A short monologue from an All Blacks figure about leadership. The speaker emphasizes that leadership begins with self-leadership—organising and preparing oneself and meeting high expectations. With self-leadership in place, one can lead others; a healthy environment enables talent to grow, while a poor environment stunts development. The speaker advises having a plan for how to lead when given the opportunity.
First thing for me about leadership is being able to lead yourself I think that's where it starts for us and any of the teams that I was involved with I expected everyone to be a leader and that looked like being able to organise yourself being able to prepare well to be able to just do the things that on and off the field that were expected of you. We didn't have a lot of rules in the All Blacks but we had high expectations and some of them were non negotiable and others were but once you start to be able to lead yourself then you can start to think about leading other people so if your environment's good your talent can blossom and grow if your environment's a little bit stagnant or a bit rotten people aren't going to grow in it so I think the key thing is lead yourself when you are given the opportunity to lead others make sure you've got a plan on how do you want to lead.
