We sat down with Sir Clive Woodward OBE, the coach that led the England rugby team to victory in the 2003 world cup. In our exclusive interview for NMP Live Meets, Clive explains the difference between management and leadership, the importance of marginal gains, and what he means by TCUP (Thinking Correctly Under Pressure). Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Sir Clive Woodward OBE
Can you give us a potted history of your career?
Yes, I became the England Head Coach in 1997, but before I had that I had two business careers. When I left university I joined Rank Xerox as a graduate trainee, I worked in the UK but probably most importantly I worked in Australia. I was a Sales Director based out of Sydney where I ran the sales side of Xerox over there.
So, I had 8 years working for Xerox, including 5 in Australia, which was great. Xerox was a great training company, certainly in terms of sales but also in terms of leadership, so it gave me a great start.
Then when we came back from Australia I basically set up a small leasing and finance company based on the skills I learned with Xerox, so a lot of leasing and finance of office equipment. It was a small company, at the height we only had 10 people, so I went from working in a big corporate environment to running my own company of 10 people, which was again great and I really enjoyed that.
Then 8 years doing that and it was going very well, and then Rugby Union went professional and I was the first full-time professional coach. I think those two careers, one as the big corporate and one running my own small business, gave me a really good grounding and foothold for taking over the England job. Running a business in sports is no different to running your own small leasing company.
What are the fundamental traits of a successful leader?
I think the lovely words respect and trust are absolutely key in terms of leadership, but the key thing to stress is that you can’t demand those, you can’t get those just because you become the leader, just because you become the Head Coach of England or you become Sales Director at Xerox. You have got to earn this thing, this trust and respect, and quite simply it is the quality of your actions.
I have always thought from a rugby point of view, as a player, you can’t pull the wool over these guys’ eyes – they know what is going on. It’s the same in business, when you are in the team and you are being led by people, you know which people are really putting it in, who is really delivering it. So, it’s just the classic throwing the kitchen sink at everything.
One of my favourite sayings is, in a leadership role that great teams are made of great individuals. I put a huge amount in, if I’m working with a team, that’s business or sport, really trying to improve every individual. I think every individual is different, and if you improve every individual then the team thing comes together a lot easier. If they generally know that you are on their side, you’re doing everything you could to improve them, you’ll get it back in bucket loads.
Sometimes when you treat everyone the same someone may not quite fit the norm, so it’s all about managing individuals and trying to make every individual better, and then the team kind of takes care of itself. If you do that those lovely words trust and respect come in, and you know obviously in the sporting world you hear interviews where people, your players, are doing interviews in the media, and when you hear the words trust and respect associated with your name it gives you good feelings. But it’s something that comes over time, you cant shortcut it, it just happens, but it’s just by looking after every individual in the actual team.
What is the different between leadership and management?
I think that’s very straightforward. I think leadership, it’s what it says, you are there generally to lead, meaning you are fundamentally in charge of the team. The team will take the whole way they operate from you. Most teams will represent the personality, the characteristics, and the drive of the leader. You are there to really throw the kitchen sink at it, try to find every opportunity to find advantages and win.
I think management is more putting in processes that are already in place, tried and trusted, you are there to manage a process. I think leading takes that to a whole new level, always trying new things, moving forward and really putting your head above the parapet. It is very easy to be a little bit intimidated by certain situations, or not trying things for fear of failure.
I think leadership you fail at times, there is no doubt about that, there’s the famous saying ‘it’s lonely at the top’ – it is. Sometimes, especially when it goes wrong, you look in the mirror and go ‘why on earth did I do that? I must have been crazy’, but then looking back now you’re probably not, because you have got to try these things.
When I am interviewing people for leadership positions it’s sometimes good to see a bit of a rollercoaster CV, sometimes people who have failed at doing things, it makes you stronger going forward, then they get a chance again. You never get a CV going like that [in a straight line] in leadership, you usually go from there to there eventually, but on the way you have big setbacks, and it’s how you manage those setbacks.
In a leadership role you are there to make sure people are trying things out, and management is less about setbacks and more about delivering a process and ensuring you deliver results.
Does a great leader need to be ruthless?
I don’t think a great leader needs to be ruthless, no. You’ve just got to be incredibly honest. I can see it on both sides because I have been in teams and I’ve had good coaches, bad coaches, and I’ve been in Xerox where I have had good leaders, bad leaders, I don’t think you need to be ruthless. You just get trust and respect by the quality of the actions of that leader. If you are really helping everybody you will get trust and respect, sometimes some of the best leaders are very calm, very calculated, the key thing is honesty.
I think that, certainly in the sporting world, I probably had more one-on-one meetings with players than probably most coaches I have seen. When I have seen people operate I like doing things one-on-one, eyeballing people, telling them exactly what’s going to happen, what it’s like, and sometimes that’s bad news. You’ve got to leave people out of your teams, you’re giving bad news, but as long as you set the scene for that situation, meaning you know how they are going to react, they have got to understand that to go from here to there it’s not always easy, you give them the information or the knowledge that they may want to hear.
How important are marginal gains within sport and the workplace?
Marginal gains very much came from British Cycling, it’s that the small things all add up to make a difference. When I was in charge of England we called it doing a hundred things 1% better, so it’s all the 1 percenters that were really important. I do believe in that, I believe in detail.
Normally in most businesses, I’m sure there are some exceptions or sports teams, you very rarely come across one massive thing that’s going to change a whole direction, what it does is break all these things down and really looking at every possible area of, quite simply, how can we do it better? And, coming back to your question on leadership, you are there to try new things, help them get these marginal gains, how can we move those forward?
Critical non-essentials is very similar, it’s kind of, as the word says, critical but not essential. They may not be the big thing, but all these little bits of detail that add up, and that’s a great word, because if you get all the critical non-essentials right they do all add up, and whether you are a customer or someone who works at that business, it does make a difference to see all the detail that goes in to place.
So, there are all different sort of words, but they all mean the same thing, and it is just about a real attention of focus on detail in everything you actually do.
What does success mean to you?
I think that success can come in many forms. Success in sport is about winning, and there are no qualms about it.
There are two sides of success, you can have winning and you can have performance. People often say it’s all about performance but I say it’s all about winning. You tend to find if you lose a game of rugby it’s all about performance, if you win a game of rugby it’s all about winning, so you can sometimes get a bit confused in that. But success, to me, was always winning.
It’s also knowing -and only you know that - if you look in the mirror and you absolutely know you have thrown the kitchen sink at something, normally over a period of time, you say ‘okay, it doesn’t go our way today, life will go on’.
Where I have real issues with myself, and you beat yourself up, is that if you know that you did cut a corner there, you took a shortcut here, didn’t quite get that done, could be for whatever reasons, could be something that’s totally logical like budgets or you didn’t get he right people, that drives me nuts because that’s your job as a leader – to actually make sure there’s just no excuses. If you can genuinely look in the mirror, and at your team, and go ‘there’s actually nothing else we could have possibly done’, you can kind of live with yourself. If you lose a game of rugby, or you lose a big deal in business, life goes on.
If you know you have actually cut that corner, then you get beat, that to me is inexcusable. And that’s the sort of people you want in your team as players, or the support staff, you want the people with the same mind, and if you throw the kitchen sink at it you tend to win.
Are innovation and risk taking essential to success?
Innovation and risk-taking, I wouldn’t say it’s essential. I think it’s something that fits very comfortably with myself. I like taking risks, I like trying new things, but it’s not a case of trying new things to be smart or gimmicky, it’s trying new things because you genuinely believe this can make a difference.
Sometimes you get a smack in the face, it doesn’t work, but I think if you test it out properly you tend to get ahead of the game most of the time, but again it’s making sure your team are prepared to try this, and take the risk, knowing that if we really want to get better we do have to try sometimes to be a little bit different.
So personally I quite like risks and risk-taking, not recklessly, but because I think that’s how you have got to improve your team, you’ve got to try it. One of my favourite sayings was always ‘no if onlys’. We’re not going to be sitting here in a few months time or a few years time going ‘if only we had done that’, sometimes you have just got to try. As I say, sometimes you get a bloody nose but you look back and you chuckle and you think ‘at least we tried’.
Can you explain your acronym TCUP?
TCUP, Thinking Correctly Under Pressure is one of the key characteristics of leveraging your talent, how you perform under pressure.
I got this from an Israeli guy called Yahuda Shinar who worked in the Israeli Armed Forces, who you know are tough. These guys know what they are doing and they called it CTUP, which was Correctly Thinking Under Pressure, and I just shifted the words around to make it very English, so it’s Thinking Correctly Under Pressure, and the key word is correctly. So, when this pressure thing kicks off and thinking, whatever it is in your world, are you able to make the correct decision at that moment in time.
Quite simply, and this is backed up by all the data, if you come across something that you’ve, not necessarily experienced before, but at least you’ve thought through what you would do, how you would handle it in that situation, if it then arises and occurs there is a very high chance you will think correctly under pressure, so it is almost as simple as that.
There should be nothing in sport or business that happens that you’ve not actually thought what we would do, what you would do, how we handle it and how you would handle that situation, and that’s what it is.
I see so many sports teams, and businesses, in real pressure situations almost freeze and choke because they’re not quite sure what to do, quite simply because they have not thought through beforehand how to handle that situation.
What are the topics and themes on which you speak?
There’s many really. I have got a whole range of topics, and we always speak to the client in a lot of depth, trying to find out what they’re trying to get out of a conference and with my presentation, so I don’t go in with any one standard pitch.
The only thing I would say to anybody who I work with is never theory. I’m not here to go through concepts or ideas; it’s totally hands on, what I learnt at Xerox, what I learned around business, what I learned within Rugby, as director of sport for team GB for 8 years, and what I am doing now with building software.
I do a lot of work with companies behind the scenes now, so it is totally practical, hands-on, in terms of what I talk about, but I can cover most subjects from leadership, especially as I’ve got a new talk now called ‘Never Learn Alone’, based on how I coached the rugby, based on the software, all about how your group learning really allows you to move forward quickly.
So we can adapt to any topic that we are given the opportunity to speak about, I think that’s the key, so hopefully the people who hear me more than once don’t ever hear the same thing twice.
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