Lion-sized leadership
by Duncan O'Leary
The bit that really interested me comes towards the end of the article when Woodward says that those selected will be meeting for two days later this month, but that no actual training will be taking place. He says 'Those two days will be absolutely vital. We will be meeting to discuss exactly how we are going to operate as a team on and off the field. The players will be deciding the procedures and the standards they want to live by".
Technically, I expect he already knows how he wants the team to operate on and off the field and is pretty certain about what standards he wants them to live by [having won the World Cup he knows a thing or two about this kind of thing]. Problem is, he alone can't provide the solution. It's the players themselves who need to adapt their behaviour and mindset if the team is going to solve the problem of actually living like this, rather than simply establishing the right rules and then going on to ignore them.
I don't know if Ronald Heifetz (author of Leadership without Easy Answers and a contributor to Demos's The Adaptive State) has heard of Clive Woodward, but i'm sure he'd be impressed.