As the great American College basketball Coach Rick Pinto so accurately put it: “Winning is a choice.”
Winning is not easy. If it was easy everyone would make the right choices and do it. When the brutal truth strips away the spin, the majority of sporting organisations are not willing to pay the heavy price demanded for trophy-winning success.
I am not talking about money.
The price to be paid is for the leaders to forget their egos and work to establish powerful relationships, based on trust, that drive organisational success. Trust does not have to mean friendship. In this instance trust simply means: “I know you are excellent at your job. I trust you to go and do it.”
Creating cultural trust will vary greatly for different teams in different sports. For example, NFL teams recruit exclusively from players developed in Universities or from other NFL franchises. Irish Rugby provincial teams are required to develop their own future senior players in pathways from as young as under-14.
NFL clubs focus on developing trust within their key recruiting relationships that supply their players, while Irish provincial teams focus on trusting the people within their academy systems.
What NFL and rugby teams do have in common is that they both require people across their entire organisations that possess a “Warrior” mindset. A mindset that is much misunderstood.
The Warrior mindset is highly alert, calm, mission-focused and in total control no matter the circumstances. A “Berserkers” mindset is the opposite. Coming from old Norse, a Berserker was a fighter raging out of control. Red cards and many boardroom yelling matches are caused by those who carry the mindset of the Berserker.
The Warrior mindset is a concept from Asian martial arts. It is best exemplified in the process developed by US special forces navy Seals. They train their seals to develop a mindset that remains in total control, relying on their training, while acting in the most deadly, violent and chaotic of environments.
Woven into long months of physical and tactical training, is the detailed hard work of educating each individual team member to be a master of their role within the mission. All of this under a leadership style that encourages feedback from the lower ranks to the decision makers on the team’s attacking plans.
Crucially, this rigorous and meticulous process builds deep interpersonal trust within the Seal teams. They trust their leadership, their training processes and their teammates. This trust is the fuel that powers the team’s performance.
The phenomenal training processes of the Seals have created a saying that “luck is the residue of preparation.” An example in rugby terms is a grubber kick behind a defensive line that bounces vertically off the grass and into the hands of a chasing team-mate. This does not happen by random chance. The perfect bounce occurs because the kicker has spent tens, if not hundreds, of hours, learning how to shape the way a ball bounces by crafting the ball’s contact with their foot.
For a rugby player, there is a long detailed list of what needs to be done that requires zero rugby skills
This is created because the kicker has made the choice to endure multiple practices of the highest standards.
The saying that practice makes perfect is a lie. Only perfect practice makes perfect. That is why excellent coaching is required for players to master the correct techniques. Only then can they take that knowledge and repeat it because repartition is the mother of all learning.
All of this requires discipline, which brings us back to the concept that success is a choice. A simple working definition of discipline that also comes from the Seal community is: “Doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, even though you don’t want to do it.”
For a rugby player, there is a long detailed list of what needs to be done that requires zero rugby skills. From the multiple requirements of physical fitness, injury management, and reviewing their own match performance before watching footage of their next opponent, all of these simply require that magical supplement that is free for us all to use called “BHW”.
Bloody Hard Work.
The most undervalued yet most integral part of every player’s BHW, which requires no rugby skill, is the mental preparation for the weekly contest. That is rejuvenating the Warrior mindset.
Counterintuitively, extreme mental focus has as its foundation in relaxation. Finding ways to decompress from the highly pressurised competitive environment, creates the ability to repeat high-intensity performances.
In the 1990s, the Australian Institute of Sport was an early adopter of the need for recovery. Their mantra was that “you cannot overtrain. You can only under-recover.” In other words, athletes, coaches, chief executives and presidents, all of those who have roles on match day, must take specific actions in their weekly plans for mental recovery before they can build towards the next performance.
Ice baths, saunas and massages are effective ways for the body to recover. Be it a mixture of meditation, going to the movies, working outside of sports or a meal at a restaurant, forgetting the world of pressure for a while, empowers the mind to be refreshed.
A greater challenge is how to regroup emotionally after the highs of a great victory or the lows of painful defeats.
Leinster’s loss to the Bulls in last year’s URC semi-final is the perfect example of a team’s inability to emotionally recover. The devastation dished out to Leinster by La Rochelle the week before in the Heineken Cup Final was still in their hearts and minds and hindered their performance a week later against the Bulls.
Crucially, the choice for teams to be successful is not just down to the coaches and players.
There is another mantra in professional sport that states: “Get your backroom organised and success will follow.” The “backroom,” which is imperative to success, starts with the presidents, chairpersons, chief executives and board members. Without exception, every successful sporting team that I have worked for or visited has had exceptional individuals in these roles. Those that failed did not.
My experience has been that there are no exceptions to this rule. Without excellent leadership from executives who also possess the Warrior mindset, long-term success on the pitch is impossible.
Every winning backroom setup I have experienced has contained leaders who worked at developing strong interpersonal relationships up and down their organisational chain.
Many times this required the leader to park their ego in their desk drawer. Great backroom leaders listen to their people, delegate responsibility and do not micromanage their team because they trust them.
The leader whose ego craves the quick fix will lay blame for a defeat anywhere but at their own feet
I have dealt with and witnessed far too many chief executives, chairmen and board members whose egos could not endure the hardship of building long-term success. I have found that giant egos often coexist with small minds. Minds that cannot endure the short-term pain that long-term planning in sport requires. This is because giant egos are too fragile to cope with the inevitable pain of defeat within that process
The leader whose ego craves the quick fix will lay blame for a defeat anywhere but at their own feet. They are the cancer that kills winning.
This is why after the opening weeks of the rugby season we see the usual giant clubs, that contain great leadership, at the top of Europe’s competitions.
Toulouse, Saracens and Leinster all lead their domestic competitions.
None of these clubs is there by chance. They are leaders because of hard choices made over many seasons. They possess the organisational trust and wisdom that creates intergenerational success.
All three clubs have outstanding chairmen, presidents, chief executives, coaches and players.
All three have a strong focus on their academies, aiming to create players who will graduate to their senior team and stay for their entire careers. All have coaches who have won multiple major trophies and have remained at the clubs for many seasons.
If all of this seems complex that’s because it is. Success requires constant stewardship over the network of key relationships and competencies across the entire organisation.
Creating high-quality environments where deep trust is the basis of the culture is exceptionally rare in sports and business.
To become an organisation with multigenerational success requires the leadership to make the monumentally difficult decision of choosing to follow the hardest road. Patience, dedication, humility, self-sacrifice and trust are all essential elements that leaders must embrace on this journey.
Winning is not easy. If it was easy everyone would do it.
