Round #03 - Team
What happened on the field in Round 3 didn't begin on game day. It began in the culture Craig McRae has built at Collingwood. A culture in which the conditions exist for a player to offer something of himself that is rarely asked and rarely given.
"In our game, if you don't have belief in yourself, if you don't have a big ego and really high standards, and if you're not prepared to drive yourself to be the best you can be — you're no good to us. But if all you are is about you, you're no fucking good to us."
- Neil Balme, a great football man, from his book ‘A tale of two men’
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Legendary New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick puts it simply. "Collecting talent is different from building a team."
Team should never be assumed. It is best to think of it as an outcome, something to be achieved. Earned, not declared.
A group of people wearing the same colours, sharing a boardroom, occupying the same line on an org chart, and having a collective title doesn't make a team.
It starts with an understanding as basic as what these colours, this boardroom, or this org chart and title ask of us.
Not the outcomes, but the individual and collective behaviours that create the conditions for this group to perform at its best.
To be a team.
And then, in time with our individual and collective learnings and growth, to be a great team.
And how will we know?
Pep Lijnders, Liverpool's assistant coach during their incredible era under Jürgen Klopp, explains it wonderfully. It is when "The team transforms the players, not the players transform the team."
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It starts with my oft-repeated mantra: "Know your role. Accept your role. Play your role."
I heard this a few years ago when the Brisbane Lions players were being interviewed two decades after their three-peat of Premierships in the early 2000s. It was the doctrine of their coach, Leigh Matthews.
In those teams are four current AFL coaches, Chris and Brad Scott, Michael Voss and Craig McRae.
As Pat Cummins, Australian Cricket Captain, an outstanding leader who brings wonderful clarity and insight to the role, and the parts he is prepared to share with the world, says in his terrific book 'Tested':
"The best captains and coaches get the answer out of the player."
Leigh Matthews created the conditions so that his players could find their own answers, know and accept their roles, and then play them to a level that they became arguably the greatest team in the history of our game.
The answers became part of the person as well as the player, their wisdom. It happened in them, and now it happens through them.
This is how coaches are made.
Leader as coach.
And team is the outcome.
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The only experience we have of someone in a team-based environment is how they ‘play their role’.
Leadership is not what is happening inside you (how you think and feel), in response to what is happening around you (what you see and hear). As a leader, you are measured by how you show up (what you say and do), as that is the only experience we have of you.
In team environments, the same truth applies.
The only experience we have of you is how you 'play your role'.
As leader, if one of your team members is not 'playing their role', is it because they don't 'know their role', or is it that they don't 'accept their role'.
First question I ask the leader as it relates to the team member:
"Are you playing your role?"
I do so by asking four questions, the first being:
"Have you coached it well enough?"
You may have defaulted to 'teller' rather than 'teacher,' especially when you are under pressure. It begins with meeting people where they are, not where you are, or where you need them to be, because the chances are, they are some distance from that.
Given the value we put on coachability in our people, you'd better start coaching if for no other reason than to find out whether the person is coachable.
The second question:
"Have you supported their learning?"
Too often, I see leaders asking people to do 'more' and not 'different'. We have asked them to take on new responsibilities, but not releasing previous expectations.
Growth requires change, and most likely challenge. It therefore requires space and time. It is organic. This is particularly the case when asking people to step into leadership roles, much less familiar and often a dose of reality from whatever preconceived ideas they had of leadership and its expectations.
The third question, and the most challenging, ambiguous, and consequential:
"Is there something going on for them?"
Even the safest, most connected team environments will have people who are struggling in ways that prevent them from performing their role. The struggle might be personal. An unwell family member, a mental health challenge, something they are carrying that may have little to do with the work itself.
And yet the work still needs to be done.
The role still needs to be played.
The tension a leader must hold here is real, and please err on the side of kindness and empathy. Resist any temptation to resolve it too quickly. The compassionate response, give time, hold space, be patient, come from a place of love, care and generosity.
Yes, you need the role played well, and most likely now. Leadership will often ask you to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously. This is a real example.
What I have learned is that the most compassionate thing is not always to keep someone in a role they are struggling to play. Sometimes the most caring act is to relieve the pressure. To change the role, reduce the expectation, or even allow the person to move out of the organisation, either their choice or yours.
That last thought is not cold. Understood properly, it is one of the most humane things a leader can do. When the role is making the struggle worse, releasing someone from it is not abandonment. It is care.
The final step, more statement than question:
"They might not be up for it, yet or ever."
The role is simply beyond them, which just might be a point in time.
We sometimes see something in someone that they haven't seen in themselves, and we push them forward before they are ready. This requires us to watch carefully, and importantly, to resist closing the gap behind them should they need to step back.
We need to work through this process of introspection as leader, holding judgement on whether the person has 'accepted their role'.
Too often, we will blame the person, often in the most accusatory way, of being selfish, of not buying in, when really, we have not provided the means or the clarity for them to understand what it is we are asking them to buy into.
As I have explained many times, blame attracts a crowd and offers no future whatsoever.
To have blame means not to have team.
And in Round 3, when the Magpies beat the Giants at Marvel Stadium, we saw a supreme example of an ultimate teammate 'accepting his role'.
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A star pupil from the Leigh Matthews’ Coaching Finishing School is Collingwood Premiership Coach, Craig McRae.
What happened on the field in Round 3 didn't begin on game day. It began in the culture Craig McRae has built at Collingwood. A culture in which the conditions exist for a player to offer something of himself that is rarely asked and rarely given.
Pep Lijnders again. "You can't 'sign' an environment (like you can a player or a coach) — it is achieved by a good, stable process."
Craig McRae did not tell Darcy Cameron to play forward. He built an environment in which Darcy Cameron could offer it himself.
Darcy Cameron is one of the premier ruckmen in the competition. He won Collingwood's Copeland Trophy as Best and Fairest last year. When Oscar Steene was selected for his AFL debut in Round 3, the natural expectation would have been that the young man coming through would share the ruck duties, playing second fiddle to his star ruckman, most likely starting in a tall forward role. Learning on the job alongside the established incumbent.
But Darcy Cameron had been in that exact position before. When he debuted for the Sydney Swans, his only senior game for the club, he shared ruck duties and found it very difficult. The step up in standard, combined with the unfamiliarity of a role different to what he was playing in the reserve grade, was simply too much to navigate at once.
He has since been quoted as saying, "It was a lot of reward for effort, but at the same time it was disappointing. I didn't perform the way I wanted to."
So he made a choice. He offered to step aside. To not take the first centre bounce. To play forward. He played the different role, so that Oscar Steene could play his natural role.
Oscar Steene had been at Collingwood for four years. He is a supplementary list player — the archetypal project, as young ruckmen so often are. Both player and club were required to be very patient. In this case, 1146 days after signing.
Four years of training sessions (and a few setbacks), of ruck contests on the track, of the daily work that no one outside the club ever sees. Four years alongside and competing with Darcy Cameron, in every sense of the word. And when the moment came, Darcy knew exactly what it would ask of the young man because he had lived it himself.
The result was a debut full of athleticism, competitiveness and joy, which the Magpie Army embraced. Within what seemed like minutes, he had the Magpie-dominated crowd cheering every time he went near the ball.
And when Oscar took a serious contested mark in the goalsquare, goes back and kicks the goal, he was mobbed by teammates in a flurry of limbs and ink as my drawing celebrates, teammates who shared the joy, but also understood what their senior man had quietly made possible.
Before the game, Darcy spoke of Oscar with the pride of someone who had watched him earn every step.
"He's had a bit of an eventful journey over the last three or four years coming here, he had a few injuries and setbacks, but he's never dropped his head. The improvement he's made in his game and his body is unbelievable. He's turned himself into an AFL footballer.”
When I started with my drawing, celebrating the 'Moment of the Match', I noticed Darcy Cameron is right in the thick of it. That is the complete picture of what 'accepting your role' looks like. Choosing the team over self, playing an unfamiliar role with no guarantee of personal reward, and then celebrating the outcome as fully as anyone.
"Gather as teammates and leave as a family." Pep Lijnders once more. That is the drawing in a single line.
Neil Balme had another way of putting it. "Everyone needs a good enough feeling about the overall to be prepared to give everything of themselves, knowing they're probably not going to make quite as much for themselves because you're giving something to someone else."
Darcy Cameron gave something to someone else that night. And Craig McRae has built the kind of team where that was not just possible. It was natural.
Seth Godin puts it simply. "Significance isn't what we get. It's what we do for others."
That is what team, as an outcome, actually feels like.
Play on!
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