A full 365 days elapsed between the All Blacks’ last appearance at the 2019 Rugby World Cup and their next test match, while the Black Ferns waited a little over 15 months to return to action.
What would have been almost unthinkable in 2019 came to pass at the start of the pandemic, when New Zealand introduced some of the world’s strictest border controls, which have largely served to keep the Pacific nation free of Covid-19. There has been much to champion in this approach, with fewer than 8,000 infections reported in a little over 18 months at the time of writing, but sport in New Zealand, much like everywhere else, has not been insulated against the impact.
In early 2020, New Zealand Rugby was forced to reduce staffing levels in an effort to cut costs, with some made redundant and others asked to take unpaid leave. “We reduced staffing levels by about a quarter,” says Mike Anthony, the Head of High Performance at New Zealand Rugby, when speaking to an audience at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership.
“We stood a number of programmes down, reduced the number of support staff they had. Competitions were impacted and the reduced number of games meant things like broadcasters and sponsors were impacted.” At the end of 2019, Ian Foster had succeeded Steve Hansen as Head Coach of the All Blacks but almost immediately found his plans in disarray.
Anthony says: “We had a new coaching group come in and they were just getting started in six test matches [across 2020], which is probably half of a normal year. So they didn’t get the opportunity to really set their mark.
“At one stage, the All Blacks were six weeks away from home in Australia playing in a competition [the 2020 Tri Nations Series], so you really wanted to make sure they felt supported.” The nation’s rugby male and female sevens players, who were preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, were encouraged to be involved in 15-a-side programmes while their programmes were temporarily mothballed.
The situation remains far from normal, with Covid outbreaks in Australia disrupting the trans-Tasman men’s Super Rugby Aotearoa competition, to cite one example. “I think what this has taught us is we’ve learned to be more agile and adapt to change. Like a lot of sports, we’re extremely well-planned, very routine-based, and what it’s taught us is there are other ways to look at things and do things, and we’ve had to be able to adapt on the move.”
Here, through Anthony’s words, the Leaders Performance Institute explores the role of the players and coaches in giving New Zealand Rugby a resilience and adaptability that has served them throughout the pandemic and stands them in good stead going forward.
Facilitative coaching
The All Blacks and Black Ferns went on an extended hiatus at the start of 2020, while New Zealand’s domestic rugby competitions were postponed, disrupted, and eventually returned in swiftly altered formats. It was a challenge for players across the game, with Anthony and his staff at New Zealand Rugby also challenged by the non-centralised nature of all but the national sevens teams.
“Our two sevens programmes are centralised, they’re together all the time, but with the All Blacks, we don’t see those players for six months of the year; they are with their Super Rugby clubs and then they come together. Our providers – S&C, medical, nutrition – are remote and come together virtually and then they spend time in the clubs working with their various departments in order to manage those athletes.
“I’ve seen better collaboration across the clubs, not silos. Now we’ve got our wellbeing group and our ‘med-fit’ group, which is S&C, medical, where the psychologist or the nutritionist links in if the player is injured. I think the process that we run around case management of our athletes has formed that collaborative crosspollination.”
The session moderator, Angus Mugford, the Vice President of High Performance at the Toronto Blue Jays, asks Anthony how the All Blacks and Black Ferns are empowered by their coaches and performance staff in this remote context. In many respects, his response pre-dates the pandemic and illustrates why both programmes were well-placed to manage the disruption.
“They have to own and drive the programme,” says Anthony. “The All Blacks have got a big season. As a competitive sport, we run from February to November, so they’ve got to get that off-season right and we give them time away to own and drive their programme and then come in refreshed mentally and physically. We want to make sure we get the best out of them that way. You use the word ‘empowering’ and our athletes have always been empowered within our programmes and our teams. I firmly believe that helps with the leadership development of our guys.
“It builds resilience as well. Richie McCaw [former New Zealand captain, record appearance holder, and two-time World Cup winner], one of our greatest All Blacks, talks about doing ‘the unseen things’ when no one’s watching. I think that’s a great way to capture what we do. It’s easy to work and sweat when you’re in and surrounded by others, but it’s doing those things at home, whether it be around your nutrition or your recovery, or your opposition analysis – they’re the things we need our athletes to do and not just be told to do.” It is important for All Blacks and Black Ferns players to have a “voice”, as Anthony puts it. “They need to own and drive the culture, the standards and the programme,” he says. “Everyone talks about how we’ve got a great culture, where it’s tied to ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’, but a true performance culture is where they can hold each other to account; and I think if you can empower your athletes and you’re just having to sit back and lead and manage rather than always coming in on some of that stuff then that’s a true performance culture.”
The players have an element of psychological safety, where they feel able to take interpersonal risks in pursuit of their self-development without fear of any negative consequences. In that vein, Anthony describes player performance reviews at the end of a training week, which strike a balance between challenge and support. “The expectation is that the player will come in prepared for the review of their performance and they will lead the conversation. It’s a great opportunity then for the coach to see their level of self-awareness around their game and where they’re at relative to their views.”
Crucially, coaches attempt to be facilitative rather than directive. “If you came to a team review, it’s not the coach standing at the front delivering, they are essentially facilitating the conversation, with a significant contribution from those players.
“Likewise leadership development, a critical piece in there because, at the end of the day, they’re the ones that have got to perform under pressure out on the pitch and execute, make decisions. I know with technology, messages can be delivered on the field, but that’s probably in between, in the breaks. In those critical moments, they’ve got to get it right.
“In my role, I spend time with the clubs and sit in on a lot of these sessions and you do see that. I think a strength to our coaches and our game is an ability to facilitate rather than be directive. That’s certainly an approach that the majority of our coaches take.” This trend, however common it may be in rugby in New Zealand, is something that needs to be built gradually and cannot be imposed on a team.
Anthony recalls the time when, working as a strength & conditioning coach, he left his role at the Crusaders, the New Zealand-based club where he had been working for a decade, to build a programme at a club in England. “[At the Crusaders] they had a great senior group that I would use as a sounding board around training load, the structure of the week the expert – you should be telling us – why are you asking us?’ and you’re trying to get that collaboration and I didn’t quite get it right. Rather than just dumping it on them, I needed to grow their understanding. ‘Here’s the end point and what we expect in the middle’.
In rugby in New Zealand, however, the practice is embedded and, as a consequence, the game is organically producing leaders in the mould of McCaw. “We’ve seen a transition of a lot of our players into the coaching ranks pretty early now and often they will want to stand up. Teaching and delivery is a skill. A lot of our coaches have great tactical and technical knowledge. That ability to share that deep knowledge, deep learning, and deep understanding, it is a balancing act and sometimes you’ve got to tell and sometimes you have to grow or check for understanding as you go. For young coaches, there’s an art that they need to learn. I’m a firm believer that you’ll get a lot deeper understanding over time if you can get them involved and make it collaborative.
“Sometimes you’ve got to deliver a message. I think it depends on the structure of your week; if we’re going week to week and want to move on from a performance and get some things in place, you’ve got to find a time to do that. You want to get your athletes up to speed. If they are getting up and presenting in front of their peers, it is time consuming – a hell of a lot more time consuming than if you just do it as a coach or whatever your role is – but I think the long-term benefits are massive. It’s how you bring them with you and, with time, it’s pretty organic in terms of the conversations that happen in the room.”
Teams in black are always being chased
The All Blacks played their first true test match against Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 15 August 1903 and the result was a 22-3 victory for the tourists in front of 30,000 spectators. As Mugford points out, since then, they – and the Black Ferns in the women’s game since 1990 – have dominated world rugby, developing a reputation for excelling at the basics of the game, while continually innovating around the edges. To what does Anthony attribute that quality? “That’s a tough one,” he says, before highlighting the strength of New Zealand Rugby’s campaign reviews. “You’ve got to be as robust with your review when you’re successful as when you’re not because I think it’s easy to find things when you’re not. When you are successful, you want to capture the learnings and say, ‘well, why are you successful?’ To me, they’re what I call our ‘big rocks’. You hope that they make up 80 to 90 percent of your programme and you retain those and take them through.”
Anthony also points out that in New Zealand, even at the highest level, the basics of rugby never become an afterthought. “If you go and watch an All Blacks’ 15 training session, you’ll see elements – ‘run, catch, pass, tackle technique, breakdown’ – those things are coached with regularity all the way through regardless of if you’re a world-class player or you’re a development player – at no stage are skillsets ticked off and then ignored. That is really key. “The art is how you retain the big rocks so that you know they’re critical to our success but make some adjustments to play around the fringes. You hope your programme is good and if there’s a few one percenters, that’s great, but you constantly want to look around the edges at what you can adjust.”
Anthony speaks of the creation of a ‘performance gap’. “The margins between teams are really small. Everyone wants to beat the All Blacks or our sevens programmes – teams in black are always getting chased – and you want to create a performance gap. It’s thinking about things; where we are now versus where we want to get to. We talk about ‘if you’ve got a performance gap, you create some discomfort in an environment and that drives the team and the individuals within it’.
“Competitive edge is something we look for in our athletes. If you’ve got that, doing the same old thing week to week, year to year, your athletes will be bored very quickly. So how do you create some of that discomfort and know that’s going to drive them to continue to get going?
“The other thing for us is how we road test that because, I talked before about how the All Blacks play 12 to 15 test matches a year; they assemble really late, they’ve got a small window, so how do we road test some of those initiatives and in our other competitions or environments to then go ‘we think that’s worth considering’? The strength of the collaboration within our teams helps with that and we really try to highlight ‘here’s something that was tried here and it worked really well’.”
Anthony raises an example away from the game itself, but it is possibly all the more important following periods of stress, anxiety and isolation. “Our sevens teams sing. The women started it, our men do it now, first thing around a training session. That is unbelievable for connection and now we’ve seen that happen, particularly around some of our age group teams, because certainly in my era, singing was something you’d frown upon and roll your eyes at, but our teams love it, our young athletes love it, and it creates great connection and then they’re switched on and into it before they go into things. You think about that and ask ‘how does that contribute to performance?’ but just little things like that around the edges are great.”
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A full version of this interview appeared in our latest Performance journal, which also featured England men’s Head Coach Gareth Southgate, the Arizona Diamondbacks of Major League Baseball, and British Wheelchair Basketball, who runs some of the finest programmes in the sport. Edd Vahid of Premier League club Southampton FC also penned a column focusing on talent pathways.
