Shared lessons in development

In the organisational development world, links with sport are rife. Lessons from leadership, coaching and teamwork are commonplace, with the worlds premier sporting institutions cited and analysed to see what transferrable lessons can be learned.

What most of us hear less about is when the world of sports adopts similar models used in the corporate world.

Professional rugby is one of those elite environments, often used as a metaphor to articulate a high performance, yet Stuart Lancaster, former head coach of England and current senior coach of Irish Champions Leinster, is bucking the traditional rugby trend by encouraging his players and staff to undertake personality profiling to better understand themselves and each other, with the aim of improving performance and leadership across the group.

Insights Discovery is a pretty familiar tool used in an organisational setting, with the ‘colour-wheel’ articulating preferences based on the psychological teaching of Carl Jung.

But in a world where physiology, skills and technique are prized so highly (rightly so), there is often little room for anything else.

When taking over at Leinster, Stuart Lancaster realised the team was over-reliant on their star captain and fly half, Johnny Sexton for audible, visible leadership (anyone out there familiar with insights can probably guess his insights colour – see clip below), so he introduced insights as a way of getting them to consider how they communicate with each other. Stuart recently shared this insight with the Sunday Times, when the domestic rugby season in Ireland ended resulting in Leinster being crowned champions having not lost a game all season.

“It is called ‘insights’, Lancaster says. “Basically, it divides your personality into four colours: red would be directing, yellow would be extrovert, green would be team player, blue would be detail-oriented. We would all be a different mixture of all four. When I came to Leinster I was keen to use it to raise the awareness of players of their own personalities and of other players in within the team.”

“A lot of Irish players are quite introverted, quiet, very detail-oriented and supportive team players. There will be players like that I have coached in England. Equally, there will be one or two more extroverts in the England squad, which can be a strength because they will be the real drivers of energy, drivers of emotion. I was looking to raise their self-awareness and try to get them to understand that it is fine to be detail-oriented but we need to show our emotion at times as well as to get the best out of each other.”

Clip from Good, the Bad and the Rugby podcast with Johnny Sexton talking about his insights colour and how it helped him as captain.

Lancaster’s time as England coach isn’t looked at fondly giving his disastrous world cup campaign of 2015, which he attributes to not being able to coach enough, such is the demands of one of the most high profile jobs in world sport. The bulk of his time was spent on management and leadership – rather than helping the players on the field through coaching - "It was 50% leadership, 40% management - or maybe the other way around - and 10% coaching," Lancaster explains.  

At Leinster he finds himself in a much stronger position as senior coach, able to spend the time needed to add real value to the players and is afforded free-reign to lead training sessions. His Tuesday sessions, or ‘Stuesdays’ as they’ve become known are stuff of folklore in Dublin. They’re described as mentally, emotionally and physically challenging, with high levels of intensity and little rest.

Overall this is a coach who is focussing on the whole player, not just the one in the gym or on the field of play. It’s understanding that with better knowledge of ourselves and how we approach situations, we’re more readily able to adapt to the world around us. Whether it’s insights, MBTI or the plethora of personality profiles out there, it’s about raising self-awareness, identifying areas for development and setting goals to achieve outstanding results, something he can claim to have been a big part of this season with Leinster.

Credit: Sunday Times 27/09/2020, BBC Sport Online (Chris Jones – 15 Jan 2020), The Good the Bad the Rugby podcast (episode 8: Johnny Sexton’s Magical Wonderland)