Steve Hansen led the All Blacks to a World Cup by building a structure where players drove their own standards. He empowered Richie McCaw to grow after a 2007 loss and had Dan Carter lose 2 kg to fix recurring calf injuries. His job was setting the environment, then getting out of the way.
When you think of good leadership, what comes to mind?
I guess the first thing for me about leadership is being able to lead yourself. I think that's where it starts. So for us and any of the teams that I was involved with, I expected everyone to be a leader.
You know, and that looked like being able to organise yourself, being able to prepare well, to be able to just do the things 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. If you've got.
The ability to do that now, not everyone does.
You have to grow that like. One of the greatest leaders we ever had was Richie McCaw, but he also was accused of being one of the worst. You know, we lost the World cup in 2007.
Nothing to do with how he played, but a lot of with how we conducted our preparation for that World cup really. But because we weren't successful, he was seen to be not successful. What came from that is adversity was he was determined to be the best he could be. So he grew, he become more demanding.
Leaders set the environment. 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. And it sounds pretty simple, but I was in the police force for a number of years and we'd have sergeants. I never went any further than constable, but we had sergeants who were brilliant sergeants. Then they became senior sergeants and they were terrible because they thought they had to be different. And what made them great leaders as sergeants was still going to make them a great leader as a senior sergeant, but they thought they had to be different.
So having a plan on how you want to lead. So do you want to be a dictator? Do you want to be an empowerer or do you want to be a combination of both?
Have you got flexible thinking? It's not always important that it's your idea. Can you be flexible enough to hear other people's ideas? How good are you at adapting in the moment or adapting to what's happening around you, the conversation you're having? Often hear people Say, oh, you know, I've got an open door policy. And then you speak to the staff and they go, we don't go in there because one person went in and he or she screamed our heads off. So shit, we're not going back there.
So, you know, and reflect on it too. I reckon good leaders will take the time to reflect. How did I go in Leading the people I'm trying to lead. And when I say, you know, you empower them. Like for me, my job in the All Blacks was pretty simple. I just sort of helicoptered over the top. But we had a whole station of different groups. So we had the players group, which Karen and Richie were the two captains during my time, were the main captains. We had a mental skills group which included the medical and so forth and Gilbert and Ochre ran that. We had logistics and commercial, which Darren Shand ran. And then we had the coaching team. And I wanted Fozzie to run that rather than me run it because I wanted him to grow a voice and my job was to make him better so he could come over and at some stage maybe take over the team. So in that, my responsibility was to make sure everyone was tick it along quite nicely and not interfere too much. So my plan or my theory was, okay, I don't need to do anything until such time as I can see something that's not going to help the team be better. So everything I worked on was, is this going to make the team better? If you could do something during the week that wasn't having a massive risk or reward for Saturday, then you didn't have to tell me about it. If you were going to try and change something that we'd never done before, which could have a detriment or a positive outcome on Saturday, then I wanted to know about it because I wanted input on that. I had to know or have enough knowledge to be able to have conversations with all those people. So your leader, your top leader needs to understand the business or the game they're in. As an example, our strength and conditioning guy, a guy called Nick Gill, probably the best I've ever worked with and been lucky enough to work with some good ones. So he was really great. But we had a player called Dan Carter, you might remember him.
He started pulling a calf all the time and we couldn't work out why. And so, I don't know. A bit of my background is horse racing. I grew up on a farm and my father was a trainer as well as a dairy farmer, so understood the mechanics of horse racing. So Biomechanically, Danny's not the greatest. So I knew that from horses, if they weren't, they could still run faster if they had bent knees, but they just couldn't do it for a whole lot of years and they couldn't carry extra weight. So I went to Dan, said, what? When was the last time that you didn't pull your calf? And he goes, oh, beck. And such and such. A date. And I said, oh, yeah? What weight were you? And he goes, oh, I was only 93ks. And you've all seen him in the jockey heads. He's not carrying any extra. So.
I said, well, what are you now? And he said, oh, I've put a bit more muscle on. I'm 95, so. Oh, yeah, okay. So then I went to Gilly and I said, why don't we take 2k off him and see if he stops pulling his calf?
And we discussed it. So we did. We took the 2k off him. He never pulled his calf again.
So that was my job, to have enough knowledge to be able to be a nuisance, but also be a help. And, you know, you get a lot of accolades for what we did, but it was a team, you know, total team.
What's the word I'm looking for? A team effort, you know, to get that group of people to play as well as we did. And it's the same in business. Like, you can be the head honk show, but you're not going to be any good if you don't let your other leaders lead and you do what you do well. Thank you.
