by Kerr, James
But then a series of disasters hit the All Blacks.
Dan Carter, the fly-half – arguably the most talented player in the world; unarguably the highest point scorer in history – was considered essential for an All Blacks victory. During a final kicking practice, he felt a pop and then the pain. Carter had torn a tendon and his Rugby World Cup was over. A nation wept.
Second to go was his understudy, Colin Slade. In the quarter final against Argentina, he aggravated a groin injury, and was out. A nation mourned.
Meanwhile, with only one specialist fly-half left in the squad, Graham Henry tracked down Donald’s mobile phone number and, when Donald eventually called him back, the coach asked what he was doing – whitebaiting. ‘We’d had a good day, hauling in around 11 kilos, but it got a lot better,’ Donald later told a crowded RWC press conference. Henry told him that if he brought his haul to the Heritage Hotel in Auckland, he’d be in the All Blacks squad.
In the forty-third minute of the final against France, the third-choice playmaker, Aaron Cruden, fell to the ground, his knee hyper-extended. Yesterday’s man, Stephen Donald, ran on to the pitch, his borrowed black jersey a size or two small. A nation stopped breathing.
In the tightest and most gruelling of finals, the French gave away a penalty. Without needing to be being asked, and with destiny hanging on the moment, Donald stepped up, nodded at the goalposts, and landed the kick.
They proved to be the winning points.
New Zealand’s fourth choice fly-half, having not played a game of rugby for six weeks, stood up when it counted and became a leader on the day.
Pass the ball.
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When Henry explains that ‘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 problem in a VUCA world is that its effectiveness is limited. In his book, Delivering Results, human resources guru David Ulrich quotes General Gordon R. Sullivan, former Chief of Staff to the US Army.
—— 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.
In this VUCA world we all live in – whether military, business or sport – teams need to be able to respond more quickly, revise tactics and make decisions in the field.
In his white paper ‘America’s Military – A Profession of Arms’, General Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, lays out the framework for the future of military command – one designed to deal with asymmetric, real-time battle situations. It is called ‘mission command’, which replaces the old top-down hierarchy of ‘command & control’ in which soldiers on the ground were just pawns:
—— The increasing complexity and uncertainty anticipated in the future environment demand that Joint Force 2020 employ mission command to unleash its full potential in a way that harnesses the initiative and innovation of all members of the team. Leaders must empower individual initiative by providing clear, concise, and complete mission orders in a climate of mutual trust and understanding.
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. A clear understanding of the leader’s intention, and the right training are key to the implementation of mission command.
Former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson said, ‘Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.’ Mission command is a response to a VUCA world in which everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
By arming staff with intention, leaders can enable their people to respond appropriately to changing context, without losing sight of the tactical imperative.
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.
Henry, Smith, Hansen and Enoka – alongside the rest of the All Blacks’ leadership – ‘operationalized’ this in key ways. They:
° 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.
˜
In 2004, there was a ‘direct assault on the leadership’ says Anton Oliver. ‘They had to completely deconstruct what they were looking at. It showed a lot of courage from Graham Henry, because he’s a control freak, right? But the success of the team is all on the back of the questions that he asked himself.’
Henry displays what Jim Collins, in Good to Great, calls Level 5 Leadership, a ‘paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will’. It didn’t come naturally to Henry – an instinctive autocrat. But his maturation enabled him to create a collaborative culture in which individual talents could rise and flourish, and in which Stephen Donald could step up under pressure, make good decisions and execute with accuracy.
Leaders create leaders. They arm their subordinates with intent. And then step out of the way.
In Good to Great, Collins identifies a fact that should be remembered by non-executive board members everywhere:
—— all good-to-great companies had Level 5 Leadership at the time of transition
Level 5 leaders, Collins argues, ‘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.
Pass the Ball
Enlightened leaders deliberately hand over responsibility in order to create engaged team-players able to adapt their approach to suit the conditions. ‘Command & Control’ in a VUCA world is unwieldy and increasingly uncompetitive. 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 ab
le to stand up when it counts – leaders in the field.
Pass the Ball
Leaders create leaders.
—— Ki ngā whakaeke haumi.
Join those who can join the sections of a canoe. (Look for a leader who can bring people together.)
V
LEARN
—— Kohia te kai rangatira, ruia te taitea.
Gather the good food, cast away the rubbish.
CREATE A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Leaders are teachers
‘I’m from an educational background’, says Graham Henry. ‘So 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.
Purpose is the connection to the core identity of the team, as discussed in Chapter II; it creates a shared emotional connection between a group of people and is a stronger motivator than money, status or a new company car.
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 and a sense of self-determination.
Mastery is the subject of this chapter.
The key questions are ‘How do leaders create an environment that delivers the opportunity for personal growth and professional development?’ ‘How do they enable mastery?’ And, ‘How do they make it happen every day?’
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Sean Fitzpatrick is undisputedly a great All Black, perhaps the greatest. He was capped ninety-two times, played in the 1987 Rugby World Cup winning side, and captained the side from 1992 to 1997, leading them most famously to a series win against South Africa in South Africa.
He is also a 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. ‘The best sports people in the world practice more than they play,’ he tells New Zealand Management Magazine. ‘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.
Leaders are teachers, and Henry is a teacher by trade. His educational background helped shape the All Blacks environment.
Alfred Chandler, the Pulitzer Prize business historian, once wrote that ‘structure follows strategy’. That is, new organizational forms are the result of strategic imperatives. It follows that you can have all the will in the world but without the right structure in place, your strategy won’t be successful. Moreover, the wrong structure will deliver, de facto, the wrong strategy.
In order to deliver the strategy encapsulated by ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’, Henry & Co. began to redesign the structure of the working week:
Sunday
Morning: injury clinic Late morning: recovery session Evening: Leadership Group planning session
Monday
Mental session and light training
Tuesday
Gym session: heavy weights Technical and set-piece session
Wednesday
Day off: unwind and refresh
Thursday
Morning: technical alignment Afternoon: intense ‘train to win’ sessions
Friday
Captain’s run (player-led session)
Saturday
Afternoon: ‘walkthrough’ – closed technical session Evening: play
Within this overall structure, a worksheet was put in place for every individual player. This is where thought became reality and vision became action.
‘Each player,’ Henry says, ‘had their player profile, or independent personal profile, made up of seven or eight major pillars, and that translated into a daily map of self-improvement. And that daily map of self-improvement was “Things I Do Today”.’
Enlightened leadership promotes a structured system for the development of the team, combined with a tailored map for the development of the individual.
The structure for the week – and the structuring of each player’s activities and focus during that week – delivered the strategy.
And the strategy helped deliver a little gold cup.
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The All Blacks have an advantage over most business teams. They play most weeks. The feedback is immediate – on the scoreboard and the next day in newspaper headlines. Analytics can break down the exact effectiveness of each individual in delivering the strategy. There is video replay. In business, leaders rarely have such defined parameters or immediate measurement.
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.
Gilbert Enoka has another life apart from his work as the All Blacks mental skills coach. In the off-season, he works for a large, multinational real estate firm, developing their team culture and mindset. The techniques he uses transfer from the All Blacks to the company, and vice versa.
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 . . .’
Many of the questions he asks at the company are the same as those asked in the All Blacks set-up:
—— 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.’
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Done right, the structuring of a learning system applies across multiple organizational levels. In the All Blacks set-up, it is blocked out around the season and also each test series – a ‘chapter’ in the overall story. The system is engineered towards optimum performance at the right time on both a team and individual basis: knowing when to introduce new players, when to rest others; the introduction and repetition of skills; and bringing the team to its physical and psychological peak at just the right time.
All this is part of rugby’s inbuilt four-year cycle.
‘The World Cup was a vision for years,’ Henry says, ‘and it came a bit clearer two years out.’ Various competitions, Henry says, ‘were the stepping-stones to winning and having improvement . . . There’s a structure there of team improvement, just like there’s a structure there of individual improvement, which is ongoing.’
And then there is ‘a set of programmes you use to try and do the business on the paddock,’ says Graham Henry. ‘Although there’s a set routine, a set ritual of preparation . . . little things come in to add a bit of icing to that – a little bit of edge to that.’ This ‘edge’ includes the psychological incentive to beat this team on this particular day, because the opposition is Australia or England, or because a player is winning his fiftieth cap.
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 edge is better,’ Henry says, smiling.
Leaders are teachers.
˜
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’.
