VI

WHĀNAU
—— Ā muri kia mau ki te kawau mārō, whanake ake, whanake ake.
Hold to the spearhead formation of the kawau.

NO DICKHEADS
Follow the spearhead
Taranaki, New Zealand
A flock of birds – kawau, a kind of cormorant – carve a graceful V across the breaking day. One bird
leads, another follows, another takes the lead, in an endless synchronized support system, much like
the peloton of professional cyclists.
Ornithologists say that flying this way is 70 per cent more efficient than flying solo. If a bird
falls out of formation, it feels the wind resistance and rejoins the flock. Should one fall behind, others
stay back until it can fly again. No bird gets left behind.
It is an extraordinary organizational dynamic – and the perfect metaphor for the Māori concept
of whānau.

˜
Whānau means to ‘be born’ or ‘give birth’.
For Māori, it means extended family: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, children and cousins.
In the vernacular, it has come to mean our family of friends: our mates, our tribe, our team.
In Māori mythology, whānau is symbolized by a spearhead, an image derived in turn from the
flight formation of the kawau. A spearhead has three tips – but to work properly, all the force must
move in one direction.
And so it is with whānau.
For a whānau to function, everyone must move towards the same point. You are free to choose
the course you take, but the spearhead is most effective if you all work together.

Fly in formation. Be of one mind. Follow the spearhead.

This is the ‘being of team’ and the essence of the successful organization.

˜
‘We need people who will work hard and work hard for their brother,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘We know
that is a pretty good formula – because that way you get contribution.’
The definition of a great team, says Kevin Roberts, the global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, is one
that is ‘in flow more frequently than the opposition’. For collective flow to occur, he believes,
organizations must be of ‘one mind’.
The legendary Phil Jackson, former head coach of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, calls this
the ‘Group Mind’ and it was the basis of his extraordinary coaching career. When Jackson first
brought Michael Jordon to Chicago, he was the league’s top scorer in each of his first six seasons, far
and away the best player in the NBA, yet he had never won a title.
‘A great player can only do so much on his own,’ said Jackson in his book Sacred Hoops. ‘No
matter how breathtaking his one-on-one moves, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone
else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.’
‘This is the struggle that every leader faces,’ Jackson says. ‘How to get members of the team
who are driven by the quest for individual glory to give themselves over wholeheartedly to the group
effort.’
 Jackson would quote Rudyard Kipling:

For the Strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

‘On a good team there are no superstars,’ Jackson’s mentor, Red Holzman, taught him. ‘There
are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team . . . they
make sacrifices; they do things necessary to help the team win.’
The results of Jackson’s egoless approach speak for themselves. When Michael Jordon retired
in 2003 he had won six championship rings and was voted Most Valuable Player in all of those finals.
Turning his ‘me’ into a ‘we’ had alchemized his reputation into trophies and medals. Being a great
team player made him a great player, the greatest of all time.

The strength of the wolf is the pack.

˜
‘It’s everything in a team, to be honest,’ says All Black legend Andrew Mehrtens. ‘It’s about thinking
about the team’s interest before yourself . . . if it’s not good for the team, don’t say it and don’t do it.’
‘We’ve all got our certain role to play,’ he says, ‘and if you can have that respect within the
group, then you are going to go a lot further . . . if the guy like a goal kicker can respect the ability, the
difficulty, of the guy throwing into the lineout, or how tough it is for a guy to hold in the scrum on the
right-hand side . . .’

˜
Owen Eastwood says that if the first steps in developing a high performance culture are to:
1. select on character,
2. understand your strategy for change,
3. co-write a purpose,
4. devolve leadership and
5. encourage a learning environment.

The sixth and arguably most important step is to begin to turn the standards into action. The best
way of doing this is through peer-to-peer enforcement. ‘Respect as a value is vague,’ says Eastwood,
‘but has impact when players decide this means no phones in meetings, no talking over each other,
etc. Values alone risk becoming wallpaper and meaningless.’ But, he adds, ‘defining and enforcing
these standards needs to be from bottom up.’
‘These are young guys, they are on television, they’ve got lots of money, they’ve never had it
before, birds are after them,’ says Anton Oliver, ‘but if you’re not reflecting the team culture . . . boys
will fuck you.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
It used to be called ‘the back seat of the bus’, the natural hierarchy that developed within an All
Blacks side and which was most easily seen in the seating arrangement on the team coach: senior
players at the back, rookies up at the front; non-All Blacks strictly not welcome.
 The senior members of the team would enforce the standards, because they were their
standards. In the old days, this was also seen in the Sunday Court Sessions, where senior players
would hand down fines, mostly liquid, usually instant. But the world had moved on and, as the All
Blacks management began to actively encourage peer-to-peer enforcement, the standards quickly went
from the back of the bus to the front of the mind.
In its simplest form, this involved the mentoring of younger players by the senior figures. It
involved the Leadership Group in collective decision making in areas such as: community
appearances, advertising approvals and which charity the team would support. It also involved the
Leadership Group being left (and trusted) to sort out internal problems within the team.
This came into play most vividly during the Rugby World Cup when two players, Cory Jane and
Israel Dagg, decided to have a big night in a Takapuna Bar. The next day, as radio commentators
screamed for their scalps, the hungover and sheepish pair were brought before the seven most senior
players and asked to explain themselves. For young men, at the prime of their lives, in the tournament
of their dreams, this must have been both mortifying and humbling. Later, they made a public apology
to the rest of the team and the case was closed.
As Bob Howitt writes:

—— This is a classic example of the dual management structure operating within the team: a
lecture from a grumpy manager wouldn’t have had half the same impact of the two
players as facing their peers had. Young men hate letting their peers and team mates
down, on or off the field.

Both players would go on to play prominent roles in the semi-final win against Australia.

˜
‘For everyone to go in the same direction,’ says Andrew Mehrtens, ‘you’ve got to have strong links in
the team. If there are weak links then you will have guys going off in different directions and that’s no
good for anyone.’
Which is why Wayne Smith invented the ‘Rugby Club’.

The being of team begins from inside. High standards must come from within. Leadership
works best when your team takes the lead.
‘The All Blacks,’ he explains, ‘are the most privileged club in the world . . . It’s a place you
have to earn your way into and it’s hugely exclusive.
‘I really felt that the Rugby Club would give us an opportunity for players to talk about the past .
. . be proud of where they come from, and who they are.’
Smith proposed to the Leadership Group the idea of a regularly scheduled social night in which
players would don their club jerseys and ‘have a quiet drink’ together, replicating the climate and
culture that originally propelled them into the sport. It was a huge success, a chance to laugh and have
fun and release themselves from the pressure.
‘To be able to work together, communication is the biggest thing,’ says Smith. ‘And I think that
comes from a team that has good links from off the field . . . a team able to spend time together and
talk to one another and be honest with one another. It’s incredibly important.’
‘You talk about handling expectation and handling pressure,’ says Graham Henry. ‘You talk
about leaders leading; players leading. You talk about the legacy and what that means . . . But I think
the other thing that was really important was the connection between people – and the greater those
connections, the more resilient and the stronger we were, the better we were.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.
As well as the bonding aspect, the Rugby Club also serves to reconnect the players with their
story, their roots, their whānau. The old club rugby shirts remind them of where they’ve come from
and the position they’ve reached, but also remind them to keep their feet on the ground.
It is a way of staying anchored, and to attach personal meaning to team purpose. And it is an
excuse to have fun. ‘Whilst there is a lot of pressure on them to enhance the jersey and pass it on in a
better state, if you enjoy the experience it actually makes it easier to achieve that goal,’ Smith says.
Fun, with a serious purpose.
To win.
The strength of the wolf is the pack.

˜
This kind of bonding process provides social capital – that is, the intangible benefit of closeness and
cooperation, which is trust. It also provides a collective intelligence, more heads being better than
one. But this sense of unity can be threatened by just one person.
An old Arab proverb says:

—— It’s better to have a thousand enemies outside the tent than one inside the tent.

There’s a similar Māori saying:

—— He iti wai kōwhao waka e tahuri te waka.

The All Blacks, meanwhile, strictly maintain the maxim they borrowed from the Sydney Swans:

—— No Dickheads.

No one is bigger than the team and individual brilliance does not automatically lead to
outstanding results. One selfish mindset will infect a collective culture.

˜
‘No Dickheads’ is the antidote to the leak, the bad apple, the enemy inside the tent. It extends to
selection – some of New Zealand’s favourite players have never made it to All Blacks status because
they are considered to be ‘dickheads’; others make it but are never invited back. It’s a powerful and
effective philosophy that helps maintain an exceptional environment.
One disaffected or selfish individual infects the group. Remove them and the group will cohere
and heal.
 No Dickheads.
Setting high standards – and putting the measures in place to maintain them through peer-to-peer
enforcement – is a critical component in successful team culture. In fact, all the coaches mentioned so
far – Bill Walsh, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Phil Jackson and Clive Woodward – began their
tenure by implementing a set of high, non-negotiable standards. These standards are how they
identified the expectations and set the ethos, the culture, of the team.
There is tremendous overlap in their philosophies and that of the All Blacks.
Vince Lombardi says, ‘as a leader you’re being watched 24 hours each day’.
The All Blacks say, ‘You’re an All Black, 24-7.’
Bill Walsh installed ‘an agenda of specific behavioural norms – actions and attitudes – that
applied to every single person on our payroll’.
The All Blacks say, ‘Better People Make Better All Blacks’.
Phil Jackson’s goal was ‘to find a structure that would empower everyone on the team, not just
the stars, and allow the players to grow as individuals as they surrendered themselves to the team
effort’.
The All Blacks had a dual-leadership model.
John Wooden said that a player who makes the team great is better than a great player.
The All Blacks say: ‘No one is bigger than the team.’
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins argues for the primacy of the ‘who’ before the ‘what’;
the ‘we’ before the ‘me’. He quotes Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: ‘You’re either on
the bus or off the bus.’ His research shows that ‘good to great leaders began by first getting the right
people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it’.
He implies you don’t have to be ruthless, just rigorous. As the saying goes, if you insist on only
the best, you very often get it. In the All Blacks they are both rigorous and ruthless; they insist on the
best and they always seem to get it.
As current coach Steve Hansen says, ‘Put your hand in a glass of water. Now take it out. That’s
how hard it is to replace you.’
The strength of the wolf is the pack.

No Dickheads
Whānau is your family, your mates, your team, your organization. For the whānau to move forward,
everyone within it must move in the same direction. This is the essence of team – working hard for
each other, in harmony, without dissent, submerging individual ego for a greater cause. This extends
to selection – No Dickheads – and the fostering of connections, trust and collaboration between all
levels of the organization. In this way people work for each other, rather than for individual glory. In
the All Blacks, high standards are fundamental and are enforced by the players themselves, who are
trusted to do the task. Success can be traced back to the connections between members of the team
and their collective character, something true of all winning organizations. Great leaders ruthlessly
protect their people, encouraging connection, collaboration and collective ownership, nurturing a safe
environment of trust, respect and family.