Lead to Succeed: What it takes to be the best

By Craig Lewis

Craig Lewis is a well-respected sports psychologist, instrumental in the successful 2005 tri-Nations Rugby League campaign for the Kiwis. Building on his sporting success he has become a corporate motivational speaker and works with leading companies: Les Mills, Price Waterhouse, Deloittes, team McMillan, Briscoes, CocaCola Amatil and Farmers. Lead to Succeed has been written for sportspeople and businesspeople alike who are looking for strategies to up their game and put into practice the principles of self motivation and personal achievement practised by our leading elite athletes. With anecdotes and case studies to illustrate those key principles, this book will be an inspirational source of new ideas for those who strive to be the best, in their personal, professional and sporting lives. It is a book for those who lead, or want to be leaders, exploring the fundamental leadership qualities essential to success in sports and business. A book for anyone involved in the promotion of enhanced performance, using emotional intelligence as an underlying premise. Craig speaks professionally to large corporate groups and will be promoting is book as part of his ongoing schedule of engagements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730445654

Craig Lewis

Craig Lewis lives and works in Auckland, as an advisor to the Kiwi Rugby league team and a range of leading corporate clients across a broad spectrum of service industries. He has been a performance coach to national champions, world champions and world record holders in an 18-year international career. Previously a senior lecturer at UNITEC in Sports Psychology, Skill Acquisition and Coaching, he has a masters degree from the University of Western Australia.He has a young family and is actively engaged in a range of community projects and activities fostering young athletes, including soccer, lifesaving and athletics.

Book preview

1

WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

This book is the result of nearly two decades spent striving to enhance the performance of New Zealand athletes. It is a significant period of a life’s dedication to maximizing the potential of great sportspeople. Like any of life’s pursuits, it has had its setbacks, but more significantly it has had its highlights. It is the culmination of experiences that have seen otherwise ordinary New Zealanders scale the heights to become world champions and world record holders—the best in the world at their chosen sport at a given point in time. It is inspirational when you think about it—a book of starting nowhere and getting somewhere.

This is not a book about self-proclamation, but rather a book that honours outstanding leadership from inspired people with a story to tell. I simply trust that I can do their stories justice. It is also my story—a book based on a premise to answer one simple question: ‘Why?’

Whilst Lead to Succeed is not exclusive, it does focus largely around the achievements of two very different teams competing in two very different sports, separated by over a decade of time, but sharing some remarkable commonalities. Not the least of these commonalities is the teams’ almost inexplicable success accomplished against all predictions. Those two teams are the New Zealand short-track speed skating team of 1993, and the New Zealand rugby league team (the Kiwis) of 2005.

They are testament to the fact that skill and ability alone don’t ensure any person of certain victory. Were that to be the case, I can only say that I suspect neither of these teams would have stood atop the podium. But somehow, each managed to overcome their odds and climb their mountain. To what this can be attributed, one can merely speculate; there are many and various reasons that compel a person to achieve their ultimate dream. These performances must surely have encapsulated many of them. But the question remains: ‘What was it about them?’ In its barest form, there was a defined ownership or responsibility, a significant level of self-awareness, and a powerful ability to concentrate and focus attention. However, it would be too simplistic to dismiss these accomplishments as the sole reason behind these teams’ phenomenal performances.

Lead to Succeed is more than an assessment of some credentialed performances. It is a unique critique of the roles played in facilitating and inspiring largely underrated and understated athletes to attain their premium performance. It is a story of leadership assuring success where success seemed unlikely. It is a book dedicated to unearthing the environments and commonalities that underpinned these successes, and it is written in the hope that some (or many) of the principles outlined will assist you in your pursuit to do business better.

It is a book about two teams whose fight against the odds meant they had to improve. They had to do business differently—and by doing business differently they achieved what no-one thought they could. I trust it might aid you to develop your own continuous improvement. With emotional intelligence as its underlying premise, Lead to Succeed is for those who recognize the powerful blend of a viable product combined with vibrant, enthusiastic and empathetic people. I know we did!

Whether through direct reference or merely by inference, both the New Zealand speed skating team and the Kiwis understood the meaning of kaizen. If anybody within the five-man speed skating team knew of this business management principle, I would have to say they kept it close to their chest. We certainly never mentioned it, but everything about us was enveloped by it.

By simple definition, kaizen means ‘continuous improvement’, and if ever a team continued to improve, it was this team in preparation for the 1993 world championships of short-track speed skating (that manic Olympic pursuit race that seems as much about staying on your feet as it does about crossing the line first). Kaizen to this team went far beyond simple skill executions and tactical awareness. It incorporated everything about our very existence—our reflective processes, our interpersonal communications, everything.

In contrast, by the time I met with the 2005 Kiwis I was already a student of kaizen and attracted by its power. It was a term that sang to me—probably because of the immense parallels that existed between its implementation in post-war Japan and the situation of the war-torn Kiwis who had failed to win in any of their previous eight attempts against Australia and Great Britain. It was a term I knew could take us to a special place, if only we learnt to live by it. It encompassed my life’s work over the preceding two decades. It was the common thread that accounted for my successes and explained my failures, and I knew it was a word from which the Kiwis would find definition.

I believe both these teams were not scared to dream—to ‘think big’, if you like—regardless of how unlikely the big picture may have seemed. I think it is a tremendous indictment on our society that we ridicule the dreamer; it has probably been the greatest inhibitor to achieving some of our most memorable accomplishments. This is a pity, because those who failed to accomplish them will never get the opportunity to celebrate their accomplishments, as the speed skaters and Kiwis did.

If you want to talk dreaming, talk about the speed skating team, who were without a training venue, without a coach, without a common respect, without skating depth, but with the fury of an Olympic-sanctioned event to conquer. Dreaming? We were surely dreaming! But dreams do come true, particularly when you back them with a process, a sense of unity, and a will never to surrender.

And then there were the Kiwis, coming off a streak of matches without victory and in a city where success had eluded them for 46 years (the Australians were targeting their 15th consecutive victory in Sydney). When you start talking about winning the whole shebang—we also had not won a series against Australia since 1953—most people would recommend certification. But thinking big does not cloud thoughts. Simply put, in the absence of thinking big, all we were left with was the safety of minimum requirements, and neither of these teams was about minimum requirement. There was immortality to be achieved—and all we had to do in the first instance was believe we could achieve it.

Both the speed skating team and the Kiwis understood the importance of reflection and process-oriented thinking—the importance of identifying strengths in our game and areas in need of further development. By consolidating the strengths, we consolidated our most immediate avenue to success, and by developing the areas in need of further development, we honoured our pledge to ‘continuous improvement’. Both teams were relentless in the pursuit of their better performance, and both became increasingly more self-aware as a consequence of their reflections. By adopting a simple strategy of evaluating and recognizing daily achievements, both of these groups put themselves on the path to constant improvement.

It has been said that what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. Both of these teams became great as a consequence of a commitment to learn from the past and a process to acknowledge their learning. Everything about our days revolved around doing that which would make us greater and enhance our performance. Everything about our days involved focused attention, and our commitment to process-oriented thinking became the internal motivation required to achieve our goals.

These teams were empathetic in their approach to one another—heck, the Kiwis’ entire campaign was based on the values of family and brotherhood so inextricably linked to the qualities of empathy. And Brian McClennan is first and foremost an empathetic human being—a ‘great bloke’, as the Kiwi colloquialism goes. Graeme Norton is too, for that matter, as are so many of the unsung heroes that made up the Kiwis’ 2005 management team.

Empathy came naturally to our group, and success followed closely in its footsteps. We were friends long before we were colleagues. We recognized the need to build a rapport based on personal commonalities long before we could contemplate a resolution to the complex issues of our business. We discussed the importance of every player feeling a genuine empathy for their team-mates—the sort of empathy that sees a natural inclination to offer support to those in distress. And we were rewarded with a sense of comradeship that made us much greater than the sum of our individual parts. That this sense of empathy was prevalent within the Kiwis long before our intervention is undoubted, but I suspect our greatest achievement lay in our ability to develop it as an on-field strategy, which it always had the potential to be.

Empathy was also a hallmark of the New Zealand speed skating team, although unlike the Kiwis it wasn’t always that way. It is reasonable to suggest that the speed skaters were an incongruent group at times in their history, separated by internal feuding and dysfunctional relationships; ‘harmony’ was not a word symptomatic of their environment. But devoid of a designated coach, their very existence depended on their ability to interrelate with each other. By emphasizing the need to better understand and respect each other, they learnt how to maximize the collective knowledge they possessed. Without empathy, they were dead in the icy water.

Both teams had an ability to enjoy one another from a social perspective, but immediately click into the more intense requirements of the task at hand. Teams that have fun together can call upon a resource way beyond their individual talents, but only when the acceptance of task is well and truly appreciated. The speed skaters were a mix of personalities—some intense, some blasé, some quite complicated, and others of a much simpler disposition. With their individual differences finally resolved, they gradually learned to take pleasure in each other’s company.

They were a collection of diverse individuals sharing a common goal, and as time progressed we learnt to laugh openly at one another’s idiosyncrasies. Laughter became our closest ally. And the Kiwis were similar: ‘enjoyment’ was one of the eight core values identified in our mission statement. We had our humorists and we shared our laughs, but everyone understood their role within the environment and their responsibilities, and no-one relinquished their task when it came time to ‘get the job done’. And through it all, both the speed skaters and the Kiwis learnt a very important lesson: when it comes to performance, nothing exudes enjoyment like performance itself!

The Kiwis had led on every occasion in the 2004 Gillette Tri-Nations series of rugby league, but failed to win on any. In 2005, however, they had somehow managed to record a come-from-behind win against Australia, and had met a Great Britain challenge before putting them away too. So what had changed? Somehow, in the space of 12 months, the Kiwis had learnt to mobilize the ‘pressures’ that had paralyzed them, and turn them into positive actions and outcomes. It is a fact that teams who experience success base their success on a positive outlook, and invariably base that positive outlook on an environment of positivism and familiarity.

The speed skaters were the same. In their world record-breaking world championship final they took an early lead, only to relinquish that lead in the closing stages of the race. Throughout the race, however, their positivism had not waned, no matter how desperate their position appeared to be, and in the absence of panic and despair, the team maintained an unrelenting focus to forge a passing manoeuvre in the penultimate lap. That there was a familiarity between the speed skating world championship and rugby league Tri-Nations finals goes without saying, but I suspect there was an underlying premise that made this more possible. And that premise? It is no more complex than a few smiles and an ability to laugh.

Perhaps the real story in both of these successes lies in the supreme confidence that preceded them—somehow we simply knew we were going to win on both occasions. Both exemplified the state of mind known as ‘flow’: a state of being totally oblivious to setback. It is being totally cocooned in a positive mindset and a state of absolute concentration. It is engagement in an exceptionally demanding task, but with a minimal level of energy expenditure. And it is as real for high-performing sportspeople as it is for anybody moved to do their best, be they a rugby league player in a Tri-Nations final, a speed skater in a world championship, or a mechanic engrossed in the repair of a car. Fundamentally, I believe both the Kiwis and the speed skaters were able to achieve this state through two very real initiatives: first, our drive to make every facet of their performance as familiar as it could be; and second, our provision of an operating process that enabled them to know and substantiate mastery. By engaging people in new and challenging projects in which they feel supported, effective leaders can discover a way for those people to feel engaged in their work, with ‘flow’ being the outcome.

There was a very real ownership that hallmarked the accomplishments of these two very different teams. The 1993 New Zealand speed skating team was the most player-owned success story I have ever encountered. It had to be—we simply did not have a coach. We were the first truly empowered team to grace the New Zealand sporting scene. Fast forward to 2005 and the Kiwis. The development of important documents, such as the team’s vision and mission statements, and descriptions of role clarity, playing structures and post-match review forms, were fundamentally constructed by the players, or at least in conjunction with them.

In any case, the reality remained that once these thoughts were established, open discussion between coaches and players around critical points of consideration became the order of the day. Everything that made its way to finality was ultimately signed off by the player or players. People do not do their best by being told—they do their best when they have the strength of purpose to do it their way and are motivated from within. And both the New Zealand speed skating team and the Kiwis exemplify this fact exactly.

Those who have accomplished are worthy of our study. By emulating their process I believe we can emulate their success. I am an ardent fan of benchmarking—it explains much of my personal library and a good percentage of my (quickly evaporating) leisure time. And I am adamant that anybody seeking performance enhancement should do the same. If you don’t take the time to evaluate critically the characteristics of the best, you really are failing to maximize a most valuable resource.

The Kiwis focused on three very significant achievers, each of whom had a story to tell and a lesson from which we could learn. By benchmarking off a selection of sporting achievers, the Kiwis of 2005 and the New Zealand speed skating team of 1993 became something of benchmark teams in their own right. I believe any organization seeking their own excellence can achieve the same, if they only care to benchmark.

The Sydney Swans achieved greatness in the AFL (Australian Football League) Premiership of 2005, with a team proclaimed as ‘one of the most understated, underrated and largely unremarkable group of players to achieve the ultimate glory’. Their success was not founded on a unique arrangement of exceptional talent, but rather on a powerful sense of trust and an immense desire and passion to support each other—the very same qualities that would ultimately trademark the accomplishments of the Kiwis.

The New England Patriots forged an American Football dynasty by demonstrating an absolute dedication to their defensive efforts, and a willingness to ensure they would take ‘no shortcuts’. Like the Patriots, the Kiwis adopted a high-intensity defensive pattern to their play. Alternatively, the speed skaters proclaimed an edict to ‘never experience any sensation of pain or discomfort in competition that [they] hadn’t already experienced in training’. Like the Patriots, the Kiwis and the speed skaters proved their desire to take ‘no shortcuts’.

The Los Angeles Lakers achieved a similar sporting dynasty to that of the Patriots by defining a series of team values that enabled them to gain a collective greatness well beyond the individual brilliance contained within their player list. With calls of respect for each other, trust and collective responsibility as their catch-cries, they forged their way into history with a unique three-year reign that commenced in 2000.

Both the New Zealand speed skating team and the Kiwis functioned through the implementation of systems thinking and the need to introduce a more formalized process of operation. For both teams, this process involved the creation of dream, vision and mission statements, and it revolved around the formation of key strategies, such as philosophies of conduct, and team cohesion policies (critical additions to the smooth running of both organizations). Both teams relied on these strategies to make sustainable success a possibility. It was through this foundation of structure and strategy that their related visions became seemingly more possible.

Critical to the establishment of both their foundations was the establishment of ‘play books’ and the clarification of roles, in much the same way as a business depends on its strategic management plan to consolidate direction, and both teams created their own key performance indicators—an accurate method for measuring what’s really important on the journey toward the vision, mission and core values.

Whilst systems thinking is essential to the smooth running of any organization, being without a coach (and the potential instabilities it presented) meant systems became more than simply important to the speed skaters: they were downright critical. By having a clearly defined system of operation, skaters were able to focus their attention on skill developments, safe in the knowledge that the day-to-day running of the programme would look after itself. This systems thinking approach was paramount to their success. It is only when a formalized and fully accepted system is implemented that any organization—be it a business or a sports team—can confidently achieve sustainable high performance.

The emphasis on clear and open communication was a significant characteristic of both teams, and something that predisposed them to their respective accomplishments. Establishing expectations and guidelines for communication was seen as a pivotal initiative, with its associated skills of refined listening, staying expressive, providing quality feedback, and giving and receiving criticism constructively. Good communication skills were seen as a vital ingredient to team cohesion and performance enhancement.

Team-mates were encouraged to work consistently to improve their communication skills. Players were required to focus on listening to their team-mates, and to understand what the person was really saying and what he was really feeling. They were urged to recognize differences in their team-mates, and to adapt their expressiveness when communicating accordingly. They were encouraged to recognize how and what to express to their team-mates to inspire that person to their ultimate performance. Finally, players became progressively more alert to the properties of criticism (particularly relevant to the speed skaters who relied exclusively on a peer-based approach to identify faults and develop skills). Players learnt always to express criticism constructively, with recipients urged to receive criticism as a necessary step to correcting performance error or improving relationships.

But of all the commonalities shared by the speed skaters and the Kiwis, none is nearly as apparent as the unlikelihood of their accomplishments. Given no chance of success, they defied the odds. Whilst identifying exactly what enabled these teams to realize their remarkable outcomes is difficult, there are certain characteristics that predisposed them. First and foremost, there was a belief in their ability to attain the unattainable. But beyond this, the story of their successes can be summarized through the diligent pursuit of mastery over the four domains of sport: technical execution, tactical appreciation, mental application, and physical conditioning. Like sitting on a stool that’s missing a leg, they may have maintained balance for a short time if they had strength in three of the four, but eventually they would have faltered. By striving to attain mastery in all four of these facets, the impossible did in fact become possible.

A similar concept applies to effective leadership, and its relationship to the five competencies of Daniel Goleman’s ‘emotional intelligence’ framework: self-awareness (a realistic assessment of your abilities and a sense of self-confidence), self-regulation (the ability to handle and control emotions), motivation (emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate goal-setting), empathy (sensing the feelings, needs and concerns of others), and social skills (the ability to handle emotions in relationships). Like the sportsperson striving to achieve the impossible, developing a prominence in two, three or four of these competencies may provide a result, but not in the games that determine immortality.

Without competence in the five, a leader may outwardly appear to be on top of things, but inevitably their vulnerability is waiting to be exposed. Like the sportsperson at a world championship, the susceptible leader is at their most vulnerable when the pressure rises—when in pursuit of that big business contract, for example, with all its associated negotiations and stresses. Before you know it, their instability is exposed. Like sport, the impossible can be attained, but only by those with a diligent attention to the competencies that culminate in truly effective leadership.

Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many, and no book will ever capture them all—certainly not this book. But the commonalities within this book are the commonalties of prescribed success, although each recipe will always contain varying proportions of its ingredients. The challenge for you is to determine the appropriate proportions for your own unique recipe, the ingredients for which may lie somewhere within the remaining chapters that make this book whole.

CHAPTER CONSIDERATIONS: THE TOP 10

Kaizen means ‘continuous improvement’. It is a system that involves everyone, from senior management through to the cleaning staff. It encourages everyone in the organization to set ever higher standards of performance and to achieve new goals in terms of customer satisfaction, sales, productivity, and profit through its explicit focus on the attention to process rather than results. Effective leaders recognize kaizen as a critical leadership technique that revolves around a feeling of dependence on one another that culminates in respect for each other, mutual accountability and trust, collective responsibility, open and honest communication, and a power derived from a united pride in performance.

In order to achieve big, leaders must first not only think big, they must also feel big and substantiate big. Successful leadership is determined by the successful completion of the specific goals that a leader sets. Without a clear understanding of the big picture, leaders tend to focus only on the problems existing within their environment, rather than on the vision from which everyone can find definition. Moreover, without a feel for the big picture, leaders and their teams are prone to being swayed by minor setbacks that have little significance for the overall potential of the group. Leaders of quality know what they want, and know what the end will look like when they get there. It is through this comprehensive vision that they can implement the structures, systems and processes