Following The Herd Does Not Cut The Mustard.

This week on the podcast i was fortunate enough to sit down with 2 x world cup winning All Black Coach Wayne Smith. 

For someone like me who is in my first year of coaching to speak to a man current wallabies coach Dave Rennie described as “the greatest coach ever” was a wonderful experience.

Here are a few of the many things that i took away from this discussion. 

“Following the Herd does not cut the mustard”. 

I asked Wayne what he meant by this quote from an article about him a couple of years ago. I’m paraphrasing here, but his reply was that every team and every individual has the opportunity to be unique. In fact finding your own identity, language and culture that reflected the unique characteristics of your team/club and the individuals in it was actually an essential part to succeeding. A coaches job is to work out what this uniqueness is and then to cultivate it.

Fear of not trying is worse then the fear of failure. 

Wayne as a coach was known for being very innovative, i asked him how he looked for ideas and how he tested ideas prior to implementing things with the All Blacks as surely as an All Blacks coach if you were going to try something you wanted to make sure it worked first. He didn’t see it that way.

“We never thought like that, we tried lol sorts of stuff that didn’t work, but we weren’t afraid to have a crack at it. It’s easy to try and be like everyone else, the coaches that are able to look ahead and try things and not be afraid of failure are the ones that tend to succeed. In 2009 the game changed, it became a really kick orientated game, teams were basically playing kick tennis and it became very boring. In some of the coaching meetings we had during that time, we decided that world rugby would probably change the law prior to the World Cup so that the game would become more entertaining, so we decided to take a punt and play a counter attacking style of game that no one else was playing at the time. It cost us 3 test matches against the springboks, but we where certain in our own minds that we were doing the right thing because we thought that the game would change. And it did. I think that us starting this style in 2009 was a real key to us winning in 2011 as we were a head of everyone else.” 

Sharing ideas help you come up with new ideas. 

When Graham Henry was the coach of the Super Rugby Winning Auckland blues team he did a presentation to all the other franchises sharing absolutely everything that Auckland did for that year in great detail. When Wayne asked him about this, he realised that what Graham was actually doing by sharing all his ideas was forcing himself to innovate and to come up with new ways to stay ahead of everyone. Amazing. 

Never stop searching and never stop learning.

You could tell by listening to him that the greatest Rugby coach of all time was still hungry for knowledge. Every week at Kobe he and the coaching staff do zooms with Professionals from other sports and other walks of life. He’s an avid reader. He does personal development all the time, including regular visits to the Melbourne Storm. He mentioned how important having a growth mindset was for coaches multiple times. 

Good enough for me.

Start with the end in mind.

“Imagine yourself at your own funeral listening to what people are saying about you. And then live your life based on what you want them to be saying at the end when you go. Be true to yourself and be the person you want to be” 

This Podcast with former All Blacks Coach Wayne Smith will be out Wednesday this week.