by Kerr, James
The senior members of the team would enforce the standards, because they were their standards. In the old days, this was also seen in the Sunday Court Sessions, where senior players would hand down fines, mostly liquid, usually instant. But the world had moved on and, as the All Blacks management began to actively encourage peer-to-peer enforcement, the standards quickly went from the back of the bus to the front of the mind.
In its simplest form, this involved the mentoring of younger players by the senior figures. It involved the Leadership Group in collective decision making in areas such as: community appearances, advertising approvals and which charity the team would support. It also involved the Leadership Group being left (and trusted) to sort out internal problems within the team.
This came into play most vividly during the Rugby World Cup when two players, Cory Jane and Israel Dagg, decided to have a big night in a Takapuna Bar. The next day, as radio commentators screamed for their scalps, the hungover and sheepish pair were brought before the seven most senior players and asked to explain themselves. For young men, at the prime of their lives, in the tournament of their dreams, this must have been both mortifying and humbling. Later, they made a public apology to the rest of the team and the case was closed.
As Bob Howitt writes:
—— This is a classic example of the dual management structure operating within the team: a lecture from a grumpy manager wouldn’t have had half the same impact of the two players as facing their peers had. Young men hate letting their peers and team mates down, on or off the field.
Both players would go on to play prominent roles in the semi-final win against Australia.
˜
‘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.’
Which is why Wayne Smith invented the ‘Rugby Club’.
The being of team begins from inside. High standards must come from within. Leadership works best when your team takes the lead.
‘The All Blacks,’ he explains, ‘are the most privileged club in the world . . . It’s a place you have to earn your way into and it’s hugely exclusive.
‘I really felt that the Rugby Club would give us an opportunity for players to talk about the past . . . be proud of where they come from, and who they are.’
Smith proposed to the Leadership Group the idea of a regularly scheduled social night in which players would don their club jerseys and ‘have a quiet drink’ together, replicating the climate and culture that originally propelled them into the sport. It was a huge success, a chance to laugh and have fun and release themselves from the pressure.
‘To be able to work together, communication is the biggest thing,’ says Smith. ‘And I think that comes from a team that has good links from off the field . . . a team able to spend time together and talk to one another and be honest with one another. It’s incredibly important.’
‘You talk about handling expectation and handling pressure,’ says Graham Henry. ‘You talk about leaders leading; players leading. You talk about the legacy and what that means . . . But I think the other thing that was really important was the connection between people – and the greater those connections, the more resilient and the stronger we were, the better we were.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
As well as the bonding aspect, the Rugby Club also serves to reconnect the players with their story, their roots, their whānau. The old club rugby shirts remind them of where they’ve come from and the position they’ve reached, but also remind them to keep their feet on the ground.
It is a way of staying anchored, and to attach personal meaning to team purpose. And it is an excuse to have fun. ‘Whilst there is a lot of pressure on them to enhance the jersey and pass it on in a better state, if you enjoy the experience it actually makes it easier to achieve that goal,’ Smith says.
Fun, with a serious purpose.
To win.
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
˜
This kind of bonding process provides social capital – that is, the intangible benefit of closeness and cooperation, which is trust. It also provides a collective intelligence, more heads being better than one. But this sense of unity can be threatened by just one person.
An old Arab proverb says:
—— It’s better to have a thousand enemies outside the tent than one inside the tent.
There’s a similar Māori saying:
—— He iti wai kōwhao waka e tahuri te waka.
A little water seeping through a small hole may swamp a canoe.
The All Blacks, meanwhile, strictly maintain the maxim they borrowed from the Sydney Swans:
—— 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.
˜
‘No Dickheads’ is the antidote to the leak, the bad apple, the enemy inside the tent. It extends to selection – some of New Zealand’s favourite players have never made it to All Blacks status because they are considered to be ‘dickheads’; others make it but are never invited back. It’s a powerful and effective philosophy that helps maintain an exceptional environment.
One disaffected or selfish individual infects the group. Remove them and the group will cohere and heal.
No Dickheads.
Setting high standards – and putting the measures in place to maintain them through peer-to-peer enforcement – is a critical component in successful team culture. In fact, all the coaches mentioned so far – Bill Walsh, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Phil Jackson and Clive Woodward – began their tenure by implementing a set of high, non-negotiable standards. These standards are how they identified the expectations and set the ethos, the culture, of the team.
There is tremendous overlap in their philosophies and that of the All Blacks.
Vince Lombardi says, ‘as a leader you’re being watched 24 hours each day’.
The All Blacks say, ‘You’re an All Black, 24-7.’
Bill Walsh installed ‘an agenda of specific behavioural norms – actions and attitudes – that applied to every single person on our payroll’.
The All Blacks say, ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’.
Phil Jackson’s goal was ‘to find a structure that would empower everyone on the team, not just the stars, and allow the players to grow as individuals as they surrendered themselves to the team effort’.
The All Blacks had a dual-leadership model.
John Wooden said that a player who makes the team great is better than a great player.
The All Blacks say: ‘No one is bigger than the team.’
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins argues for the primacy of the ‘who’ before the ‘what’; the ‘we’ before the ‘me’. He quotes Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: ‘You’re either on the bus or off the bus.’ His research shows that ‘good to great leaders began by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it’.
He implies you don’t have to be ruthless, just rigorous. As the saying goes, if you insist on only the best, you very often get it. In the All Blacks they are both rigorous and ruthless; they insist on the best and they always seem to get it.
As current coach Steve Hansen says, ‘Put your hand in a glass of water. Now take it out. That’s how hard it is to replace you.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
No Dickheads
Whānau is your family, your mates, your team, your organization. For the whānau to move forward, everyone within it must move in the same direction. This is the essence of team – working hard for each other, in harmony, without dissent, submerging individual ego for a greater cause. This extends to selection – No Dickheads – and the
fostering of connections, trust and collaboration between all levels of the organization. In this way people work for each other, rather than for individual glory. In the All Blacks, high standards are fundamental and are enforced by the players themselves, who are trusted to do the task. Success can be traced back to the connections between members of the team and their collective character, something true of all winning organizations. Great leaders ruthlessly protect their people, encouraging connection, collaboration and collective ownership, nurturing a safe environment of trust, respect and family.
No Dickheads
Follow the spearhead.
—— Kia urupū tātou; kaua e taukumekume.
Let us be united, not pulling against one another.
VII
EXPECTATIONS
—— Ko taku reo taku ohooho, ko taku reo taku māpihi mauria.
My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul.
EMBRACE EXPECTATIONS
Aim for the highest cloud
Sean Fitzpatrick tells the story of being at the beginning of his career, jostling for a place in the Auckland team. The problem was he couldn’t hit his lineout throws, couldn’t make them stick.
Andy Haden, the Auckland and All Blacks lock, wasn’t impressed.
‘He told me to bugger off, basically,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘Luckily for me I dealt with it the right way and went away and learnt how to throw the ball in.
‘It was a hard lesson, though. I didn’t play for Auckland for another two years.’
˜
Another story.
It’s 1993, the All Blacks against the British Lions in Wellington. Despite a narrow win in the Test before, the All Blacks ran on clear favourites. And ran off humiliated.
The score: 20-7 to the Lions.
Suddenly, with the third and final Test approaching, the All Blacks were staring into the abyss – the possibility of two straight losses for the first time since 1949. The papers savaged the team.
According to Robin McConnell in his book, Inside The All Blacks, so did the coach, Laurie Mains. ‘I have never been so bloody humiliated as to see Poms dominating an All Blacks team . . . Do you accept losing a Test match? I don’t . . . We need guts, we need good Kiwi toughness and heart. Above all, you’re All Blacks. What are you going to do about it?’
In the locker room right after the game, Fitzpatrick told his players, ‘Make a mental note of the way you feel right now – and make sure you never feel that way again.’
It was a lesson in losing that had been handed down to him. ‘As All Blacks,’ he tells a London Business Forum conference, ‘you’re told in no uncertain terms to remember your losses more than your wins.’
It hurt Fitzpatrick worst of all – his penalty count had been higher than the rest of his team combined. Ex-All Blacks called on Fitzpatrick to resign.
Instead, he turned the pain into motivation.
The next Test, in Christchurch, they won: 27-3.
It would have been too painful to lose.
‘It is the fear of not doing it properly,’ says Fitzpatrick, ‘and what does that do? It makes you prepare properly. And all successful teams, whether it be in business or in sport, the ones who prepare properly are the ones that normally win.’
‘People get scared by the phrase fear of failure,’ he says, ‘because they think it inhibits their performance. But, if you’re actually honest with yourself, if you actually use that as a motivating factor – to prepare well and not the night before – you know, the [business] pitches that fail are the ones where the people are up at 3 o’clock in the morning preparing . . .’
‘A strong dislike of not being good enough is healthy,’ says Andrew Mehrtens. ‘I would do anything to win, except cheating, of course. I hated losing. Really hated losing.’
‘The key,’ Fitzpatrick tells his audience, ‘is to understand that there is a world of difference between fear of feedback or failure and harnessing that fear to positive effect.’
Embrace expectations.
˜
In Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes about the benefits of a fear of failure in what he calls ‘Loss Aversion’. Citing research by Devon Pope and Maurice Schweitzer at the University of Pennsylvania, he discusses the ‘relative strength of two motives’ in the statistics of professional golfers: ‘Whether the putt was easy or hard, at every distance from the hole, the players were more successful when putting for par than for a birdie.’ The difference in the rate of success was 3.6 per cent.
We don’t play to win, it seems, we play not to lose.
‘The history of All Blacks rugby has been so successful that the expectation in New Zealand is that we win every Test,’ says Graham Henry, ‘and I think that is good for the team. If you didn’t have that expectation, I’m sure we wouldn’t reach the standards we do.’
It’s a triangulated crossfire: the expectations of a nation, the expectations from teammates and coaches, and a high level of self-expectation all coming together in one massive Loss Aversion that drives them to greater sacrifice – and success – on the field.
‘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,’ says Jonah Lomu.
Embrace expectations.
It is this internal benchmark that sets apart the great from the good. ‘I challenge myself to be the best basketball player every moment I’m playing the game,’ Michael Jordon tells MVP.com.
As recounted by Tony Cozier to the BBC’s Sam Sheringham, Tino Best, the West Indies fast bowler, shows how it is done on his answerphone: ‘This is Tino Best speaking, the fastest bowler in the world. I can’t take your call right now, but I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve finished practising how to get faster.’
It’s similar in the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, says former Red Arrows pilot Justin Hughes. ‘The standard you measure yourself against is high. The debriefing is fairly brutal, not in an aggressive way but in that the team measure their own standards against much higher standards than are measured externally. The public’s opinion is not what we’re measuring – we’re measuring something way, way higher.’
In The Real McCaw, the All Black captain tells Greg McGee of a childhood spent in the remote reaches of Hakataramea, up the Waitaki Valley, on the edge of the earth. Specifically, he tells the story of a conversation he had with his Uncle Bigsy – one that was to change his life.
‘Do you want to be an All Black?’ his uncle asked.
‘Oh yeah.’
So they mapped out how to do it, writing down a series of goals that included the Canterbury Under 21s, the Canterbury provincial team – and the All Blacks in 2004.
‘You don’t just want to be an All Black,’ Uncle Bigsy told McCaw, ‘you want to be a great All Black.’
‘Sign it,’ he said, indicating the list. ‘Sign it Great All Black.’
‘G. A. B.’ McCaw somewhat sheepishly wrote, before hiding the note in his room.
In 2002, when the farm in Hakataramea was sold, McCaw came back to clear out his room and found the piece of paper stuck on the back of the wardrobe. He realized he’d beaten all the targets he’d set, becoming an All Black three years ahead of schedule.
Successful leaders have high internal benchmarks. They set their expectations high and try to exceed them.
Yet things were not good. The All Blacks had just lost the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against France. McCaw’s legacy was on the line, his place in the team. He hadn’t yet reached his goal.
‘What would a G. A. B. do?’ he asked himself.
˜
Muhammad Ali began calling himself the greatest before he had any real right. ‘It’s the repetition of affirmation that leads to belief,’ he says, ‘and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.’
Daniel Kahn
eman reminds us that these affirmations don’t even need to be true: ‘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.’
By setting even the most unrealistic self-expectation, ‘the aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger (even) than the desire to reach it.’ It seems that, even in Nobel Prize-winning economics, the clichés are true:
° If you can conceive, and believe, you can achieve.
° Visualize to actualize.
° Fake it till you make it.
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.
First defined in 1949 by Robert K. Merton as a ‘false definition of the situation evoking new behaviours which make the original conception come true’, the term is more commonly used these days as a kind of warning: ‘He said bad things would happen and so bad things happened.’ But the reverse, as shown by McCaw, is just as true; say you’ll be a G. A. B. and you might just become one.
Kahneman posits two interrelated psychological observations that help explain this: Anchoring and Priming.
Anchoring is most easily understood by recalling the tricks employed by supermarkets, shysters and salespeople everywhere. ‘Normally £20!’ the huckster shouts. ‘For you, sir, I’ll give it to you for £5. Bargain!’ The anchoring of perceptions – normally £20! Bargain! – makes the lower number seem cheaper.
Priming is perhaps more surprising. In 1996, John Bargh, a social psychologist from New York University, tested what is known as the ideometer effect, a reflexive response in which actions subconsciously follow thoughts. In a now legendary experiment, he gave groups of participants single-word flash-cards and asked them to construct some simple sentences. Buried within some of the groups’ cards were single-word synonyms for age:
