leadership

Hype or Performance?

I have no issue with words like HIGH, PERFORMANCE, ELITE or HONESTY, CORE or BUSINESS when used individually.

I now have a huge problem when they are used together.

Once the ‘Elite Honesty’ term came to light with Australian Cricket I started to question some of the language I had also been using. I realized that I too had allowed myself to be sucked into the black hole of meaningless double speak.

I have often referred to High Performance (HP) but what is that? What does a manager of HP do? What is a HP department?

If you google HP this is what comes up,

“a concept within organization development referring to teams, organizations, or virtual groups that are highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results.”

Don’t we want this for everyone and for every department within a business? I certainly want our accountancy team and our legal team to be achieving ‘superior’ results. What about sales and marketing, design, IT and distribution? Oh, and what about the BOARD?

Who’s the manager of mediocre performance or poor performance?…you see where I’m going with this.

It’s meaningless.

What is Elite Honesty? Who comes up with this stuff? I can’t imagine what it must be like to walk into the dressing room as an Australian player and see Elite Honesty emblazoned on the walls, as was the case recently in Perth. Surely the measure of performance should be runs, wickets, catches, fairness, effort, competition and respect. Isn’t honesty enough, how do we be elitely honest?

I’m starting to understand what Yogi Berra, the NY Yankees catcher and manager meant when he said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”

Meaningless doublespeak is everywhere. There’s Fake News, Core Business even in education we had ‘Functional Gramma’for a while, now it’s the 4 C’s? What’s the next? ‘box ticking’ exercise?

When I think about all of this plus the list of acronyms I no longer understand and the Business of FairBreak I’d like our organization to be kind, caring, respectful, fun, game changing, challenging, enlightening, profitable, supportive, inclusive and equal.

I want the people in it to own it and help shape it; I want it to be their Ship.

I don’t know if any of that is in a HP manifesto. The only ones I’ve seen have a lot of boxes to tick.

From now on I will only say, ‘I work with people’. HP be gone….. #elitehonesty

“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” Yogi Berra

Was Yogi talking about High Performance departments? I’m starting to think he was onto something…..

Australian cricket: ‘In my office now, boys!’ – Shaun Martyn on the current state of play

In 1984 England were getting smashed by the West Indies and everyone was looking for England and their leadership to make excuses for performance. England captain David Gower on being interviewed during the series said, “It is a Test match. It’s not Old Reptonians v Lymeswold, one off the mark and jolly good show. You are not expecting life to be made easy for you.”

If only that attitude prevailed at the moment in Australian cricket.
Gower was not looking for excuses; he and his players would deal with the problems and be judged on how they handled themselves. In reflecting on the release of the Longstaff review and the fallout from it, things just have to change.

The Chairman’s position has now become completely untenable and he has resigned. Unsurprising when you profess to have good governance and at the same time orchestrate your reinstatement prior to a review being released. Laughable!

The whole credibility of the board has been in question. Appointing someone from the current board as Chairman is also impossible from a governance perspective. This board has presided over this mess.

What equally amazes me is that the State CEO’s have the ability to start the process of fixing this mess. Why don’t they?

They seem to be complicit in condoning the behaviour called out by Longstaff.

I think it speaks volumes for the leadership in cricket across the board.

When you have organisations that are not accountable they can do whatever they like. There is no accountability! I was disgusted by the responses by the CA Chairman on the ABC’s 7.30 Report when his notion of accountability was that CA had voluntarily instigated a review into what is now being referred to as a “hiccup” in South Africa.

That “hiccup” reference said it all. It demonstrated mammoth incompetence and a complete and total lack of understanding of the game, its relevance, its history or its future.

As a result of the Chairman’s resignation it may now be possible for Kevin Roberts, the new CEO at CA to make some headway. It will depend on how the board reacts and the appointment of the new Chairman.

In my one brief exchange with Kevin Roberts I found him to be very open and thoughtful. He has a huge task and needs clean air.

The ACA are not adding anything positive to the debate at the moment either.

Regardless of whether you think the bans on Smith, Warner and Bancroft are too harsh or not, they are there and need to be served. Banging on about lifting the bans just alienates more of the public and reinforces the widely held view that the male players are indulged.

Grown men conspired to cheat in an environment that encouraged it and then lied about it. Fact. If there were older and wiser heads in that dressing room in South Africa it would never have happened. The fact that the coaching and management staff is still largely in place also speaks to the integrity of the whole set up.

We have seen this week the ACA publicly setting up another adversarial situation.
If the Australian team was performing better at the moment lifting bans wouldn’t even be spoken about.

The ACA have sought far too much media attention in this. They should be working quietly, negotiating responsibly, and with the best interest of the fans, the players and the game.

Cricket is a game of partnerships and good partnerships are built with trust, time, consistency and leaving your ego at the door or in the dressing room.

At the moment it feels like both CA and the ACA should be called into the headmasters office and suspended until they come back, with their parents, to be told by David Gower to start acting responsibly both in class and in the playground!