Legacy

by James Kerr

This is our time.

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

The etiquette is like a whare, a Māori meeting-house, where everyone is given the opportunity to speak, to say their truth, to tell their story.

Plenty of work to do in the lineout. Got to get that right. Other teams won’t go so easy on us. Let’s not get carried away. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Some big games coming.

The challenge is to always improve, to always get

better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best.

‘It’s not expecting somebody else to do your job for you. It teaches you not to expect things to be handed to you.’

From self-knowledge, Lombardi believed, we develop character and integrity. And from character and integrity comes leadership.

who also considered himself a teacher first, a leader second.

‘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.’

Performance = Capability + Behaviour

‘Leaders design and create an environment,’ says Eastwood, ‘which drives the high performance behaviours needed for success. The really clever teams build a culture that drives the behaviours they need.’ ‘I think all of those environments,’ says Graham Henry, ‘whether it’s a business environment or sporting

environment, are about developing people. So, if you develop your people, your business is going to be more successful. It’s just a matter of creating an environment where that becomes a happening every day.’

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

The challenge is always to bring them to life, and into the lives of those you lead.

Your role is to leave the jersey in a better place.

The goal? To help them find self-knowledge, even if the truth turns out to be uncomfortable.

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. The questions the leaders asked of themselves, and of the team, was the beginning of a rugby revolution.

After all, the better the questions we ask, the better the answers we get.

To ‘get above yourself’ is deeply frowned upon in this culture, and more broadly in New Zealand society.

So, as these sporting superstars clean up their locker room, looking after themselves so that no one else has to, we might ask ourselves if excellence – true excellence – begins with humility; with a humble willingness to ‘sweep the sheds’.

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.

‘kill rate’

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.

the creation of ‘an environment . . . that would stimulate the players and make them want to take part in it’.

‘dual-management’ model in which responsibility was ‘handed over’ to the players so that they had, in Henry’s phrase, ‘more skin in the game’.

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

Leaders create leaders.

Unless intervention occurs, all organizational cultures do.

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.

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.

What steps do you need to consider taking so you can prepare for the second curve, without prematurely leaving your current success (on the first curve) behind?

For leaders, it means dealing with decisions that involve incomplete knowledge, sketchy resources and the vicissitudes of human nature.

Observe This is data collection through the senses; visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, taste – as well as more modern metrics. Like an animal sniffing the wind, we gather the raw material for response.

Orient This is analysis, synthesizing all available data into a single, coherent ‘map of the territory’ – a working theory of our options.

Decide This is the point of choice; where we determine the best course of action. We cut away the ext...

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 ...

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

Go for the gap.

actions. It isn’t just reacting to what’s happening in the moment, it is being the agent of change.

Getting started is deceptively simple. First list around 10 things you need to achieve over the next 100 days.

It’s about adapting quickly to change by creating an adaptive culture.

Momentum swings faster than we think. One moment we’re on top of the world, the next falling off the other side.

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.

Better People Make Better All Blacks

Better People Make Better Leaders

‘The more you have to play for,’ Gilbert Enoka summarizes, ‘the better you play.’

‘We wanted to establish what a Crusader man would look like, what would drive him,’ says Smith. ‘It took a couple of weeks really to make sure that everyone bought into what we came up with, what the players came up with.’

Leaders connect personal meaning to a higher purpose to create belief and a sense of direction.

Personal meaning is the way we connect to a wider team purpose.