From Good to Elite: The All Blacks’ Leadership Blueprint

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to One to One with James Laughlin. I'm a former world champion and now I work with and coach professional athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of billion dollar companies. I'm going to share with you in this episode some of the insights and strategies, some of the tools that I use with my clients. Every week I'll bring you an insight, an action or a tool that will help you go from great to to greatest. My mission is to cut through the noise and help give you the tools that truly transform your mindset and help you to take the right actions towards your desired outcome. So let's dive in. Today. You give me a few minutes of your time and I'm going to share with you some of the insights from the leaders of the All Blacks, arguably one of the greatest teams across all sports, across the history of sport. Now recently I had an event where it was myself, Razor Robertson, who's the current head coach of the All Blacks, Gilbert Anoka, former mental skills coach and Sir Wayne Smith, former assistant coach of the All Blacks and of course head coach of the Black Ferns. All of them are world class, all of them have won world championships and all of them have helped build high performance. So we had an event just a few weeks back and it was a three or four hour breakfast event. We raised some money for an amazing charity called Conductive Education here in New Zealand. And thank you to everyone that did attend that. If you're listening, I deeply appreciate you. We raised close to $60,000 that morning for an amazing, amazing outfit. So I wanted to share with you, the listener, some of the lessons, some of the learnings, some of the takeaways. And you know, there was so much to take away. But when I look at how these leaders operated, there was a couple of themes that kept coming up. Okay, number one, you're going to laugh at this one. Humor. They all exemplified this degree of humor. They all engaged in humor. They were self deprecating, they wound each other up. They talked about some of the tough times they've been through in their careers. Just like you, you're going to go through tough times if you haven't already. It's coming your way. I've got to be real life is not just a plain sailing thing. So they talked about the importance of humor and not only talked about it, they demonstrated it. So I want you to think about in your career how much time and space you make for joy, happiness, pranks, banter, the good stuff. Because when they talked about that, they talked about how it brought the team together, how it helped them traverse tough times. You know, Sir Wayne Smith talked about one time where he got letters in his letterbox when the team wasn't performing well. And some of the stuff was just vitriolic. But he could laugh about it and he laughed about it with his wife. And humor is so important. I had Jamie Pinell on the show, former New Zealand SAS trooper, and he said the two values in the SAS are humor and humility. So it's interesting that these top performing teams, both military and sport, really value humor. So I'm going to challenge you to think about what you're doing today to involve humor in your life. And when the next challenging thing comes your way, could you look at it through? How could I laugh about this? There's that idea of the 10, 10, 10 formula, you know, 10 minutes from now, how will I think about this? 10 days from now, how will I think about this? And 10 months from now, and in 10 months from now, if I'm laughing, why can't I laugh 10 minutes from now? So just putting things in perspective, okay, next big thing that comes to mind that they shared was the sense of belonging. Now everybody wants to know, how do I become the best? How do I become the world champion? How do we win the thing? How do we get more money? How do we grow? Stop. How do we create more belonging? Because when people feel like they belong, they perform better. They feel like they have a seat at the table and that they're valued. So instead of investing in all this technology and AI, we, well, we've got to do that too to some degree. But how about we invest in creating a sense of belonging? Now when I go in and deliver high performance workshops with teams, sometimes it's a one off, other times it's over months and even years. For me, it's about helping them co create a playbook of belonging. Because every company's different. What the All Blacks do is different from the electricity company in Auckland, which is different from the Scott based team in Antarctica, which is different from the home loans company in Sydney. So I like to help co create what belonging actually looks like for them. Why? The surveys, the research, the data shows that when there's a deep sense of belonging across an organization, engagement increases, staff retention increases and therefore outputs improve as well. There's no shortcut to creating belonging. But I promise you, it is easy to do when you get clear on what makes your people feel like they belong, you can do it all day long. So that was the other thing that I really took away. So if you're in a team, how do you create that belonging? Every person gets to add to that, whether you're the CEO, the director, the rookie on the ground, you know, middle management, it doesn't matter. Everyone has to play their part in creating that sense of belonging. Now the other thing that I wanted to share with you that was just really abundantly clear was this radical clarity of success. You know, Razor Robertson, current head coach of the All Blacks, talked about what his vision is for the team. Now as an Irishman, I'm thinking, goodness, Ireland's got to step up if they stand a chance against Razor at the World cup coming up in a few years time because Razor's very clear on what he wants and what success looks like. And talking to both Gilbert Anoka and Sir Wayne Smith, same thing across their years of performing at that high level, they were just really clear on what success looks like. So are you clear, are you radically clear on what success looks like? For those of you that will read my book and link is in the show notes thehabitbook.com, you will know when you get that, that the first section, the first habit of high performers is getting radically clear. If you don't know what you want, don't start, don't start the wheels of motion, just get clear on what the destination looks like. You might not know exactly, but let's at least have an overarching destination. You know, get the color right, you might say blue, but you know, you might not know what shade of blue. Halcyon, Azure, Royal Light, Baby, all. There's all different types of, of blue. But get clear on the color. Let's get radically clear on what success looks like there. And as you start taking those steps towards blue, whatever your outcome might be, the shade can change as you change and as data changes and as the world changes. We've got to be flexible, but we've got to be clear on what the end looks like. That was something that really stood out for me. With these three guys, when we were chatting and sharing ideas, clarity of outcome is absolutely crucial. Now, the last thing I'll share with you is they didn't suffer fools. There's no time in high performing organizations and teams to suffer fools. So if people are messing around, underperforming, you've got to address it. You've got to get clear that they're on the bus, they're heading in the right direction, everyone's rowing together. If they're not, you've got to be clear. You've got to be direct, candid, maybe help them find another bus. But to achieve that top 1, 2 or 3% of performance, we've got to be really clear with our communication. Hold high standards. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. So don't walk past standards and go, yeah, that's good enough. She'll be right. No, she won't. We've got to set standards up here and we've got to maintain them. So off the back of that morning came away and started reflecting on those things. For my own life, for my own business, for my clients, and setting the bar and getting radically clear, keeping humor in there. So I hope that these insights have served you today, short and sweet. But I promise you these insights will make a difference. Which one of them will you implement today? And if this has been valuable for you, please share it with someone who might also benefit from it. But for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. Thanks for tuning in to Lead on Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about leveling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.