Lesson #13 - The game does not give up its rewards easily
Playing at the highest level isn’t pressure, it’s a reward”.
Bill Shankly – Legendary Manager of Liverpool FC
It is a quote I wrote down many years ago, which I found both challenging and comforting.
As I write it, I am immediately taken back to a place.
Something I experienced many times.
I am driving away from a game when our team had been beaten badly, not our first loss, in fact, we no longer look like winning.
In football, as an experience, losing is plainly not unusual. For every game, there is a winner and loser. But then some losses demand questions be asked and answered. You know the games. Your team has been so reduced by the opposition the loss now feels personal.
It was the home games I remember most. Driving out of the MCG with Richmond or Melbourne, or Subiaco Oval with Fremantle. The matches played in front of your people. Those who had aligned their identity to ours, often having no choice in the matter, anointed with a club before they’d met their grandparents. It felt as though we had dishonoured them.
They came to watch even though we were unwatchable.
When you get in the car, you immediately turn off the radio to save yourself from the public postmortem. You have just left the private version of this in the player and coach’s rooms. The inner sanctum conversations with those who actually have their hands on the levers.
As you talk to them, you feel devoid. This is when you are expected to find the right words, to soothe and find a way forward. Yet you have none, and whatever you say feels empty and hackneyed and does nothing to change the mood or move the dial.
In the now silence of your car, an inner voice starts telling you stories. You refer to yourself in the third-person, not by asking questions but by making accusatory statements.
“Cameron, I think you are fucking the whole thing up”.
And I know I am not alone in this view. Fingers are being pointed in my direction, and all I am doing is joining the chorus.
One time, I voiced this view out loud as I left the drove away from the ground. I was CEO of Fremantle Football Club, and we had been beaten badly in a game we expected to win, and the gap between performance and expectation was getting wider by the week. The words left my lips, and my wife Cecily, sitting in the passenger seat, heard me.
She said nothing.
There was silence for the rest of the trip home.
When we got home, car in the driveway, house dark, she said quietly, “Please don’t say that again”, and before I could respond, she said, “Please don’t think that again”.
Cec went inside, and I sat in the car. Alone and in the dark.
I proceeded to sulk and feel sorry for myself. My whole world, everything I cared for, seemed to be turning in on me, and I was overwhelmed by my own thoughts. Soon I started to feel the first pangs of shame.
“Playing at the highest level isn’t pressure, it’s a reward”, I reminded myself. I was in a position of absolute privilege, playing a leadership role in the game I loved and a club that had captured my heart.
I once heard the quote, ,”If you are underthinking, read; if you are overthinking, write”. It was time to put pen to paper.
I dug out a notebook from my bag, flicked on the light inside the car, and started writing. Soon I was filling pages, asking myself questions, and then attempting to answer them.
At the top of the page, I wrote a Neale Daniher quote from our time together at Melbourne FC some years earlier when we narrowly missed playing in the Grand Final:
“The game does not give up its rewards easily,” he said to the players after we lost a Preliminary Final.
I soon realised how indulgent and selfish my mindset was. We had moved from Melbourne a few years earlier for me to take this role, thousands of kilometres from family and friends, totally disrupting our lives and those of our children. Here I was sooking, dishonouring the role, my family and their sacrifices.
Blame finds friends easily, particularly in an environment where opinions are many. The most insidious form of this is self-blame, and here I was, as a senior, experienced CEO, joining the singalong.
Now back inside our East Fremantle home, with a replay of the ‘unwatchable’ game on the TV in the background, I read back over my notes. I circled two thoughts, a question, and the answer I wrote.
The question: “What does the role expect of me?”
The answer: “To be a maker. A maker of sense, meaning and place. To do this, I need to be a maker of space, as I am now, with this pen and this paper.”
Leadership is a private and public pilgrimage, particularly in elite sport. It will always demand personal transformation, but also require you to learn out loud.
I needed to build my ‘inner game’, a form of leadership consciousness, to develop my ‘outer game’, my leadership capability, the latter having been my entire focus until now. It would be a process of constant transition with no finish line. There will be loss and gain with each transformation, and the truth may well set us free but will most likely make us miserable in the meantime.
Good leadership is its own reward when you find it, and it is well worth the journey of discovery.
Having undertaken this exercise, I never drove away from a game, thinking or repeating those words.
I knew there would be times when the game would test me to the limits of my experience and capability, and I would make many mistakes. At no stage, from this point onwards, did I not believe I was the right person for the job.
This was the moment my leadership attitude changed and, years later, became the catalyst for the work I now do with leaders.
Leading is never about riding in on your metaphoric white horse as the person with all the answers; it is most often the opposite. You are trying to create context and space for a better conversation, avoiding default responses, as they are most likely driven by your bruised ego, selfishness or anger.
I now encourage leaders to develop a philosophy as it relates to leadership, based on their experiences, learnings and beliefs, starting with the question, “What does the role expect of me?”
When I work with emerging sports coaches, including those with an ambition to be senior coaches in the AFL, I ask the question:
“What is your leadership philosophy?”
Almost immediately, they talk about how they want their team to play. The ball movement, defensive mechanisms, team structures, training plans and the like, all understandable, given this is the context of their involvement in the game since they started playing football as children.
But I am seeking much more from them, informed by the leadership experience I have described.
In my view, their ‘inner leadership game’ will define them as a coach. It will be required when they are literally swimming in complexity as they inevitably will be, their time of judgement. They will form a leadership identity and insight that will become their personal competitive advantage, and soon their team’s, much more than game tactics and styles of play.
I help them develop their leadership philosophy, as I do the CEOs and leadership teams I work with.
I am constantly evolving my leadership philosophy and have been doing so since I got out of my car in East Fremantle all those years ago.
I would like to share its current iteration as the next lesson in this exercise.
It is underpinned by six maxims:
Leadership is hard
People are human
Communication is important
Future is tomorrow
Change is different
Things get messy
The focus is “Our Leaders” and what it means to be “In the Arena” and reads:
Our leaders know that our team and organisation can never outperform its leadership.
To be better. Much better. To be the best we can be. To make a difference.
The role expects it of us. We honour it.
Our leaders will be vision-driven and values-based, asking “What’s possible?” and “What’s important?”, the two questions underpinning our culture and strategy, to embed our behaviours.
We make no small plans; they lack the power to stir people’s souls. There will be no small plans for us. It will be compelling. It will move you.
It will start with understanding the colour, richness and learnings of our ‘so far’ story and the possibility and hope of our ‘not yet’ story.
It will not be accidental, nor will it be easy, and it cannot be left to chance. If it is undefined, it is effectively unknown and therefore untapped.
The vision will require imagination, to ignite, motivate and bond individuals into one team and one organisation through the shared future and pilgrimage we will undertake together.
Real imagination requires courage to create a new order; therefore, we must cross a bridge of vulnerability. As Leonard Cohen says, “It is the cracks that let the light in”.
Our leaders then allow our people to colour in the rough image we have sketched out, knowing we are a better organisation with deeper connections when individuals bring their whole person to create nuance and develop a culture unique to us.
Our leaders align ambition with capability by answering two questions:
What does winning look like?
What do we need to be good at?
Our leaders are makers.
Makers of sense. They build belief in the face of complexity and ambiguity, knowing that if not for these conditions, we do not need leadership. They are our opportunity. We welcome them.
Makers of meaning. We are the cultural architects, fully intertwined and connected. It is our ‘us story’. Unique, intentional and purposeful.
Makers of place, the most important thing we can say to any of our people is, “You belong here”. You are one of us because of your character, capability, and commitment to connecting with who we are and why we do it.
Our leaders show up, drive and model expectations and standards, playing their roles with certitude, by making space for each other, building confidence as they grow, often from the learnings that come our way, whether we are looking for them or not.
It will get messy before it gets better.
We will not need to go looking for adversity. It will find us. An opportunity to expand. Test our leadership.
Mistakes will be made, and we will make them. By owning our mistakes, we grow, and by sharing them, others do as well. By ‘carving our learnings into the wall’, those who follow us learn also. This will be our legacy.
Our leaders act and communicate with conviction, but also pause, picking up signals and adapting quickly, not letting momentum, external forces and emotion make decisions for us. Yes, it will get noisy, sometimes deafening; this is what it means to be ‘In the Arena’. We will have a strong and trusted voice that resonates.
We cannot always ask for ‘more’, but we can ask for ‘different’.
Our leaders hold their nerve. Calm, brave, humble and compassionate. The role and situation expects this of them.
Our leaders are patient with results, but not behaviours. They set expectations and deliver consistently, putting together great teams who raise the bar even higher, not shying away from ambition or confrontation.
There will be clashing points of view. Task conflict is welcomed. Relationship conflict is not.
Not everyone will agree with what we do and how we do it and may even refuse to buy-in. It might not be for them. That’s ok, but in the end, choices will be made. You are either in or out; there is no space in between.
Our leaders value skill over talent. Skill is the application of talent with ethos and mindset. People who want to be great teammates. Role players.
It will be special to be on our team because it will be hard to be on our team.
Many will not make it, but they will be given every opportunity.
Our leaders enter the room as learners, not knowers. It takes curiosity to learn and courage to unlearn.
Our leaders are teachers, not tellers. We “build a child for the path, not a path for the child”.
Our leaders understand there will be required to make trade-offs to ensure the best use of scarce resources, but we will not trade-off our agreed standards and expectations. It is a simple expectation, stay ‘above the line’, and if we are uncertain where the line is, we talk about it without personal judgement.
Our clarity will come from connection.
Our leaders understand the difference between what seems to matter and what truly matters – winning shallow vs winning deep. There has never been a better opportunity for leaders to lead than now.
Our leaders have fun. There is so much joy to be had in what we do. We take the role seriously but don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Get all of this right, and the score will take care of itself.
In putting this ‘Leadership Philosophy’ together, I thank the leaders I have worked with and admired for inspiring my own leadership journey. I speak of you often. Some are no longer with us, and in all cases, I reflect on our conversations, but I also know we still had a lot of talking to do.
I also thank Owen Eastwood, Brene Brown, Seth Godin, Rick Charlesworth, Cody Royle, Pippa Grange, Pete Carroll, Dr Michael Gervais, and many others for ‘shipping their work’. Putting pen to paper and having the courage to make their thinking available to the world, inspiring both the idea and content of this evolving leadership philosophy.
As Keith Richards (reportedly) said of music, “It’s not what you take, it is where you take it”, or as I would interpret it, “Borrow freely, apply uniquely”.
Play on!
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