Rugby league is a ferocious sport, now gone well beyond a sport to be a profession, at least at the top levels. You can still play in the park, and enjoy the competition and physicality of it, but that is not what the top level is about.
It is a business, and the CEO’s are not those with the title of CEO of the clubs concerned, while they might have the power of financial veto, the real CEO’s are the coaches. They are the ones that shape the way the teams play on the day and are ultimately responsible for putting in the processes that can generate the results on the field over the weekend.
As such, what can businesses learn from the two most successful coaches of the last 20 years, and perhaps the two best coaches of all time.
They are playing in the big league, while most businesses are still playing the commercial equivalent of park footy.
Talent development & leverage
Both coaches seem to have the ability to see latent talent in young players and develop them into top level players over time. It is the ability to see the future in a youngster and apply the right mix of game skills and personal development, which leads to the individual being a part of a team, contributing to the whole in a truly meaningful way, delivering ‘leverage’ to the team that sets them apart.
However, it is also the ability to see the latent talent in a journeyman player and turn them into an ‘A’ player by bringing out the latent talent that is amazing in both these cases. Few businesses I have seen do much of a job at talent development and are poor at leveraging existing talent. More often the round peg that failed to fit into the square hole is dispensed with irrespective of the latent talent, rather than being helped to find that round hole. Talent wastage is rife in most businesses.
The talent development pipeline created at the Storm is awesome. Billy Slater was one of the genuinely great fullbacks, recruited as a youngster from country Queensland. When retirement was coming, there were moans about the hole his absence would create, and lo and behold, the hole never eventuated, simply because there was a replacement ready to step up, and has done so in a dazzling manner. Similarly, when Cooper Cronk left, and went to another club. How would the ‘spine’ of Melbourne work without not just Slater, but now also Cronk? No problem, the replacement is a wonderful player, fully capable of filling giant shoes, while Cronk brought a competitive edge to the new club that contributed enormously to them winning the premiership. Now Cameron Smith is on the verge of retiring, and the same moans are being heard. I am sure his replacement will be a wonderful player, blooded and coached into the winning systems of the club.
Coaching
Coaching is what coaches do, the headline task. Turning those talented youngsters into super athletes, but as importantly, turning the B players into A players.
Bellamy and Bennett both seem to be loved and respected by their charges, even when they have moved on to another club. There are numerous examples of talented players moving onto other clubs from under the wings of the two B’s, and shining because the habits and motivation instilled by the B’s. The development and honing of their talent is forever, not just in the context of the two teams directly coached by the B’s.
Most businesses spend way too little time, money and energy coaching their employees. They are treated as numbers, dispensable units of production, rather than people who generally want to, and are willing to be contributors when allowed and enabled to be.
Perhaps coaching is the highest form of leadership?
Recruiting
I have seen it written many times that the primary responsibility of a manager is to replace themselves with someone who will do the job better than them. The great leaders always have a full bench of talented individuals being readied to move up the ladder, while at the same time, looking outside to find the talented individuals to add to the bench. The ‘B’s’ spend a lot of time watching for the talent out there on the fringes, and when they see it, they find a way to move them into the system. This goes with the time and energy spend in talent development and coaching, it provides the raw material that over time will develop.
Almost all the recruiting I have seen in 45 years of commercial life is around filling a seat when it suddenly becomes vacant for any number of reasons, and then it is usually the best that turns up on the day that gets the seat. The “B’s’ would never recruit this way. They will each have a list of those that they think might, one day, fit into their system, and they put in the effort to get to know and understand the talent well before there is any hint of recruiting.
Processes
Every team has processes on the field, the plays they run against the opposition. Sometimes they work, often they do not, but what is obvious every time you see a play being run, is that it has been planned and practised until it is second nature. The ‘B’s’ must have a book of plays from which they pick and choose depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition they will be facing. There will be some standard plays, a set of processes that they use all the time, as well as the specialised couple that they see as being particularly competitive against their current opposition.
These processes are written down, refined, and used as the basis of continuous improvement. They are not computer programs that tell you what to do, they are processes in which the players are engaged in the development, and ultimately responsible for the implementation.
Few businesses have their equivalent. As a consultant the easiest way to make an early impact is often to create and implement a few basic processes that rectify what are usually basic flaws in operating procedures. Documenting operating procedures is the first step in standardising, and then improving the drivers of success.
Practice
Practise makes perfect is a cliché taken seriously by all sporting teams, I suspect it is a religion for the ‘B’s’. Spartan mythology gave us the cliché: ‘Sweat more in training, Bleed less in war’. Make no mistake, a rugby league (and union) field is war, so the more sweat in training the less blood on game day.
Businesses do not practise enough. Sales is the prime example. Salespeople are often subjected to the most training in a business yet getting them to role play and ‘practise’ their sales pitches and processes has proved to be hard. They might do it once or twice in a 2-day training session with the other salespeople, but it does not ever in my experience become a routine, a way of getting ready and continually improving their performance.
Contextualised creativity
The best players are always creative, they seem to be able to see more than anyone else, they see the gaps opening before they open, and they always seem to have time others do not. To quote ice hockey great Wayne Gretsky ‘I skate to where the puck will be, not where it is now’.
In a game dominated by process and physical power on the back of great athletic skills, the teams that have in them the ability to see and exploit an opening before it opens, requires not only a creative individual, but a team that operates in such a manner that they can adjust on the fly, almost without speaking. It is the sporting equivalent of improv jazz, where each player is a master of their own instrument, while being able to improvise within the context of the piece that is being played by the group.
Team Execution & individual Accountability
The foundation of execution is the ability of the players to execute the plays they have practised and practised under the added pressure of game day. At the same time, they must be able to anticipate and smother the offensive plays being run at them by the opposition.
Core to excellence in execution is the accountability of individuals to play their part in the execution of the plays.
On one hand, the team wins or loses, on the other, individuals in successful teams are held accountable for their part of the execution, and the parts and performance of each individual player is transparent to the whole team.
In the great commercial teams, I have seen that this circular motion of team performance and individual accountability is the glue that holds together the ability to perform under pressure and deliver superior results.
Resilience
No success comes without its fair share of knocks along the way. It is the way the teams and individuals pick themselves up from the knocks that show the true nature of the competitive spirit.
When Melbourne was well beaten by lowly rated St George in the last round of the premiership, the pundits wrote them off as able to be the winner of the 2020 premiership. Favouritism went to Penrith, who had played an unbeaten run of 16 straight games in the lead up to the grand final. Melbourne came back to win the final handsomely. Resilience plus!
Rarely do I see resilience built into the operating processes of businesses. Almost always they hide after a setback, failing to learn from the problem, and then able to adjust their approach and go again.
Discipline
Discipline comes from focus of the individual and the team, mutual accountability, and the determination to finish. Whether this be one play in a range of plays, or a whole season of games, the discipline holds. Everyone knows their individual role, and the contribution it makes to the whole team, so it is the combination of both that delivers the outcome.
The level of discipline shown by the teams under the coaching of the ‘B’s’ is greater than that of their opposition, both on and off the field, in every aspect of their performance.
Scorekeeping
In the absence of a score, how do you know who won? Every competition relies on keeping score, not just as a means of assisting team and individual accountability, but to also deliver a sense of shared purpose.
While it is true that not everything that matters can be easily measured, it is also true that over time, the drivers of superior performance become obvious, and it is possible to generate measures of these leading indicators of performance, and tracking trends over time is enlightening.
Again, I am sure the ‘B’s’ track game scores (indeed, when Melbourne loses, the frustration and passion of Bellamy is often on show) as well as a range of leading indicators of future performance. Why else would the players be wearing distance trackers during practice. And practises be videoed and played and replayed?
Commercial scorekeeping is generally piss-poor. The score that generally counts most is the bottom right corner of the P&L. Unfortunately for many, this number is only an outcome of a whole range of factors, that if left unscored, will not deliver the profit numbers.
This has been the last post of a year best forgotten. Having said that, the lessons from the year, if heeded will lead to a better future than would otherwise have been the case. We Aussies have demonstrated a depth of resilience that might surprise some. Long may it continue.
Have a safe and merry Christmas, thanks to those who have read, shared, and commented on my rantings over the year, and I will ‘see’ you in 2021.
