Legacy

by James Kerr

Seek the treasure you value most dearly; if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain.

Shared responsibility means shared ownership. A sense of inclusion means individuals are more willing to give themselves to a common cause.

unilateral

Unilateralism- decisions that only effect or are agreeable to one side of the decision v multilateralism

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.

‘Instill in your team members a sense of great self-worth – that each, at any given time, can be the most important on the battlefield.’

‘the traditional way no longer works’, he is referring to the old-school, centralized command structure that seeks to micromanage, from above, every detail of a project.

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.

The mission command model requires the leader to provide: 1. A clearly defined goal 2. The resources 3. The time-frame The rest is up to the individuals in the field.

Tested and refined in the field, mission command has been proven to: ° Develop autonomous, critical thinkers able to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, and adjust their actions on the run. ° Facilitate an adaptive environment, enabling good decision making under pressure. ° Create flexible leadership groups – developing individuals who can step in with clarity, certainty and autonomy. ° Create a sense of ‘ownership’ within the team; building trust and a common understanding. ° Create a decision framework; marking out roles, responsibilities and response so decision-making is intuitive, instantaneous and delivers on intention.

° Made an active decision to change and formed a powerful sense of purpose for the team. ° Devolved leadership to senior players by forming a Leadership Group, entrusting its members with key decisions and authority to enforce standards and behaviours. ° Developed individual operating units, in which each player had a specific portfolio of responsibility and leadership. ° Structured their weeks so that responsibility for decision making gradually evolved from management towards players; by Saturday the team was entirely in the hands of the players. ° Created a ‘Train to Win’ system – preparing the team under pressure using randomized problem-solving techniques, active questioning and high-intensity training to prepare them for the heat of competition. ° Focused on an understanding of how the brain reacts to stress to provide the tools to help players stay present, connected, clear and accurate in order to make better decisions under pressure. ° Created a ‘learning environment’ dedicated to developing the individual in a tailored, self-managed programme of self-improvement. ° Developed techniques, rituals and language that connected players to the core; using storytelling in all its forms to create a sense of purpose and intention. Pass the ball.

Level 5 Leadership, a ‘paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will’.

‘channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. Their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.’ Pass the ball.

By creating a devolved management structure, leaders create ownership, autonomy and initiative. Arming their people with intent, they visualize the end-state, outline the plan, provide the right resources and trust their people to deliver. The result is a team of individuals prepared and able to stand up when it counts – leaders in the field.

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

Purpose is the connection to the core identity of the team,

Autonomy is the direct result of the dual leadership/mission command model discussed in Chapter IV; it comes from team members having control over their own destiny, the choice of how they respond to a given task

Excellence is a process of evolution, of cumulative learning, of incremental improvement.

Enlightened leadership promotes a structured system for the development of the team, combined with a tailored map for the development of the individual.

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.

‘from driveway to driveway’. That is, from the moment the English players left home to play for their country to the moment they returned, everything would be considered, analysed and aligned with the team’s values, purpose and strategy.

Sometimes the small things can take a big effort. And cost a lot of money.

You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small . . . On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch . . . Cause we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING.

Marginal gains: 100 things done 1 per cent better to deliver cumulative competitive advantage.

‘You are a product of your environment,’ says author W. Clement Stone, ‘so choose the environment that will best develop you towards your objective.

Are the things around you helping you towards success – or are they holding you back?’ After all, ‘It’s not the mountains ahead that wear you out,’ said Muhammad Ali, ‘it’s the pebble in your shoe.’

‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,’ Apple founder Steve Jobs told the writer Walter Isaacson, ‘but that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You’ve got to pick carefully.’

When the environment is dedicated to learning, the score, as Bill Walsh says, takes care of itself.

Successful leaders look beyond their own field to discover new approaches, learn best practices and push the margins. Then they pass on what they have learned.

no excuses and no exceptions. “The only thing I want you to be is the best that you can possibly be.”’

‘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.

‘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.’

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. The sixth and arguably most important step is to begin to turn the standards into action.

‘For everyone to go in the same direction,’ says Andrew Mehrtens, ‘you’ve got to have strong links in the team. If there are weak links then you will have guys going off in different directions and that’s no good for anyone.’

It’s better to have a thousand enemies outside the tent than one inside the tent.

No Dickheads. No one is bigger than the team and individual brilliance does not automatically lead to outstanding results. One selfish mindset will infect a collective culture.

This is the essence of team – working hard for each other, in harmony, without dissent, submerging individual ego for a greater cause.

Success can be traced back to the connections between members of the team and their collective character,

‘We have a saying,’ says Fitzpatrick, ‘don’t be a good All Black. Be a great All Black. Don’t just be satisfied to reach your targets. Go higher.’ ‘We hate coming second place to ourselves,’

‘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.’

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.

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.

The language we use embeds itself and becomes action, so it is critical to respect it, shape it and deploy it strategically.

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.

‘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.

‘If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere.’

Training with intensity accelerates personal growth.

‘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 They call this ‘Red Head’.