World view helps Tigers winAndrew Clennell
The Australian
26 September 2019The catchcry was “eat ’em alive” and it encapsulated a mentality at Richmond that was equally ferocious on the football field and described the often bitter infighting in the boardroom and with its supporters.
Yet the ruthless Richmond of the 1970s and early 80s that then turned into the laughing-stock of the AFL for two decades, has been replaced by a group more attuned with phrases like “inclusiveness” and “authentic leadership”. The players are practising meditation and mindfulness while staff measure success not just in terms of wins and losses on the field.
“’Eat ’em alive’ was always about (beating) the opposition but then you saw some rash decisions made in the past that had people saying ‘they are eating their own or turning on their own’,” says Peggy O’Neal, the diminutive coalminer’s daughter from Virginia and Melbourne superannuation lawyer who has been Richmond president since 2013.
“We’ve come to realise that … you make the best decisions you can, and you need to make decisions for the long-term. You have to build a premiership club and team … unlike old days when you’d try quick fixes.”
On Saturday the Tigers will try to win their second grand final in three years, having broken a 37-year drought in memorable circumstances in 2017, a year after the board withstood a push to topple it and after they kept an embattled coach. In the past, there would have been bloodletting. Instead, there was patience.
The Tigers are warm favourites to beat Greater Western Sydney and have their swagger back, with more than 100,000 members — the most of any AFL club — and are racking up big multi-million profits.
Behind the scenes though, Richmond have been changed forever by using leadership techniques and lessons learned and gleaned from around the world. In particular, it is the more than $22,000 the club shelled out in late 2016 for then-embattled coach Damien Hardwick to fly to Boston at the beginning of the Massachusetts winter to attend an “Authentic Leader Development” course at the famed Harvard Business School.
“Was it money well spent? Yes, but only because there was a coach who understood and felt deeply it would make a difference in making a better team and a better him, and it has,” O’Neal says. “Coaches spend so much time on professional development, which is important, but the personal development side is overlooked. Maybe a coach is a teacher, so it is how they teach. So to Damien’s credit he went and soaked it in and it has made a difference in how we act.”
It was during that crucial week that Hardwick realised he had to change his leadership style to get the best out of his team, stop letting losses get to him, micromanage and overcoach his players. He learnt on the course to be more aware of his strengths and shortcomings, and how people should put the results of the entire organisation ahead of their own ego. It was also about being unafraid to show emotions and vulnerability to players and staff.
That manifested itself in what Hardwick calls “hero hardship highlight” sessions, taken from a book by former American football coach Mike Smith, You Win in the Locker Room First. The sessions had players and staff sharing stories about who their hero was, a hardship they had faced and a highlight of their life.
O’Neal says: “The connection is everybody being able to be themselves. It makes it a better place to come and people are happy to come. It doesn’t make an easier place but it makes it a place where you can fulfil your potential. That’s not just in football, that is across the entire organisation.”
Assistant coaches were sacked and a management reshuffle brought in a key addition in football manager Neil Balme.
On-field results have followed as star players such as Dustin Martin and captain Trent Cotchin have bought into the new mentality.
Tigers chief executive Brendon Gale quotes American leadership and management guru Simon Sinek when discussing how sports clubs such as Richmond have to define their purpose: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
The “what”, Gale says, is definitely still all about winning football matches: “ultimately, footy is the most important thing we can do. And we can never lose sight of that”.
And the “why” is existing “for a deeper purpose. It is that purpose we define as connecting to thrive and win”.
Gale says he knows the purpose-led strategy is working because he sees “buy-in” from members and commercial sponsors who also work with the club’s community programs, including the adjoining Korin Gamadji Institute at Punt Road headquarters, where young indigenous people receive vocation training.
It also helps to have a star player like Martin, with whom O’Neal will exchange her usual text messages before the grand final. “He says the same thing ‘we’re going to win’. Which is good, and it makes me feel calm,’’ O’Neal says.
“And hopefully ‘eat ’em alive’ is just beating GWS on Saturday.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/afl/world-view-helps-richmond-tigers-regain-their-stripes/news-story/232b7f1758d63971810c728ced556dcb
