Legacy

by James Kerr

The First XV

The First XV: Lessons in Leadership.

I Sweep the Sheds Never be too big to do the small things that need to be done

II Go for the Gap When you’re on top of your game, change your game

III Play with Purpose Ask ‘Why?’

IV Pass the Ball Leaders create leaders

V Create a Learning Environment Leaders are teachers

VI No Dickheads Follow the spearhead

VII Embrace Expectations Aim for the highest cloud

VIII Train to Win Practise under pressure

IX Keep a Blue Head Control your attention

X Know Thyself Keep it real

XI Sacrifice Find something you would die for and give your life to it

XII Invent a Language Sing your world into existence

XIII Ritualize to Actualize Create a culture

XIV Be a Good Ancestor Plant trees you’ll never see

XV Write Your Legacy This is your time

I Character

—— Waiho mā te tangata e mihi. Let someone else praise your virtues.

SWEEP THE SHEDS

- Never be too big to do the small things that need to be done
- Successful leaders balance pride with humility: absolute pride in performance; total humility before the magnitude of the task.
- The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best.
- ‘It’s not expecting somebody else to do your job for you. It teaches you not to expect things to be handed to you.’

A collection of talented individuals without personal discipline will ultimately and inevitably fail. Character triumphs over talent. Only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader.

Vince Lombardi- For him, it all begins with self-knowledge, with the great ‘I Am; a fundamental understanding and appreciation of our own personal values. It was on this foundation that he built his teams and his success. From self-knowledge, Lombardi believed, we develop character and integrity. And from character and integrity comes leadership. ‘The challenge of every team is to build a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another,’ said Vince Lombardi. ‘Because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.’ Collective character is vital to success. Focus on getting the culture right; the results will follow.
‘Winning takes talent,’ John Wooden would say. ‘To repeat it takes character.’

—— Performance = Capability + Behaviour

The way you behave, he argues, will either bring out the best or worst of your capability, and this applies to businesses and teams as well as to individuals. ‘Leaders create the right environment for the right behaviors to occur,’
Behavior exists in two domains: Public and Private.
- ‘The Private Domain’ is the one in which we spend time with ourselves and where our mind-game plays out. This is the biggest game of all, as daily we confront our habits, limitations, temptations, and fears. ‘Leaders design and create an environment, which drives the high performance behaviours needed for success. The really clever teams build a culture that drives the behaviors they need.’

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

‘The paradox is that, though every organization thinks they have unique problems, many change issues are centred on one thing. The ability–or inability–to convert vision into action. Sometimes it is through a lack of a vision itself. More often though the inability to translate vision into simple, ordinary, everyday actions.’

‘What is the All Blacks’ competitive advantage?’, key is the ability to manage their culture and central narrative by attaching the players’ personal meaning to a higher purpose. It is the identity of the team that matters–not so much what the All Blacks do, but who they are, what they stand for, and why they exist.

The All Blacks’ remarkable success on the field begins with a very particular culture off the field and it is this culture–the glue that holds it all together–that has delivered extraordinary competitive advantage for more than a century.

This management technique–which begins with questions–is of the ‘Socratic Method’, so-called because Socrates used a type of interrogation to separate his pupils from their prejudices. The goal? To help them find self-knowledge, even if the truth turns out to be uncomfortable. It is a key technique within the All Blacks leadership and captured in a Māori proverb: Waiho kia pātai ana, he kaha ui te kaha. Let the questioning continue; the ability of the person is in asking questions.

A culture of asking and re-asking fundamental questions cuts away unhelpful beliefs in order to achieve clarity of execution. Humility allows us to ask a simple question: how can we do this better?
Rather than just instruct outwards, the coaches began to ask questions; first of themselves–how can we do this better?–and then of their players–what do you think? This interrogative culture, in which the individual makes their own judgments, and sets their own internal benchmarks, became increasingly important.
The word decide comes from ‘to cut away. The All Blacks’ interrogative culture cuts away unhelpful beliefs in order to achieve clarity. It is a facilitated style of interpersonal leadership in a learning environment concerned with adaptive problem solving and continuous improvement and in which humility–not knowing all the answers–delivers strength.
- you’ve got to ask questions–and we try and get descriptive answers so you get self-awareness.’——‘What might happen if…?’ ‘In this situation what would you do…?’ ‘How might you…?’ ‘What about…?’

No one person has all the answers, but asking questions challenges the status quo, helps connect with core values and beliefs, and is a catalyst for individual improvement. After all, the better the questions we ask, the better the answers we get. ˜

Humility does not mean weakness, but it’s opposite. Leaders with mana understand the strength of humility. It allows them to connect with their deepest values and the wider world.
A person of rare quality; a natural leader possessing strength, leadership, great personal power, gentleness–and humility.
For leaders of all stripes, reconnecting with our values–with our truest, deepest instincts–is an essential building block of character, which is the essence of leadership. And it begins with humility. St Augustine said it best: ‘Lay first the foundation of humility . . . The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.’
The great sports coaches of the past such as John Wooden and Vince Lombardi put humility at the core of their teaching. The All Blacks place a similar emphasis on their fundamental and foundational values, going so far as to select on character over talent. The players are taught never to get too big to do the small things that need to be done. ‘Exceptional results demand exceptional circumstances,’ says Wayne Smith. These conditions help shape the culture and therefore the ethos–the character–of the team. Humility begins at the level of interpersonal communication, enabling an interrogative, highly facilitated learning environment in which no one has all the answers. Each individual is invited to contribute solutions to the challenges being posed. This is a key component of building sustainable competitive advantage through cultural cohesion. It leads to innovation, increased self-knowledge, and greater character. It leads towards mana.

Sweep the Sheds Never be too big to do the small things that need to be done.——Kāore te kūmara e whāki ana tana reka. The kūmara (sweet potato) does not need to say how sweet he is.

II Adapt

GO FOR THE GAP

When you’re on top of your game, change your game

Four Stages for Organizational Change:

A Case for Change
A Compelling Picture of the Future
A Sustained Capability to Change
A Credible Plan to Execute.

Development

We’re competing on the open market for the best human resources. He reasoned that an active focus on personal development and leadership would create capacity, capability and loyalty.
A winning organization is an environment of personal and professional development, in which each individual takes responsibility and shares ownership.
Leaders create leaders.
Like most things in nature, cultures are subject to a more cyclical process, of ebb and flow, growth and decline. According to Charles Handy (in The Empty Raincoat), this cycle has three distinct phases: Learning, Growth and Decline.
- In the Learning Phase, we often experience dips in actual performance as we feel our way through the unfamiliar. Think of Tiger Woods relearning his golf swing or the teething period in which a new CEO gets to grips with the issues of an organization.
- growth accelerates. This is the Growth Phase. Rewards follow. Praise and blandishments too.
- The Decline Phase hits us much like the early twinges of arthritis in a middle-aged person. At first an anomaly, it eventually becomes the painful norm.

The key, of course, is when we’re on top of our game, to change our game; to exit relationships, recruit new talent, alter tactics, reassess strategy.

Sigmoid Leaps

a series of scalloped jumps along the Sigmoid Curve, outwitting inevitability. As a leader this is one of our primary responsibilities, and the skill comes in timing these leaps: when to axe your star performer; when to blood new talent; when to change your game-plan altogether. This is the quintessence of kaizan, the Japanese notion of continuous improvement.
The organizational decline is inevitable unless leaders prepare for change–even when standing at the pinnacle of success.

The military has an acronym: VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. VUCA describes a world prone to sudden change, unknown consequence and complex, shifting interrelationships; one that is difficult to decipher, impossible to predict.

Decision Cycle or OODA Loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It is quick to apply, and useful for everyday decision-making.

Observe -This is data collection through the senses; visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, taste–as well as more modern metrics.
Orient– This is analysis, synthesizing all available data into a single, coherent ‘map of the territory’–a working theory of our options.
Decide– This is the point of choice; where we determine the best course of action. We cut away the extraneous by making a decision.
Act– We execute; acting swiftly and decisively to take advantage of the moment. We then go back to the beginning and observe the effect of our actions. And so the loop continues.

Vasilyevich Suvorov, a Russian general born in 1719 who wrote the military manual The Science of Victory. He believed in:Hystrota playing a fast-paced game, Glazometer making quick decisions that disorient the opposition, Natisk acting aggressively to seize the competitive advantage. That is, move rapidly into a commanding position, assess your unfolding options quickly and clearly, attack with absolute and ruthless commitment–assess, adjust and repeat. Or as the All Blacks would put it:——Go for the gap.

Adaptation is not a reaction, but a systematic series of actions. It isn’t just reacting to what’s happening in the moment, it is being the agent of change. This is achieved through a structured feedback loop–by building the adaptive process into the very way we lead.

Momentum swings faster than we think.

One moment we’re on top of the world, the next falling off the other side. The role of the leader is to know when to reinvent, and how to do it. The Sigmoid Curve means that when we’re at the top of the game, it’s time to change our game. The key is not losing momentum. As the military has discovered, the best form of attack is a continuous feedback loop and, as we know from kaizan, this process is best when it involves your people. The teams that will thrive in this VUCA world are those who act quickly and decisively to seize competitive advantage; adjusting and readjusting along the way. You either adapt, or you lose, and sustainable competitive advantage is achieved by the development of a continuously self-adjusting culture. Adaption is not a reaction, but continual action, so plans to respond.

III Purpose

He rangi tā Matawhāiti, he rangi tā Matawhānui. The person with a narrow vision sees a narrow horizon, the person with a wide vision sees a wide horizon.

Pondering the strategic objective–to create ‘an environment . . . that would stimulate the players and make them want to take part in it’–he came up with the six words that would define the efforts of the next eight or so years:——Better People Make Better All Blacks
Developing the individual players and giving them the tools, skills, and character that they needed to contribute beyond the rugby field, they would also, in theory, develop the tools, skills, and character to contribute more effectively on it.
This ‘Kiwi kaizan’ was a focus on personal development, both as human beings and as professional sportsmen, so that they had the character, composure, and people skills to be leaders, both on and off the field.

Storytelling

‘We all bought into an idea of trying to create our own culture,’ says Smith, ‘and to do that we used storytelling. ‘It’s about the purpose and personal meaning…Those are the two big things.’

To turn their vision into something that the players could identify with, they needed a theme. The first came from Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘for he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother’.
‘The emotional glue of any culture–religion, nation or team–is its sense of identity and purpose,’
What we identify with are the ‘things we recognize as important to ourselves–to our deepest values . . . this kind of meaning has the emotional power to shape behaviour’.
Leaders connect personal meaning to a higher purpose to create belief and a sense of direction.
Personal meaning is the way we connect to a wider team purpose. If our values and beliefs are aligned with the values and beliefs of the organization, then we will work harder towards its success. If not, our individual motivation and purpose will suffer, and so will the organization.
It begins from the inside out.

‘Hawthorne Effect, the idea that emotional reward is more important than material compensation. That intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation rules the world.

Abraham Maslow and his famous ‘Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow thought that once beyond the satisfaction and security of your basic needs–safety, food, water, shelter, warmth, comfort–you are no longer driven by purely extrinsic motivations and can turn your attention to deeper needs.
The first, a sense of belonging and love; a partner, a family. From then on, life becomes about esteem; self-respect, the respect of others, recognition for our talent, our capabilities, our behaviors. In Maslow’s world, we all move towards a sense of self-actualization. That is a psychological state of presence, flow, self-respect, self-expression, and authenticity.
‘What man actually needs, ‘is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.’- Viktor Frankl
‘The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is, and the more he actualizes himself.’ ‘Self-actualization,’ he concludes, ‘is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.’ Of ‘getting over yourself. Of sweeping the sheds. And it begins with the question ‘Why?’
Steve Jobs, the Apple founder once told his team: ‘the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a ripple right through the universe.’ ‘Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.’
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, describes this as the ‘extra dimension’–a guiding philosophy that consists of core values and a core purpose beyond just making money. He believes that, when authentic and rigorously adhered to, a dramatic, compelling purpose is a fundamental driver of the companies that go from good to great.
Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, expresses what most of us innately know: ‘people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it’. ‘What I’m interested in is what gets people up every single day to do something, maybe pay a premium, maybe suffer inconvenience, maybe sacrifice because they’re driven by something else. What is that thing? What I’ve learned is it’s that question, why? It has a biological imperative, it drives us, it inspires us.’
You hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood, sweat, and tears.’ Inspired leaders, organizations, and teams find their deepest purpose–their ‘why?’–and attract followers through shared values, vision, and beliefs. As Nietzsche said: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’
Ubuntu is ‘the essence of being human,’ says Bishop Desmond Tutu. ‘Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness.’ Ubuntu does not mean that people should not have self-interest, But ‘are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life.’ Ubuntu means we send out ripples from us into the wider community: our actions affect everyone, not just us. They play for something greater than themselves.
In The Real McCaw, author Greg McGee describes how one wall is dominated by a grey polystyrene archway of Corinthian columns, plinths, gables, and foundation stones. It looks like a Walt Disney version of a Greek temple. At the base are foundation stones with words written on them. ‘Team-First’ is at the center, surrounded by the Crusader’s other fundamental values: ‘Loyalty’, ‘Integrity’, ‘Respect’, ‘Work-Ethic’ and ‘Enjoyment’. Across the central plinth is one word, ‘Excellence’, the ultimate aim. Connecting the foundation with the apex is a series of columns, each of which has a title: ‘Nutrition’, ‘Physical’, ‘Technical’, ‘Practical’, ‘Teamness’ and ‘Mental’. It is these six pillars upon which excellence–and success–is built.

Play with Purpose

Our fundamental human drive comes from within–from intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations. Leaders who harness the power of purpose have the ability to galvanize a group, aligning its behaviors to the strategic pillars of the enterprise. Using vivid storytelling techniques, including themes, symbols, imagery, rituals, mantras and metaphor, and bringing them to life with imagination and flair, leaders create a sense of inclusion, connectedness, and unity–a truly collective, collaborative mindset. It begins by asking ‘Why? Why are we doing this? Why am I sacrificing myself for this project? What is the higher purpose?’ The answers to these questions have the ability to transform the fortunes of a group or enterprise–activating individuals, providing a cultural glue, guiding behaviors, and creating an overall sense of purpose and personal connection. It is the beginning of the being of team.

Play with Purpose Ask ‘Why?’——Whāia e koe ki te iti kahurangi; ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei. Seek the treasure you value most dearly; if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain.

IV Responsibility

—— Haere taka mua, taka muri; kaua e whai. Be a leader, not a follower.

Leaders create leaders by passing on responsibility, creating ownership, accountability, and trust. This can clearly be translated into business, where the leader sets objectives and parameters, then ‘passes the ball’ to the team, handing over responsibility for implementation and detail. Leading by creating leaders.
Shared responsibility means shared ownership. A sense of inclusion means individuals are more willing to give themselves to a common cause.
‘Leaders don’t create followers,’ ‘they create more leaders.’
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.’
By arming staff with intention, leaders can enable their people to respond appropriately to changing contexts, without losing sight of the tactical imperative. Adaptability
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 responses so decision-making is intuitive, instantaneous and delivers on intention.

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 program 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.

Level 5 leaders, Jim 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

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 able to stand up when it counts–leaders in the field.

V Learn

——Kohia te kai rangatira, ruia te taitea. Gather the good food, cast away the rubbish. CREATE A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Leaders are teachers

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

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.’ Success is the result of a long-term commitment to improving excellence–the small steps leading to a mighty leap. (Controlled and uncontrolled leaps)
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.
Enlightened leadership promotes a structured system for the development of the team, combined with a tailored map for the development of the individual.

Map of Self Improvement Document

Where is the soul of this company? What is Harcourt’s all about?
- What are the values that drive your behavior?. . 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.

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.
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 Aggregation of Marginal Gains

The drive to perfect every controllable detail in search of optimal performance.
‘Races are won by a fraction of a second,’ wrote John Wooden.
According to Woodward (in his book, Winning), Walters taught him ‘that success can be attributed to how a team worked together under pressure, how they understood the importance of teamwork and loyalty, and how they were willing to do a hundred things just 1% better. This final aspect Woodward called ‘the critical non-essentials’. A fresh jersey at halftime, the same bus for every game, a more inspiring locker room at Twickenham–every little thing helped
Britain’s Olympic cyclists called it ‘marginal gains’. In their preparation for a home Olympics in 2012, in which they won an incredible seven out of ten gold medals, the details included: ° customized aerodynamic helmets ° ‘hot pants’–worn to keep thigh muscles warm between races ° sweat-resistant clothing ° alcohol sprayed on wheels to enhance traction at the start ° hypoallergenic pillows to help stop riders catching colds ‘The whole principle,’ Brailsford explains to the BBC, ‘came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and improved it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put it all together.’
At McLaren F1, they call it ‘Tenths’. The entire team is galvanized by the idea of shaving tenths of a second off the lap time. All F1 teams do it, of course, but at McLaren they make it their central operating principle.
Al Pacino character calls it ‘Inches’:——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.

Creating a learning environment demands that leaders step back and look at their team, business, or organization as what engineers call a closed or bound system: with a defined parameter in which every input is known. Zoom in, Zoom out.

‘You are a product of your environment,’ says author W. Clement Stone, ‘so choose the environment that will best develop you towards your objective. Analyze your life in terms of your environment. 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.’
By working hard to control the environment, the All Blacks seek to eliminate the pebbles in their shoes. Saying yes to high performance means first saying no. ‘what we’ve actually done . . . is to strip things out . . . What hasn’t changed are the “go-to’s” that drive the legacy . . . the art is knowing what to spit out.’
‘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.’

–‘Kapo O Panga’–to express their sense of self.

Sometimes it only takes one encounter–one teacher–to change a life, and many lives after that. 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.
‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,but what is woven into the lives of others.’ Your legacy is that which you teach.- Pericles

Create a Learning Environment

Human beings are motivated by purpose, autonomy, and a drive towards mastery. Accomplished leaders create an environment in which their people can develop their skills, their knowledge, and their character. This leads to a learning environment and a culture of curiosity, innovation and continuous improvement. By finding the 100 things that can be done just 1 percent better, leaders create incremental and cumulative advantage, and organizations see an upswing in performance and results. In creating a coherent learning environment, it pays to both eliminate unhelpful elements–clearing out the furniture–and to introduce insightful and inspiring influences.

——Te tīmatanga o te mātauranga ko te wahangū, te wāhanga tuarua ko te whakarongo. The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening.

VI Whānau

Ornithologists say that flying this way is 70 percent more efficient than flying solo. If a bird falls out of formation, it feels the wind resistance and rejoins the flock. Should one fall behind, others stay back until it can fly again. No bird gets left behind.
Whānau means to ‘be born’ or ‘give birth’. For Māori, it means extended family: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, children and cousins. In the vernacular, it has come to mean our family of friends: our mates, our tribe, our team. In Māori mythology, whānau is symbolized by a spearhead, an image derived in turn from the flight formation of the kawau. A spearhead has three tips–but to work properly, all the force must move in one direction. And so it is with whānau. For a whānau to function, everyone must move towards the same point. You are free to choose the course you take, but the spearhead is most effective if you all work together. Fly information. Be of one mind. Follow the spearhead. This is the ‘being of team’ and the essence of a successful organization.
Phil Jackson, former head coach of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, calls this the ‘Group Mind’, ‘A great player can only do so much on his own, No matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.’ ‘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.’ For the Strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Owen Eastwood says that if 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
- 5. encourage a learning environment
- 6. (most important) begin to turn the standards into action. The best way of doing this is through peer-to-peer enforcement.

The being of the team begins from inside. High standards must come from within. Leadership works best when your team takes the lead.

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.

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.
They 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.
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.

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 a 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

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

‘The key 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. ‘We have a saying,’ says Fitzpatrick, ‘don’t be a good All Black. Be a great Black. Don’t just be satisfied to reach your targets. Go higher.’ ‘We hate coming second place to ourselves,’
Successful leaders have high internal benchmarks. They set their expectations high and try to exceed them.
Muhammad Ali began calling himself the greatest before he had any real right. ‘It’s the repetition of affirmation that leads to belief, and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.’

Internal Story

‘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.’
The truth is that the story we tell about our life becomes the story of our life.
This internalized narrative–triggered by words, images, movement and memory–is a phenomenon popularly known as the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Chatwin also reminds us that the Ancient Egyptians believed that the seat of the soul is our tongue. Using it as our rudder, and words as our oar, we steer our way across the waters to our destiny. 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 truth is, we don’t so much tell stories, as stories tell us. Ira Glass, ‘Great stories happen to those who tell them.’
Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values. We learn best–and change–from hearing stories that strike a chord with us . . . Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies or for themselves.
Whāia te iti kahurangi; ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei. Aim for the highest cloud, so that if you miss it, you will hit a lofty mountain.

Embrace Expectations

By embracing the 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.

Embrace Expectations Aim for the highest cloud.——Kia whakangawari au i a hau. Let us prepare ourselves for the fray.

VIII Preparation

——Ko te piko o te māhuri, te-rā te tupu o te rākau. The way the sapling is shaped determines how the tree grows.

‘The training, decision-making wise, should be harder than the game,’ says Wayne Smith. ‘So you try an overlying principle of throwing problems at them–unexpected events–forcing them to solve the problems.’ challenging them and randomizing situations, we found we were getting better long-term learning. If you are not overextending yourself you’re not going to get much learning . . . there’s no point in ducking the challenges.’
The 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. ˜
And the best kind of practice involves intensity–getting out of your comfort zone, extending yourself. In a phrase heard around the All Blacks’ camp, ‘If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere.’
‘The fight is won or lost,’ says Muhammad Ali, ‘far away from witnesses–behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, well before I dance under the lights.’
In business, training is often seen as a soft option and is limited to the occasional away day. However, effective training is intense, regular, and repetitious. For world-class results, it should be central to the culture.
Meanwhile, the Department of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital in New York City, has developed what they call the ‘Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills Shoot-Out’, an intensity-based interactive ‘video game’ for surgeons-in-training. Laparoscopic surgeons who spent three hours a week training on the video game made one-third fewer errors and performed 25 percent faster than those who didn’t.
‘You’re trying to exercise decision-making in high stressed environments. It’s not the physical but the psychological aspect that the All Blacks have pioneered–the use of randomness, unpredictability, and constant questioning, combined with pace and physicality, in order to stress the brain and test decision-making capacity.
‘It’s all about performing under pressure on the paddock,’ says Gilbert Enoka. And to perform under pressure when it matters, you need to train that way. That way, when we do it for real, it’s automatic. We don’t think, we just do. We have clarity. Accuracy. Intensity. Train to win.

Performance System (Ceri Evans)

Gazing Performance Systems Ceri Evans and Renzie Hanham, two men with both a theoretical and a practical understanding of how the brain performs under pressure. Evans, a karate black belt and former Rhodes Scholar who won fifty-six caps for the New Zealand football team is a forensic psychiatrist who developed the methodology that Gazing now uses to help organizations lift performance. Gazing works internationally with companies including Xerox, Avis, and UPS in handling pressure, improving performance, and delivering results.
‘Mental Analysis and Development Group’ early in 2010 to confront the issue of pressure–what it is, what it does, and what they can do about it. They called it MAD for short.
‘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 behaviors–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’.
The opposite they call ‘Blue Head.’ This is the ability to maintain clarity, situational awareness, accurate analysis, and good decision-making under pressure. It’s a resourceful state in which we are able to trust ourselves to deliver, to be flexible, adaptable, and on top of our game. We can see the big picture, as well as the important details and our attention, is where it should be. To have a Blue Head means to remain on task, rather than diverted, and Gazing’s parlance allows us to ACT:
- A. Alternatives: to look at our options, adapt, adjust and overcome
- C. Consequences: to understand the risk/ reward ratio of each alternative and to make an accurate assessment of what is needed
- T. Task Behaviours: To stay on task and execute the tactics and strategy

Performance under pressure is knowing how to ACT. In Brosnahan’s words, ‘allowing yourself to win by following the process rather than being caught up in outcomes’. ‘The skill to handle pressure was critical,’ says Henry. ‘Pressure is a privilege,’ most organizations don’t focus on a program of training for mental toughness. They ‘tend to go for the one-off hits, which is unrealistic’: a training session, an away day, an inspirational speech, but nothing continuous and progressive. Few focus on long-term development, on a program of improvement. unlike physical fitness, mental toughness is the result of a long-term conditioning program. If you want to develop your ability to concentrate and focus and be flexible in what you do from a mental perspective, wouldn’t you apply the same approach?’
Gazing’s training approach, in its simplest form, says Brosnahan, involves a ‘skill ladder’, which begins by building technique and increasing intensity, then introduces real pressure. In this way, our brains acclimatize to the pressure. We develop clarity, more accurate, automatic execution, and situational awareness.
The idea, however, is not to do too much too soon. A surfeit of pressure applied prematurely will leave us floundering, disoriented, and modeling the very emotions we’re training to avoid.
So, we focus on the technique, increase the intensity, and then add pressure. Before we finish, we reduce the intensity and focus once again on the technique, as if we’re cooling down at the gym. Repeat. And keep repeating until it’s automatic.
‘unconscious competence’, and what the All Blacks call ‘clarity’. ‘It’s about striking the balance between being lucid but being motivated,’ ‘There comes a point where you can become too hyped up and you lose your lucidity and ability to read a situation and make a good decision.’
The word automatic is from the Greek, Automatus, and means ‘self-thinking’. It’s not far from the idea of thinking for yourself–the idea of autonomy and self-responsibility implied by the phrase ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’. By training with intensity, we make our performance more automatic, better able to stay on task. If we can control our attention–avoid the Red and stay in the Blue–we can focus on controlling the things we can control, without worrying about the things we can’t. We can stay in the moment. We can lead with clarity.

Train to Win

Mastery in anything–a sport, a skill, a craft, business–is achieved by practice. Practice is enhanced by intensity. Research has shown that both our body and our brains respond positively to a diet of accelerated, intense learning, which leads to dramatic improvements and competitive advantage. The All Blacks embrace the power of intensity to ‘train to win’–working with randomized scenarios and unexpected challenges in order to recalibrate the players’ tolerance for high-pressure situations. The aim is to enable greater clarity and accuracy under stressful circumstances–and to enhance the ability to bring attention back to the present and the task at hand. Smart leaders utilize intensity to challenge themselves and their teams, and to increase competence and capability. Just as core body exercises are vital for physical conditioning, so core psychological training is essential to develop mental toughness and resilience.

Tangata akona ki te kāinga, tūngia ki te marae, tau ana. A person who is taught at home will stand with confidence in the community.

IX Pressure

——Te tīmatanga o te mātauranga ko te wahangū, te wāhanga tuarua ko te whakarongo. The first stage of learning is silence, the second stage is listening.

‘Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence,’ ‘Under pressure, your attention is either diverted or on track. If you’re diverted, you have a negative emotional response and unhelpful behavior. That means you’re stuck. That means you’re overwhelmed.’ On the other hand, if your attention is on track you have situational awareness and you execute accurately. You are clear, you adapt and you overcome.
Bad decisions are not made through a lack of skill or innate judgment: they are made because of an inability to handle pressure at the pivotal moment.

RED HEAD

Tight, inhibited, results-oriented, anxious, aggressive, overcompensating, desperate.

BLUE HEAD

Loose, expressive, in the moment, calm, clear, accurate, on task.

Red is what Suvorov called ‘the Dark’. It is that fixated negative content loop of self-judgment, rigidity, aggression, shut down, and panic.
Blue is what he called ‘the Light’–a deep calmness in which you are on task, in the zone, on your game, in control, and inflow.
- It works like this: where we direct our mind is where our thoughts will take us; our thoughts create an emotion; the emotion defines our behavior; our behavior defines our performance. So, simply, if we can control our attention, and therefore our thoughts, we can manage our emotions and enhance our performance.
- In recognizing his triggers–bad pictures–and controlling his attention–keeping the bad pictures at bay–he is able to stay in the present, remain clear, accurate, and on task. We all have our preferred representational system, we also have all the embedded auditory, visual and kinaesthetic triggers. The trick is to recognize when they are firing in our brains and when the effect is negative.
- We need to recognize the ‘Red Flags’, the ‘Warning Sirens’, our ‘Sixth Sense’. Then we have to manage our reactions.

The brain essentially has three parts–instinct, thinking, and emotion, ‘Invariably under pressure, it is the thinking that shuts down and that means you are relying on emotion and instinct and can no longer pick up the cues and information to make good decisions.’‘If you become disconnected then you can focus on outcome and not task and the ability to make good decisions is compromised.’
The Real McCaw describes the work that Ceri Evans did with the players to help them reconnect.
- Like meditation, it begins with the breath: ‘Breathing slowly and deliberately . . . shift your attention to something external–the ground or your feet, or the ball at hand, or even alternating big toes, or the grandstand . . . use deep breaths and keywords to get out of your own head, find an external focus, get yourself “back in the present”, regain your situational awareness.’
- These actions are Anchors (see Chapter VII), and they have a particular function. They are designed to bring the players into the moment, into clarity, into the blue. It is easy to see how this technique is applicable to a pressurized business environment.

First, we put ourselves in a resourceful state: calm, positive, clear. Then we ‘anchor’ that state through a specific, replicable physical action–something out of the ordinary, like scrunching up our toes, stamping our foot, staring into the distance, throwing water over our face. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat–until it’s automatic. Then, when we recognize the symptoms of pressure–when our focus closes down, our vision narrows, our heart rate lifts, our anxiety increases, our self-consciousness rises–we can use the anchor to reboot. And return to our centre. Like a doctor using paddles on a cardiac arrest, the ‘jolt of recognition’ reactivates our more resourceful state and returns us to the moment. It is, literally, ‘re-cognition’: thinking again. Undiverted, we’re free to assess, adjust and act; to become realigned with our task and the best way to complete it. To act rather than react.

‘Maps force clarity,’ he says. ‘You can’t put bullshit on a map.’ In high-performing domains, he says, people have the same maps, the same common language. This common language–whether a schematic, words, phrases or mantras–delivers clarity. ‘If you have a direction you want to go in, if you can describe it, succinctly and clearly, that’s your starting point,’ he says.
Mantras are the way in which we can tell our story to ourselves; they are tools for effective thinking, a mental roadmap in times of pressure. Mantras are literally an ‘instrument for thinking’, a practical tool for returning to the moment.
- Pilots, for instance, have a mantra to help them deal with a deluge of flight data that assails them during a crisis:——Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. That is, first focus on flying the plane; second, fly the plane in the right direction; third, tell people where you’re flying the plane. It’s a simple, practical process that has saved lives. Its simplicity enables pilots to orient themselves and take the right steps in the right order; providing big-picture perspective and clearly defined steps.
- Meanwhile, paramedics and ski patrollers have a mantra for first-aid situations.——Assess. Adjust. Act. That is, assess the situation; adjust your approach to suit the situation; act accordingly. Again, the process creates clarity and certainty, without losing urgency. The thing many mantras share is the Rule of Three; that is, they are three words or phrases that work together in a stepwise process to bring about change.
- By harnessing this three-point structure, mantras create a strong linguistic chain of events; they take you from chaos, through clarity and into action. Automatically.

Controlling our attention–through anchoring, maps, and mantras–is about bringing ourselves back into the present. Rather than ‘what ifs’, we are then able to deal with the ‘what is’. Rather than, ‘What if we run out of resources?’ we can ask, ‘What is the best way to use our resources?’
Maps and mantras allow 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.

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 practice 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.

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.’
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, 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.
‘Most leaders who fail,’ Bill George says ‘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. ‘Leaders need to think:
- “Why are you here?
- What’s your purpose?
- How do I use my time here?”
- ‘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?’

‘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.’

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.
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,’ ‘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.

Honesty

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 stories and working style. This needs to be supported by the leader’s role-modeling behavior around the admission of mistakes and weaknesses and fears . . . This is essential for safe conflict and safe confrontation, where the most important interaction often occurs. High-performing teams promote a culture of honesty, authenticity, and safe conflict.

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 behaviors 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. ˜ Ontological Law of Integrity:——To the degree that integrity is diminished, the opportunity for performance is diminished. 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.
If we have a compelling purpose, high expectations, and clear goals, but we don’t honor 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.

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.

Honesty = Integrity = Authenticity = Resilience = Performance

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 an 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.

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

First, what do I have to offer the team?. . And, second, what am I prepared to sacrifice?’
‘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. ˜ 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 ourselves. 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. Champions do