchors and priming words.

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.

We learn best – and change – from hearing stories that strike a chord with us . . . Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies or for themselves.

‘Judge yourself against the world’s best,’ Sean Fitzpatrick tells his audience. ‘Without question.’

Embrace Expectations By embracing a fear of failure, we can lift our performance, using a healthy loss aversion to motivate us. Equally, it pays to hoist our sights if we aspire to be world class: to create for ourselves a narrative of extreme, even unrealistic ambition. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true, or reasonable, or possible; it only matters that we do it. In this way, we set our internal and team benchmarks to the ultimate. 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.

Embrace Expectations Aim for the highest cloud. —— Kia whakangawari au i a hau. Let us prepare ourselves for the fray.

And the best kind of practice involves intensity – getting out of your comfort zone, extending yourself.

In business, training is often seen as a soft option and is limited to the occasional away-day. However, effective training is intense, regular and repetitious. For world-class results, it should be central to the culture.

We have clarity. Accuracy. Intensity. Train to win.

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 risk/reward ratio of each alternative and to make an accurate assessment of what is needed T. Task Behaviours: To stay on task and execute the tactics and strategy

The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening. KEEP A BLUE HEAD Control your attention

‘Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘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.

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 applies to the military; it applies to sport; it applies to business. In the heat of battle, the difference between the inhibitions of the Red and the freedom of Blue is the manner in which we control our attention.

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.

anyone in our arena who looks at performance and looks at improvement . . . it’s all about a state shift . . . and ensuring that you can get your head into a good place.’

The best leaders remain true to their deepest values. They lead their own life and others follow.

The key to strong peer-to-peer interaction is a high level of trust. This is trust in the sense of safe vulnerability. The leaders need to create an environment where individuals get to know each other as people and gather insight into their personal story and working style. This needs to be supported by the leader’s role-modelling behaviour around admission of mistakes and weaknesses and fears . . . This is essential for safe conflict and safe confrontation, where the most important interaction often occurs.

High-performing teams promote a culture of honesty, authenticity and safe conflict.

Know Thyself In recognizing our deepest values, we can understand what kind of leader we are and what kind of life we wish to lead. Authenticity – the mark of a true leader – begins with honesty and integrity. Honesty allows us access to our truest vision of ourselves and, when setbacks occur, gives us strong foundations. Integrity gets the job done. If our values, thoughts, words and actions are aligned, then our word is our world. With accuracy of action, less slippage occurs between thought and deed. In knowing ourselves, we live our vision. By being our word, we make it happen.

Find something you would die for and give your life to it

Stephen Covey encouraged us to begin at the end, imagining ourselves at our own funeral. Who would be there? What would they say about us once we’re gone? What would our life mean to them?

If we’re going to lead a life, if we’re going to lead anything, we should surely know where we are going, and why. Champions do extra. They find something that they are prepared to die for. Then they give their life to it.

As leaders, what kind of life will we lead? It begins by doing extra; the extra set at the gym, the extra burst of hard work, the extra sprint, the extra effort.

What is the extra that will make us extraordinary?

Champions Do Extra Find something you would die for and give your life to it. —— Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa. Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark.

No one is bigger than the team. ° Leave the jersey in a better place. ° Live for the jersey. Die for the jersey. ° It’s not enough to be a good. It’s about being great.

Leaders are storytellers. All great organizations are born from a compelling story. This central organizing thought helps people understand what they stand for and why. True or not, stories are the way we understand life and our place in it. We are ‘meaning making machines’, interpreting and reinterpreting a sequence of events into a narrative form and reassembling at will.

Honour Integrity, Responsibility, Accountability. —— Courage Do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason. —— Commitment Devotion to the Corps and my fellow Marines.

First we shape our values; then our values shape us. Words start revolutions.

The key criteria for creating a change story is fourfold. ° The story must be credible and relevant – in Aristotelian poetics, it must have ethos (an authority and understanding of the subject) and logos (it must make rational sense). ° It must be Visual and Visceral – appealing to the auditory, visual and kinaesthetic receivers in our brains. It must seize our hearts as well as impress our heads. In terms of Aristotelian poetics, it must have pathos (it must be felt). ° It must be flexible and scaleable – as easily told around a campfire as across the boardroom table. This implies the use of simple, everyday language and ideas. ° And it must be useful – able to turn vision into action; purpose into practice – acting as a transferor of meaning between one domain and another, between ‘your’ world and ‘mine’, between the ‘leader’ and the ‘led’. Whether visual or verbal, motto, mantra or metaphor, language creates revolutions.

‘Building trust, developing people and driving high-performance behaviours are never-ending tasks,’

Inspiring leaders establish rituals to connect their team to its core narrative, using them to reflect, remind, reinforce and reignite their collective identity and purpose.