The Multiplier Effect

I am a ten-year-old boy running out onto the MCG at half-time in a Richmond vs Carlton game, playing my one and only game for the Tigers’ Little League team, when I jogged past Neil Balme, the imposing Richmond ruckman/forward.

"Get 'em, young Schwabby!" he calls out with a big smile across his broad face.

As a young boy thoroughly obsessed with the Tigers, unsurprisingly, the moment has stayed with me forever, a highlight of a very limited playing career.

I now reflect on this moment in a different way.

I think about the context.

During this era, Richmond wore its success, aggression and ruthlessness like a suit of armour. The supporters of all other clubs seemed united in their disdain for Richmond, and the Tigers promoted and thrived in this conspiratorial ‘us against them’ world of their creation.

A conversation with any Tiger supporter who experienced this era will not only focus on the fact that Richmond teams won, and often, but also on how they went about winning, and everyone went along with it. No apologies needed or expected.

My father, Alan Schwab, was the Richmond Secretary (now CEO) during this time, and the man who recruited Balme as a teenager from Perth.

Behaviours drive culture, and culture embeds behaviours, so it was at Richmond.

Pure intimidation was at the heart of the Richmond playbook, a psyche not restricted to the field of play; it permeated every aspect of the club.

The focus was not merely on making Richmond better but on diminishing and reducing their opposition.

No man represented this more than Neil Balme. When he calls out to the skinny-legged kid amongst 19 other kids racing onto the MCG, he is in the thick of battle in one of football's most intense rivalries, and Balme, the footballer, was always in the thickest form of the most physical of battles.

Richmond and Carlton had met in the 1973 Grand Final the previous year, with the Tigers victorious in a match where Balme stamped his reputation on the game in an infamous incident with champion Blues full-back Geoff Southby that still divides the clubs half a century later.

Reconciling what the football world interprets as two versions of Neil Balme has flummoxed the football world for generations.

In that brief interaction with me on the MCG, the player, who seemed as much a 70s guitar-slinging rockstar with his long, flowing hair and menacing disposition, calls out to the kid who was just one of the many "children of" who hung around the Richmond Football Club, and does what I now recognise as his leadership superpower.

Yes, Neil Balme is one of those people that you immediately feel good about. Charismatic with a big presence, quick and eager to find humour even in the most challenging situations, disarmingly intelligent in the most humble of ways. He cannot help but draw people to him, but somehow, he stays fully present with them with wonderful generosity and decency. Yet, as impactful as this is, what makes Neil Balme special is his wonderful capacity to make you feel good about you.

I felt this as that ten-year-old lad, and again 25 years later when I am CEO of the Melbourne Football Club and Neil is our Senior Coach, and again when I speak with him for this podcast.

When our professional lives intersected at the Demons, I had to deliver the message no CEO wants to, and no coach wants to receive, ending Neil's coaching tenure. The game's reality demanded decisions that would affect not just a team's fortunes, but a great football man's career.

Yet even in that most difficult of moments, when we revisited this time that we have never really discussed since, Neil displayed the same humanity.

"I understood what that meant," he reflected in our conversation. "I knew it wasn't you saying, I don't reckon you're any good. It was you saying, look, we needed to do better, and my job is to tell you."

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," Neil told me. "It told me there are other things to do in footy, and maybe you should do them."

The result was a leadership philosophy and presence that played a central role in crafting winning cultures at Geelong and Richmond for six Premierships.

At the heart of Neil's approach is a profound understanding of what makes teams exceptional: "In our game, if you don't have belief in yourself, if you don't have a big ego and really high standards, you're no good to us. But if all you are is about you, you're no fucking good to us.”

Neil describes it as ‘the multiplier effect’ – where collective success exceeds the sum of individual contributions – remains the most powerful force in team sports. And as Neil simply puts it:

"There's nothing else - it's only people helping each other."

Notebook ready.

Play on!