NZ Rugby's Team Playbook For High-Performance

✍️ Coming up in today’s edition:

1. One quick win: to build incredible trust in your team

2. One proven system: to craft a high-performance culture in your team

3. One million-dollar question: to sense check your company values

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1. THE FOUNDER OF HUMU SHARES A UNIQUE METHOD TO BUILD TRUST WITH HIS TEAMS

Trust is imperative if you want to build psychological safety in your team.

Every person on your team wants to feel like you have confidence in them to do the job well.

But how do you regularly build trust as the leader?

Steal this technique from Laszlo Bock (Co-Founder of Humu) 👇

Send an email to your team asking these 2 key questions:

1. What is the one thing I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? 

2. What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? 

This will send a large trust-strengthening signal e.g. “Please help me improve.”

Schedule in-person meetings to go over the replies, rather than on email. This way you will create a deeper bond with your team.

If you replicate this enough times, it will become contagious across your organisation - others will start to do this process too.

It will take you less than 5 mins to send that email and you could get 8x 15 min catchups done with your team over the next 4 weeks.

2 hours of your time = an invaluable trust-building within your team PLUS you might even learn some really valuable feedback!

2. A LEADERSHIP SYSTEM USED IN ELITE SPORTS WHEN A NEW MANAGER TAKES OVER

When you take over as a leader of a team, it can be daunting.

Here is a 5-step strategy used by world-class coaches from NZ Rugby, England Football, INEOS, British Cycling and many more.

1. Assessment: Analyse The Systemic Environment

As soon as you enter an organisation, go in with realistic awareness.

As humans, we are notoriously over-optimistic when assessing risk on a project that we would like to do.

When Manchester United’s new billionaire owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe took over, his brutal assessment of the state of the club was a great example of how to put this into practice.

He talks with real honesty about the poor state of the facilities here and then analyses the environment which then doesn’t single out any singular coach or player for the poor performances over the last decade 👇

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A smart tactic if you are in the process of accepting a new role, is to interview or send a survey to all key stakeholders about their expectations of you and the team before accepting the role.

NZ All Blacks rugby coach Brad Mooar told me that before he takes any major leadership role, he will send out surveys to the fans to get their input on what values and behaviours they expect from the players whilst also speaking with the board, key people within the club and any other stakeholders to make sure he understands how realistic their expectations are with the resources at hand.

2. Setup: Failing To Prepare Is Preparing To Fail

The majority of teams will ignore this stage and jump straight into execution mode.

There is a reason why in the PRINCE2 methodology, there is a project stage called Phase Zero. This is named this way as the output is more about how the team will work together rather than what they will be doing.

Bruce Tucker’s (1965) research on team performance has highlighted the following key steps to establish behavioural norms in this setup phase:

• Establish a clear and compulsive vision which the team can align

• Clarify key stakeholder relationships and agree on a plan to engage and communicate with them regularly

• Ensure you have the right people on your team with the right skills and the right attitude

• Agree ground rules as to how the team members will behave, both when they connect and when they meet outside the meeting to deliver the team objective

• Gain agreement for individual and collective accountability

Please never skip this stage 🙏

3. Communication: Like Your Life Depends On It

The impact of poor communication on workplace problems is HUGE:

• 72% of employees do not fully understand their company’s strategy due to poor communication (IBM Global C-Suite Study)

• 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause of workplace failures (ClearCompany)

• Poor communication costs companies with 100,000 employees an average of $62.4 million per year in lost productivity (Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report)

The key here is to maintain clear communication and actively encourage team dialogue to ensure clarity of understanding as soon as you start.

4. Resilience: Practise Makes Perfect

Your job as the leader is to build resilience so the team collectively learns how to adjust to problems such as shortage of resources, impending deadlines and changes of scope.

Resilience can be your competitive advantage if teams learn to thrive under pressure.

Look at this clip from Tiger Woods's dad on his unusual tactics that built up his resilience so that nothing ever phased Tiger in the big moments 👇

Think about a couple of methods that you can implement to prepare your team for when they come under collective pressure to perform.

5. Improvements: Embed The Marginal Gains

Studies have proven that great teams pay attention to continuous improvement.

This is the reason why Team INEOS and Dave Brailsford have been so successful by implementing the marginal gains theory.

Make sure you schedule time out of the delivery processs at regular intervals to examine how the team and processes have been working and agree ways of improving collectively.

3. WHICH EMPLOYEE WOULD YOU SEND TO MARS?

This is a very quick exercise that will help you define your team’s values.

Ok, so maybe Mars might be too abstract.

But if you were looking to set up another office in a brand new location around the world…

Which of your employees would you send, if your goal was to replicate the standards and culture of the current business.

No cheating (this can’t be you or the C-Suite) 😅

Now describe that person’s character in 3 sentences.

Those are your values.

That’s it.

I see a lot of companies try to codify the values from the top down. This is a mistake. Especially when your top performers in the team are a living representation of what your values should be.

Bonus point: tell that top performer how much you appreciate them this week 🙌 Recognition can often be more powerful than rewards!

MY FAVOURITE FINDS 🔗

For your performance:

• Michael Jordan’s interview on how he was able to eliminate fear under pressure (X clip)

• If NFL Quarterback Joe Burrow’s story doesn’t inspire you, I’ll eat my hat (TikTok)

For your team:

• How the little details like Lebron James’s locker tidiness will set the team standards (Miami Heat Head Coach)

• The GREATEST team comeback of all time at the 2008 Olympics (Michael Phelps)

For your health:

• The top 5 sports that correlate to you living longer (Elon Musk x Joe Rogan)

• Cristiano Ronaldo’s Whoop fitness scores broken down by the founder (Will Ahmed Interview)

Thanks!

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