Its a bit lengthy but it explains how Geelong and some other clubs have improved their leadership. I guess the proof is in the pudding for Geelong.
The leading men
Samantha Lane | September 15, 2007
RAY McLean spent the first half of last Saturday dressed in an Adelaide polo shirt in Neil Craig's Telstra Dome coach's box. While riding the bumps of a three-point finals loss that ended the Crows' year, he took notes on how the coach and his deputies interacted.
McLean finished the day in red and white colours, embedded in a disappointed Swans camp at the MCG that, for the first time in three years, had ruled itself out of a grand final. McLean has been part of Paul Roos' team for five years now and still lends regular advice on how one of the competition's best-functioning clubs can get better still.
Last Sunday, Gerard Murphy donned a Geelong uniform. As the Cats executed a record-breaking 106-point walloping of the Kangaroos, he monitored proceedings in Mark Thompson's inner sanctum. A complete stranger to Skilled Stadium before last December, Murphy now knows every intimate detail about the factors surrounding the Cats' rise.
Murphy and McLean, neither of whom played a senior game of football, are the co-founders of Leading Teams, a business that over seven years has deployed men to conduct behind-the-scenes work at all but a handful of the AFL's 16 clubs.
McLean has been referred to as a leadership guru and a mystery attache. He describes himself simply as a leadership consultant. Murphy this year has been described as a "faceless" X-factor critical to Geelong's superb season. He cringes at the description.
The nine-man band at Leading Teams, Murphy says — six of whom are ex-AFL footballers who would be remembered more for battling than brilliance — is just a group of "very good facilitators".
Working with footy teams is only part of the pair's job.
"What we do is facilitate a process," Murphy says. "Whether the program is successful or not will depend on whether the facilitator has the capacity to facilitate the group well enough."
Almost without exception, these men are unrecognisable. But they have left discernible imprints. Leadership groups, player empowerment, joint captaincies and, most recently, sanctioning of players by players are all byproducts of philosophies pushed by Leading Teams.
Five of the six clubs that have been in what the company calls performance improvement programs made the finals this year — Sydney, Adelaide, Geelong, Port Adelaide and Hawthorn. The sixth side with a Leading Teams attache this season was the Brisbane Lions. A young group facing life without iconic leader Michael Voss, the Lions surprised most with their subsequent performance.
Never more than now has it been as fashionable in football to take a good hard look at oneself. A captain of another AFL side has been working privately with another Leading Teams man all season and at least three clubs have inquired about having someone from the company join them next year.
Murphy is about 10 months into his Geelong project, as is one-time Collingwood and Carlton player Trent Hotton, who joined Port Adelaide last December, and former Geelong and Richmond player Craig Biddiscombe, who became the Lions' man last summer. Kraig Grime, who met McLean when the pair worked in the RAAF, started working with Hawthorn in 2005.
McLean's first gig at an AFL club came after he wrote a letter, in 1995, to then-St Kilda coach Stan Alves. He suggested that the work he had done with Central District, perennial underachiever in the South Australian National Football League, might benefit the Saints. At that time, most teams thought the only way to improve was to acquire better players, but Alves agreed to meet McLean. The club agreed to pay him $10,000 for a season's work and by 1997, the Saints made the grand final.
McLean stayed at Moorabbin until Alves was dismissed. He went on to work at Collingwood, where coach Tony Shaw embraced his methods but, later, Mick Malthouse did not.
This year, Murphy, who lives at coastal Jan Juc, has spent most Mondays at Geelong. He will chat with football manager Neil Balme, the man behind his recruitment, check in with the coaches, attend select leadership group meetings and sit through the match review.
"There's no rocket science to that," he says.
McLean sits in the coach's box for most of Adelaide's games in Melbourne and tends to work in two-day blocks when he travels to South Australia throughout the year to see the Crows. This week, McLean helped the Crows' players conduct a season review that they later would present to their coaches. It was a club first and says much of what Leading Teams is about.
"It's about players having really solid input into areas which 10, 12, 15 years ago might have really been considered to be a no-go zone for them. That's what I think the program's done," McLean says.
"It's not just chaos. It's not just a random event where you might think, 'Why don't we let the players pick the team?' You need to have seen the players taking responsibility for a number of areas … there's a relationship of trust that builds between the coaches and the players and as that continues to grow, you almost logically find more areas (for the players to have more involvement) because you trust them more.
"It's about an evolution of a relationship."
The Leading Teams vocabulary is distinct, and the parlance spreads. Some say it is a cultish-sounding tongue.
In high times (Geelong this year), players and coaches will repeat, almost like a mantra, how every week and every game — regardless of its significance — should be approached and reviewed as the one before it. A player, as Cameron Ling did earlier this year, might mention that an outsider who happened to drop into the clubrooms on a Monday should not be able to tell whether the team has won by one point or been belted by 100 at the weekend.
In trying times (the Brisbane Lions in rounds seven-13), a coach or player involved in a Leading Teams program will focus on the importance of the team sticking to the things it believes to be important. A coach, as Leigh Matthews did during the season, will try to explain that even if it is losing on the scoreboard, a team can be winning in other areas. References will be made to the things the side has identified that makes it good — Leading Teams calls this a club's "trademark". When they do those things, a coach or player will repeat, nine times out of 10 they will succeed.
Leading Teams has changed the way football looks at leadership groups. Once, they tended to be a loose cluster of a club's best players. Now at almost every side, players embark on a detailed voting process to arrive at their captain(s) and his/their designated helpers. It is not a popularity contest.
"There's still some people that are absolutely sceptical about leadership groups," McLean says. "And I am, too, if I don't think there's a meaningful selection process."
Sydney and St Kilda have three skippers each. Brisbane named five at the beginning of this year. Captains are no longer a club's best player by default. Stuart Maxfield's appointment as Sydney skipper in 2003 was a notable example. At the end of last year, no-frills defender Tom Harley won the job at Geelong despite queries over how many games he would be able to get out of his now 29-year-old body this season.
As fate would have it, Harley missed eight of the first nine games but has not missed one since. In two weeks, he could be the first Geelong man since 1963 to hold aloft a premiership cup.
Another feature of clubs with Leading Teams influence is that the players, rather than administrators wielding big sticks, now decide on how to sanction peers who have transgressed their internal code.
McLean sat in on the meetings Sydney's leading players had before a demoted Nick Davis was admonished in 2006 for claiming he was a "scapegoat" for his team's poor form. Murphy sat in on the Geelong leaders' deliberations earlier this year over their once-recalcitrant small forward Steve Johnson, who kept mucking up off-field. At Adelaide this season, three players, including ruckman Ben Hudson, were suspended from the side for staying out too late before the game against Geelong in round 19.
"The thing that the footy world looks at is, 'They dropped the ruckman and they lost'. The players, I reckon, have got well past that," McLean says.
"I don't think that they think that going into that game without Ben Hudson was the reason they lost the game. That didn't even figure in the discussion. They were much more interested in how we get over it.
"I'm not hard and fast about having to suspend players for every misdemeanour that goes around.
"If a player is not … really up for taking much responsibility, then the more appropriate management style is to direct them and tell them. But if you've got a really responsible player who's smart and does the right things … directing them all the time without giving them scope to have input means you're missing out on a resource.
"You're constantly evaluating the individual so that you can find the best strategy to get the best outcome for the individual and the team."
Coaches are being influenced by the program.
Craig, in a press conference several weeks later when Hudson was back in the side, discussed how the ruckman had put back into the club's "trust bank".
After Geelong, in round five, topped an ordinary month by losing to the Kangaroos by 16 points, Thompson said in his post-match news conference that he had asked his players what they wanted him to say by way of explanation.
"They wanted me to come out and tell it how it was," he said. "We had a poor attitude, a lack of respect for the game and the opposition. I just don't want it to happen ever again. I'm over it."
The Cats won their next 15 games.
Before round eight, when Sydney was in a flat spot, Roos handed over team selection to his leading players. The side won three of its next four games.
In his book Any Given Team, McLean describes Roos as the coach "most ready" to accept Leading Teams philosophies. On the cover of the book, there is a glowing testimony from Roos: "The culture at our football club … would not have been achieved without Ray McLean's direction and guidance."
Murphy and McLean say there is no tricky formula to the way they help teams re-define their cultures just as Sydney has done. Nutting out what McLean calls a "trademark" is one of the most critical exercises. It should provide the reference point for everything that follows.
A sports team would state how it thinks it would be viewed and how it wants to be viewed. When the Swans wrote their internal code, they gave it a name: the Bloods.
"When you're presented with a really tough issue, you go back and say 'OK, this is the sort of team we said we wanted to be — these are the standards'," McLean says. "It might be a difficult issue about a player … It might be an off-field issue — how do we handle it? If you use your principles that you put in place to manage your way through, I'd count that as some sort of success."
Murphy oversaw a similar exercise with Geelong's players last summer. He estimates that preliminary process took a couple of hours.
The next step is detailed peer assessments carried out by players and coaches. They tell each other what they want each other to start doing, keep doing and stop doing.
In one of those sessions, Geelong's Cameron Mooney, whose on-field discipline had always been his Achilles heel, said he was told for the first time how much his antics upset his teammates. Before Murphy joined the Cats, as Mooney told The Age in the pre-season, they were no good at confronting each other. The forward has gone on to blitz (and keep his report card clean) this year.
From all reports, Geelong's Thompson, like Roos, has grasped the concept and practicalities of player-power wholeheartedly. "You have to work closely with the coach. He's absolutely vital," Murphy says.
Coaches wanting to enlist a Leading Teams consultant are asked a series of questions before any agreement is reached.
McLean's work fizzled at Collingwood about 2001 because, as he writes in his book: "While Mick Malthouse actively used and encouraged the leadership group he seemed less interested in using the team's trademark to guide decisions …"
Magpies' coaching staff, according to McLean, were "anxious from the outset what would happen if a good player received negative feedback".
Geelong is a unique case where the unprecedented heart-to-hearts have coincided with a brilliant season. But Murphy is greatly uncomfortable with any suggestion that his work provided the catalyst for the Cats' dramatic turnaround.
"People get hung up on whether you've won or lost a game. It's so irrelevant for us.
"It's about doing the right thing and then eventually, if enough people do it … "
The leading men
Samantha Lane | September 15, 2007
RAY McLean spent the first half of last Saturday dressed in an Adelaide polo shirt in Neil Craig's Telstra Dome coach's box. While riding the bumps of a three-point finals loss that ended the Crows' year, he took notes on how the coach and his deputies interacted.
McLean finished the day in red and white colours, embedded in a disappointed Swans camp at the MCG that, for the first time in three years, had ruled itself out of a grand final. McLean has been part of Paul Roos' team for five years now and still lends regular advice on how one of the competition's best-functioning clubs can get better still.
Last Sunday, Gerard Murphy donned a Geelong uniform. As the Cats executed a record-breaking 106-point walloping of the Kangaroos, he monitored proceedings in Mark Thompson's inner sanctum. A complete stranger to Skilled Stadium before last December, Murphy now knows every intimate detail about the factors surrounding the Cats' rise.
Murphy and McLean, neither of whom played a senior game of football, are the co-founders of Leading Teams, a business that over seven years has deployed men to conduct behind-the-scenes work at all but a handful of the AFL's 16 clubs.
McLean has been referred to as a leadership guru and a mystery attache. He describes himself simply as a leadership consultant. Murphy this year has been described as a "faceless" X-factor critical to Geelong's superb season. He cringes at the description.
The nine-man band at Leading Teams, Murphy says — six of whom are ex-AFL footballers who would be remembered more for battling than brilliance — is just a group of "very good facilitators".
Working with footy teams is only part of the pair's job.
"What we do is facilitate a process," Murphy says. "Whether the program is successful or not will depend on whether the facilitator has the capacity to facilitate the group well enough."
Almost without exception, these men are unrecognisable. But they have left discernible imprints. Leadership groups, player empowerment, joint captaincies and, most recently, sanctioning of players by players are all byproducts of philosophies pushed by Leading Teams.
Five of the six clubs that have been in what the company calls performance improvement programs made the finals this year — Sydney, Adelaide, Geelong, Port Adelaide and Hawthorn. The sixth side with a Leading Teams attache this season was the Brisbane Lions. A young group facing life without iconic leader Michael Voss, the Lions surprised most with their subsequent performance.
Never more than now has it been as fashionable in football to take a good hard look at oneself. A captain of another AFL side has been working privately with another Leading Teams man all season and at least three clubs have inquired about having someone from the company join them next year.
Murphy is about 10 months into his Geelong project, as is one-time Collingwood and Carlton player Trent Hotton, who joined Port Adelaide last December, and former Geelong and Richmond player Craig Biddiscombe, who became the Lions' man last summer. Kraig Grime, who met McLean when the pair worked in the RAAF, started working with Hawthorn in 2005.
McLean's first gig at an AFL club came after he wrote a letter, in 1995, to then-St Kilda coach Stan Alves. He suggested that the work he had done with Central District, perennial underachiever in the South Australian National Football League, might benefit the Saints. At that time, most teams thought the only way to improve was to acquire better players, but Alves agreed to meet McLean. The club agreed to pay him $10,000 for a season's work and by 1997, the Saints made the grand final.
McLean stayed at Moorabbin until Alves was dismissed. He went on to work at Collingwood, where coach Tony Shaw embraced his methods but, later, Mick Malthouse did not.
This year, Murphy, who lives at coastal Jan Juc, has spent most Mondays at Geelong. He will chat with football manager Neil Balme, the man behind his recruitment, check in with the coaches, attend select leadership group meetings and sit through the match review.
"There's no rocket science to that," he says.
McLean sits in the coach's box for most of Adelaide's games in Melbourne and tends to work in two-day blocks when he travels to South Australia throughout the year to see the Crows. This week, McLean helped the Crows' players conduct a season review that they later would present to their coaches. It was a club first and says much of what Leading Teams is about.
"It's about players having really solid input into areas which 10, 12, 15 years ago might have really been considered to be a no-go zone for them. That's what I think the program's done," McLean says.
"It's not just chaos. It's not just a random event where you might think, 'Why don't we let the players pick the team?' You need to have seen the players taking responsibility for a number of areas … there's a relationship of trust that builds between the coaches and the players and as that continues to grow, you almost logically find more areas (for the players to have more involvement) because you trust them more.
"It's about an evolution of a relationship."
The Leading Teams vocabulary is distinct, and the parlance spreads. Some say it is a cultish-sounding tongue.
In high times (Geelong this year), players and coaches will repeat, almost like a mantra, how every week and every game — regardless of its significance — should be approached and reviewed as the one before it. A player, as Cameron Ling did earlier this year, might mention that an outsider who happened to drop into the clubrooms on a Monday should not be able to tell whether the team has won by one point or been belted by 100 at the weekend.
In trying times (the Brisbane Lions in rounds seven-13), a coach or player involved in a Leading Teams program will focus on the importance of the team sticking to the things it believes to be important. A coach, as Leigh Matthews did during the season, will try to explain that even if it is losing on the scoreboard, a team can be winning in other areas. References will be made to the things the side has identified that makes it good — Leading Teams calls this a club's "trademark". When they do those things, a coach or player will repeat, nine times out of 10 they will succeed.
Leading Teams has changed the way football looks at leadership groups. Once, they tended to be a loose cluster of a club's best players. Now at almost every side, players embark on a detailed voting process to arrive at their captain(s) and his/their designated helpers. It is not a popularity contest.
"There's still some people that are absolutely sceptical about leadership groups," McLean says. "And I am, too, if I don't think there's a meaningful selection process."
Sydney and St Kilda have three skippers each. Brisbane named five at the beginning of this year. Captains are no longer a club's best player by default. Stuart Maxfield's appointment as Sydney skipper in 2003 was a notable example. At the end of last year, no-frills defender Tom Harley won the job at Geelong despite queries over how many games he would be able to get out of his now 29-year-old body this season.
As fate would have it, Harley missed eight of the first nine games but has not missed one since. In two weeks, he could be the first Geelong man since 1963 to hold aloft a premiership cup.
Another feature of clubs with Leading Teams influence is that the players, rather than administrators wielding big sticks, now decide on how to sanction peers who have transgressed their internal code.
McLean sat in on the meetings Sydney's leading players had before a demoted Nick Davis was admonished in 2006 for claiming he was a "scapegoat" for his team's poor form. Murphy sat in on the Geelong leaders' deliberations earlier this year over their once-recalcitrant small forward Steve Johnson, who kept mucking up off-field. At Adelaide this season, three players, including ruckman Ben Hudson, were suspended from the side for staying out too late before the game against Geelong in round 19.
"The thing that the footy world looks at is, 'They dropped the ruckman and they lost'. The players, I reckon, have got well past that," McLean says.
"I don't think that they think that going into that game without Ben Hudson was the reason they lost the game. That didn't even figure in the discussion. They were much more interested in how we get over it.
"I'm not hard and fast about having to suspend players for every misdemeanour that goes around.
"If a player is not … really up for taking much responsibility, then the more appropriate management style is to direct them and tell them. But if you've got a really responsible player who's smart and does the right things … directing them all the time without giving them scope to have input means you're missing out on a resource.
"You're constantly evaluating the individual so that you can find the best strategy to get the best outcome for the individual and the team."
Coaches are being influenced by the program.
Craig, in a press conference several weeks later when Hudson was back in the side, discussed how the ruckman had put back into the club's "trust bank".
After Geelong, in round five, topped an ordinary month by losing to the Kangaroos by 16 points, Thompson said in his post-match news conference that he had asked his players what they wanted him to say by way of explanation.
"They wanted me to come out and tell it how it was," he said. "We had a poor attitude, a lack of respect for the game and the opposition. I just don't want it to happen ever again. I'm over it."
The Cats won their next 15 games.
Before round eight, when Sydney was in a flat spot, Roos handed over team selection to his leading players. The side won three of its next four games.
In his book Any Given Team, McLean describes Roos as the coach "most ready" to accept Leading Teams philosophies. On the cover of the book, there is a glowing testimony from Roos: "The culture at our football club … would not have been achieved without Ray McLean's direction and guidance."
Murphy and McLean say there is no tricky formula to the way they help teams re-define their cultures just as Sydney has done. Nutting out what McLean calls a "trademark" is one of the most critical exercises. It should provide the reference point for everything that follows.
A sports team would state how it thinks it would be viewed and how it wants to be viewed. When the Swans wrote their internal code, they gave it a name: the Bloods.
"When you're presented with a really tough issue, you go back and say 'OK, this is the sort of team we said we wanted to be — these are the standards'," McLean says. "It might be a difficult issue about a player … It might be an off-field issue — how do we handle it? If you use your principles that you put in place to manage your way through, I'd count that as some sort of success."
Murphy oversaw a similar exercise with Geelong's players last summer. He estimates that preliminary process took a couple of hours.
The next step is detailed peer assessments carried out by players and coaches. They tell each other what they want each other to start doing, keep doing and stop doing.
In one of those sessions, Geelong's Cameron Mooney, whose on-field discipline had always been his Achilles heel, said he was told for the first time how much his antics upset his teammates. Before Murphy joined the Cats, as Mooney told The Age in the pre-season, they were no good at confronting each other. The forward has gone on to blitz (and keep his report card clean) this year.
From all reports, Geelong's Thompson, like Roos, has grasped the concept and practicalities of player-power wholeheartedly. "You have to work closely with the coach. He's absolutely vital," Murphy says.
Coaches wanting to enlist a Leading Teams consultant are asked a series of questions before any agreement is reached.
McLean's work fizzled at Collingwood about 2001 because, as he writes in his book: "While Mick Malthouse actively used and encouraged the leadership group he seemed less interested in using the team's trademark to guide decisions …"
Magpies' coaching staff, according to McLean, were "anxious from the outset what would happen if a good player received negative feedback".
Geelong is a unique case where the unprecedented heart-to-hearts have coincided with a brilliant season. But Murphy is greatly uncomfortable with any suggestion that his work provided the catalyst for the Cats' dramatic turnaround.
"People get hung up on whether you've won or lost a game. It's so irrelevant for us.
"It's about doing the right thing and then eventually, if enough people do it … "
