by Kerr, James
Maps and mantras allows us to, in Gilbert Enoka’s phrase, ‘meet pressure with pressure’; that is, rather than feeling it, we can apply it. By controlling our attention we control our performance, by controlling our performance we control the game.
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So, fast forward from Cardiff 1997 to Auckland 2011, from a Rugby World Cup quarter-final to a World Cup final, from a team heading towards defeat to a team heading towards victory.
It’s the same two sides playing: New Zealand vs. France. It’s just as tight, but this time New Zealand lead by one point.
Read the body language.
Richie McCaw breathes, holds his wrist, stamps his feet – reconnecting with himself, returning to the moment.
He looks around. There are no glazed eyes now. No walking dead.
Brad Thorne throws water over himself, cooling his thoughts. Kieran Read stares out to the far distant edge of the stadium, regaining perspective.
New Zealand, the stadium of four million people, is less calm. The dread casts a long black cloud. The spectators can’t help but flash back to the bad pictures. They are in the Red, but the All Blacks stay in the Blue.
The clock counts itself down, slowly, slowly; until finally . . . the whistle blows.
9-8 New Zealand.
‘We smashed ’em,’ says Graham Henry.
And in their heads, they did.
Keep a Blue Head
Pressure is ‘expectation, scrutiny and consequence’. It is the curtain coming down, the shutters closing, the red mist rising. It leads to tightening, panic, over-aggression, choking – and poor decision-making under pressure. Wise leaders seek to understand how the brain reacts to stress and practise simple, almost meditative techniques to stay calm, clear and connected. They use maps, mantras and anchors to navigate their way through highly pressurized situations, both personal and professional, and to bring themselves back to the moment. In this way they and their teams stay on top of their game and on top of the situation. These techniques can take us from a volatile, uncertain and ambiguous space into a place of mental clarity. ‘Clear thought. Clear talk. Clear task.’ They are the difference between Red and Blue, dark and light, failure and success.
Keep a Blue Head
Control your attention.
—— Mā te rongo, ka mōhio;
Mā te mōhio, ka mārama;
Mā te mārama, ka mātau;
Mā te mātau, ka ora.
From listening comes knowledge;
From knowledge comes understanding;
From understanding comes wisdom;
From wisdom comes well-being.
X
AUTHENTICITY
—— Whakapūpūtia mai ō mānuka, kia kore ai e whati.
Cluster the branches of the manuka, so that they will not break.
KNOW THYSELF
Keep it real
‘We always talk about the “real self” rather than the “fake self”,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘If you come into the All Blacks and you succumb to peer pressure, and you do things because others want you to, if you’re not grounded then . . . you get found out.’
Enoka uses the analogy of a bridge that is secure because it is made of several different planks: personal skills, friends, family, being an All Black. ‘If the only plank you’ve got is the rugby one, then you’ll always come unstuck.’
He explains how the All Blacks learn to protect themselves from mental fragility. ‘If you marry the self, the environment, the culture, the rituals, the legacy, and you put these together, you actually weave a pretty powerful fabric that’ll actually get you through your journey. You may wobble a bit (when things go wrong), but you won’t actually fracture and crumble.’
Better People Make Better All Blacks.
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Know thyself.
Often attributed to Socrates, the phrase is even older, inscribed in the Inner Chamber of Luxor Temple, in Upper Egypt.
‘Man, know thyself,’ the hieroglyphs say, ‘and thou shalt know the Gods.’
‘To know how to win,’ goes the saying, ‘you first have to know how to lose.’ For the All Blacks, to know how to lose, you first have to know who you are.
In refusing to be distracted by the clamour of the crowds, the distractions of the day, we can become free to follow our own path; to, in Enoka’s words, ‘be resilient and to stand tall and to keep faith and stay strong within yourself’.
‘Development of the authentic self,’ he says, ‘is hugely powerful to performance.’
It is the essence of the leader, his base, his mana.
In his landmark book, True North, Harvard Business School professor Bill George argues that the essence of a great leader is about ‘being genuine, real and true to who you are’. It’s an approach reflected within the All Blacks’ camp.
Enoka says of McCaw, ‘people say to him, how do you manage the public arena? And he said, “Well, it’s easy, because what you see in public is exactly what I’m like in private.”’
‘Most leaders who fail,’ Bill George says in an interview with Pamela Hawley, ‘really suffer from a lack of a strong identity, belief in themselves and, to be frank, respect for themselves. When leaders are disrespecting others, it really starts with themselves.’
The best leaders remain true to their deepest values. They lead their own life and others follow.
‘First we do need to take a look at the meaning behind life,’ he says. ‘Leaders need to think: “Why are you here? What’s your purpose? How do I use my time here?”
It is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller:
‘What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?’
‘I believe that leadership begins and ends with authenticity,’ says George. ‘It’s being yourself, being the person you were created to be.’ Adopting the styles of other leaders is the opposite of authenticity.
‘Your time is limited,’ Steve Jobs said in his now famous 2005 Stanford Commencement address, ‘don’t be trapped by dogma . . . And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.’
Authenticity is the opposite of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mauvaise foi, or bad faith.
Bad faith occurs when peer pressure and social forces combine to have us disown our own values. It is an accommodation we make with society to fit in, a psychological ‘selling out’ in which we forsake our own freedom and self-expression for the conformity of the crowd. Worse, it stands between our self and ourselves. It stops us knowing our true nature, which cauterizes our mana.
In Essays in Existentialism, Sartre uses the example of the waiter whose style has become mannered, ‘quick and forward, a little too rapid’. This distance between self and self-projection, reality and identity betrays him, removes him from his true purpose, and alienates those around him.
On the other hand, authenticity allows us to author our own lives; to make our own original imprint and to write our own story in a voice that is true to our values.
‘I want to live an authentic life,’ says Anton Oliver. ‘But of course to do that you have to understand who you are first. To have a baseline to keep referring back to.’
And this begins with honesty and integrity.
First, Honesty
‘In the belly, not the back’ is how Gilbert Enoka describes it – the ability to deliver honest feedback. Owen Eastwood considers it a prerequisite of a peak performing environment:
—— The key to strong peer-to-peer interaction is a high level of trust. This is trust in the sense of safe vulnerability. The leaders need to create an environment where individuals get to know each other as people and gather insight into their personal story and working style. This needs to be supported by the leader’s role-modelling behaviour around admission of mistakes and weaknesses and fears . . . This is essential for safe confl
ict and safe confrontation, where the most important interaction often occurs.
‘I think early on we didn’t deal with losing very well,’ says Anton Oliver. ‘It was very much point the finger, everyone very isolated. That changed a lot as the team became more collective, took the burden of loss equally, shared it.’
‘I enjoy watching the game together as a team because everything’s out in the open,’ says Andrew Mehrtens. ‘Your missed tackles are out in the open, things you have done well are out in the open . . . Being able to say to another guy and just being matter of fact without it being a personal judgement, “You need to be doing this to help me out with my job.” Or, equally, “What can I do that helps you do your job?”’
If you are able to do that, Mehrtens says, ‘I think you’ve got a good team.’
High-performing teams promote a culture of honesty, authenticity and safe conflict.
And Then, Integrity
Integrity comes from the Latin integritas or integer. It means being whole and undivided. It is the ethical ‘accuracy of our actions’.
Integrity means that our thoughts and words and deeds are ‘as one’, a chiropractic alignment in which our core values, purpose, beliefs and behaviours all flow in the same direction. It’s useful to think of integrity not as morality, as many people do, but as workability. It is not about being pure, or noble – it’s about getting stuff done. Though the end result is trust, belief and respect, these are merely the by-products of the fact that when we say something will happen, it actually does happen.
This means that others can count on us to deliver. And, most importantly, that we can count on ourselves.
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In a paper published at Harvard Business School, Michael C. Jensen, Werner Erhard and Steve Zaffron explore the relationship between integrity and performance. In the abstract for their model – ‘Integrity: Where Leadership Begins’ – they define their terms:
—— Integrity in our model is honoring your word. As such, integrity is a purely positive phenomenon. It has nothing to do with good vs. bad, right vs. wrong behavior. Like the law of gravity, the law of integrity just is, and if you violate the law of integrity ... you get hurt just as if you try to violate the law of gravity with no safety device. The personal and organizational benefits of honoring one’s word are huge – both for individuals and for organizations – and generally unappreciated.
It is a simple and powerful concept. Integrity is, they say, ‘a factor of production as important as knowledge or technology’ that ‘provides access to incredible increases in performance’.
Think of the time wasted at meetings in which people are late or don’t turn up, deadlines that drift, phone calls never made because ‘something came up’, cheques in the mail, relationships ruined because one side let the other side down. Systems failing to mesh, to adhere, to work together properly.
But what if they did? What if everything worked like clockwork, together, predictably and on time?
Jansen et al. posit what they call the Ontological Law of Integrity:
—— To the degree that integrity is diminished, the opportunity for performance is diminished.
That is, the more slippage there is, the less gets done; and the less slippage, the more traction. They compare it to a bicycle wheel. If spokes are missing, the wheel works less efficiently. If all the spokes are in place, it’s as efficient as it can possibly be. Integrity means all the spokes are in place, all the time.
Unsurprisingly, there is a rigorous integrity within the All Blacks camp, an almost total accountability. ‘When deeds speak,’ says Wayne Smith, ‘words are nothing.’ If someone says they’ll do something, you can be sure they will do it. If they say they’ll be somewhere, they will be there. In fact, they work to Lombardi’s rule: if you’re not early for a meeting, you’re late. Many set their watches ten minutes fast. No one is late for the bus. No one wants to let anyone down.
It gets the job done.
If integrity is a central leadership tool and everyone in a team does exactly what they say they will do, clarity, certainty, productivity and momentum are the results.
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If we have a compelling purpose, high expectations and clear goals, but we don’t honour them, we get nowhere. But by focusing on this specific area – on ‘accuracy of action’ – we can change the relationship we have with our own thoughts, and this is tremendously powerful. Rather than vague ideas and intentions, if we are our word to ourselves, then our thoughts become more committed, intentional and decisive.
They become agents of change.
‘Authenticity,’ according to leadership writer Lance Secretan, ‘is the alignment of head, mouth, heart and feet – thinking, saying and doing the same thing consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust.’
If leaders make their word a commitment – ‘I am going to make this happen’ – tremendous things begin to occur and businesses, empires, fortunes and legacies are built. If the conversation we have with ourselves has integrity, then the results can be revolutionary.
There’s a old story about J. P. Morgan, the banker and philanthropist, who was shown an envelope containing a ‘guaranteed formula for success’. He agreed that if he liked the advice written inside he would pay $25,000 for its contents.
Morgan opened the envelope, nodded, and paid.
The advice?
1. Every morning write a list of the things that need to be done that day.
2. Do them.
Honesty = Integrity = Authenticity = Resilience = Performance
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By being aware of integrity slippage, we can cultivate discipline, intention and action, both personally and within our teams.
If we speak with integrity our word becomes our world; a commitment, a declaration of intent, a generative force. It allows us to speak with optimism and possibility, resilience and determination, decisiveness and authority. It helps us survive any setback. And it helps us begin the long climb back upwards again.
With an authentic voice, we have authority.
We can author our own story.
Know Thyself
In recognizing our deepest values, we can understand what kind of leader we are and what kind of life we wish to lead. Authenticity – the mark of a true leader – begins with honesty and integrity. Honesty allows us access to our truest vision of ourselves and, when setbacks occur, gives us strong foundations. Integrity gets the job done. If our values, thoughts, words and actions are aligned, then our word is our world. With accuracy of action, less slippage occurs between thought and deed. In knowing ourselves, we live our vision. By being our word, we make it happen.
Know Thyself
Keep it real.
—— He tangata kī tahi.
A person who can be taken at his word.
XI
SACRIFICE
—— Ka tū te ihiihi.
Stand fearless.
CHAMPIONS DO EXTRA
Find something you would die for and give your life to it
‘I was in the hotel,’ says Benson Stanley, a young man about to make his All Blacks debut, ‘when one of the senior guys comes up to me, tapped me on the shoulder and gave me two questions to think about . . . First, what do I have to offer the team? . . . And, second, what am I prepared to sacrifice?’ He pauses. ‘Pretty big questions.’
That night Stanley and a number of other rookies were called in front of the team. They answered the questions. What can I offer? What will I sacrifice? Then a few of the senior players – Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, Brad Thorn – spoke about what it means to be an All Black, the legacy, the standards, the players who have laid their bodies on the line before them. Then the whole team performed a haka to welcome the new recruits, and to challenge them.
‘From then on I knew it was the big time,’ says Stanley. That’s when he knew he was an All Black.
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Initiation ceremonies ‘ease the transition from
one state into another,’ writes Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By. From youth to maturity, freedom to responsibility, life into death, they are a psychological passageway. A process of becoming.
‘A ritual is an enactment of a myth,’ Campbell says. ‘By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.’ A primary All Blacks myth is the idea of sacrifice. Giving everything for the team, bleeding for it, putting your balls on the line.
Giving everything you have.
And a little bit more.
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‘Champions do extra.’ It’s Brad Thorn talking now.
The opposite of a rookie, Thorn played more than 200 Rugby League games for the Brisbane Broncos before switching codes and playing sixty Tests for the All Blacks, becoming a World Cup final winner. In honours won – and respect earned – he is one of the most successful rugby players of all time. As he talks, younger All Blacks strain to hear what he has to say.
He was a lazy kid, he says, but his father had a motto that he now uses every day:
—— Champions do extra.’
First to arrive at the gym, and the last to leave, Thorn’s motto means he always adds something extra to the end of every routine – an extra rep, an extra ten minutes, an extra set, an extra circuit. ‘Five minutes to go in the Test match,’ he asks, ‘who wants it more?’
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There is a saying: ‘There are no crowds lining the extra mile.’ On the extra mile, we are on our own: just us and the road, just us and the blank sheet of paper, just us and the challenge we’ve set ourself. It’s the work we do behind closed doors that makes the difference out on the field of play, in whichever field we compete, whether we’re in a team, leading a business or just leading our life.
