The Winning Way 2.0Learnings from Sport for Managers

by Anita Bhogle

It is about reaching out to those who are not doing so well.

Communication skills are important for entrepreneurs as well and not something that they invest time in, says Ronnie Screwvala.

When he appeared on our show Masterstrokes on CNBC, Sourav Ganguly said that good leaders got their decisions right seven times out of ten. Rather modestly he gave himself a five but said that even if he was wrong the team trusted him and believed that he made mistakes while trying to do his best for the team. No wonder he was credited with changing the fortunes of the team as captain! It is a wonderful position for the leader to reach and highlights why generating trust is one of the fundamental tenets of leadership.

team.

egalitarian.

Mukul Deoras sums it up by saying, ‘Western leaders depend more on clarity of two-way communication and implicit delegation. Eastern leadership is perhaps a lot more feudal. They depend on clarity of instruction and alignment.’7

chiding

mystery.

challenges

unflappable

A captain’s own performance can be an irritant to the job unless that can be effectively separated from leadership. Some years ago when still captain of India, Sourav Ganguly said he had told Rahul Dravid, who he thought would be India’s next captain, about the importance of taking decisions as captain whether or not he is getting runs. ‘If you mix up the two roles you are in trouble,’ he said.

body

class is permanent, form is temporary. The

Rahul Dravid faced public outcry when, as captain in Pakistan, he declared the innings with Tendulkar not out on 194. However, that was a decision that needed to be taken if the team was to win.

It is not easy and it needs a tough captain to take tough decisions, to put the team ahead of an individual landmark. Eventually, the leader who puts the team first tends to be respected.

The first was in 1997 at Manchester, when the Australian captain Mark Taylor made a seemingly puzzling decision. The conditions were overcast, the pitch was green and it was a toss crying to be won so that the opposition could be asked to bat first. However, Taylor knew that on that surface, spinners would come into the game on day four and five, and so, to allow Shane Warne to bowl in the fourth innings and try and win Australia the Test, they needed to bat first.

Steve Waugh writes, ‘When Tubby (Taylor) returned and announced he had won the toss and elected to bat, disbelief swept the room. On the surface, his decision appeared foolhardy and a massive gamble but he had backed his gut.… A captain needs to see the bigger picture.’ It is an aspect young leaders need to be a...

In the 2002 Test series between India and England, India went to Leeds one down with two games to play. It was a blustery day, the pitch was a touch damp, rain was in the air, and it was again a win-toss-bowl-first pitch. But India’s captain Sourav Ganguly backed his side to combat the conditions and batted first. It was a vote of confidence in the team and they rallied to the call. Once the conditions were conquered, runs were made quite freely and India drew the ...

floundered.

forgo

vein,

Barry Richards said of Ian Chappell, ‘He never asked people to do something he wouldn’t do himself.

He didn’t believe in a night watchman and wanted a batsman to go out himself. But then he did th...

culling,

A. S. Ramchander, Executive Director at Castrol India at one time, told us, ‘Within an organisation, honesty in giving feedback is often avoided in order to be polite. The evaluator (the one giving feedback) will have credibility only if he is honest. Yet specifics are missed out and the once-a-year performance appraisal confuses the juniors.’11

However, Indian managers seem to have an inherent advantage in managing uncertainty as well as diversity. As Jerry Rao puts it, ‘Indians are used to cultural diversity from a young age. Since our infrastructure is so bad, when things go wrong, they know how to improvise. They develop the smarts that, say, people working in Singapore, where everything works like clockwork, don’t develop.

amply

lurks

The

It is good that Imran Khan did not suffer from insecurity, or else the cricketing world would have missed players like Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. Imran always put Pakistan first and was very secure himself, so he didn’t mind picking young players who, in a few years, would actually become better than him, for his skills would decline with age. He also believed in leading from the front and so, when his fast-bowling skills had significantly declined during the World Cup campaign of 1992, he moved up to number three in the batting order. The captain was making a statement there. Imran was also aware, as all good captains should, that if his younger players grew to become outstanding players, he would win more matches as captain because, as we said earlier, the wins and losses go against a captain’s name. And so he ensured that Waqar Younis was not allowed to become anything other than a genuine fast bowler and he held Wasim Akram’s hand till Akram became the champion cricketer that he is now recognised as.

Akram could bowl every ball in the game but hadn’t yet learnt the art of thinking a batsman out, didn’t therefore know which ball to bowl when and to whom. Imran, as captain, was now well past his best as a bowler but still knew what to bowl to get a batsman out. And so, ball by ball, Imran would guide Akram and as he himself said, a day came when he was at mid-off and the game seemed to have stopped. He looked at his bowler, who was at the top of his run-up and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘Skipper, you haven’t told me which ball to bowl’ was apparently Akram’s response. Imran could do this because he was a secure leader.

He had the experience, but no longer the expertise needed. Akram had all the skill but didn’t yet possess the experience. The combination though, using the best both had to offer, was brilliant. And this combination of experience and expertise has great possibilities in industry where technology makes senior managers less informed compared to the youngsters e...

inval...

employ.

But as Holding said, ‘Lloydy took the trouble to understand that we were all different and because he respected us, we respected him.’

In a world where leadership is associated with the size of the team you manage or the territory you oversee, these people feel left out if they are not made people managers. Making them leaders could be a double whammy—you lose a great contributor and get a poor leader instead! ‘You have to give them a great career path and power them, open up the door and let them do what they love doing. Recognize their brilliance but make sure they understand their own weaknesses,’ suggests Pramod Bhasin.13

‘If you can’t do it, I will.’14

Shelf-Life

paramount.

Post the match-fixing issue at the turn of the century, Indian cricket needed a flamboyant, inspirational leader, not just to carry the team along but to convince the fans that they were out there doing their best. Sourav Ganguly was the right man and he was wonderful in transforming India from a defensive, uncertain side, especially overseas, into one that could win anywhere. By doing this, he brought the people back into the game and supporting the national side. In fact, you could say cricket in India recovered almost too quickly from that match-fixing affair!

stature

This sense of timing is critical in industry as well, as we have seen in the next generation of the Bajaj family and in the trend-setting Ambanis. Dhirubhai was the pioneer, starting small, recognising opportunity and building the company. As India changed and began taking its place in the world, Reliance found that Mukesh Ambani, with his global outlook and ambition was the man for the occasion. Maybe it is purely an academic issue whether both father and son would have done equally well if the roles and timing, were reversed but Reliance certainly benefited enormously from having the right people leading it at the right time.

resurgence

grievously

gritty

flair

eluding

With Border and Taylor, and Ganguly and Dravid, it was the right man in charge at the right time. Had the order been reversed, Taylor in the mid-eighties and Border thereafter, Australia may not have been as well served.

prudent

fuelled