"India's Cricket Lessons"

This is a tribute to Gary Kirsten the coach to the India Cricket team. What a fantastic result Team India. It feels a huge honour to be living in the City of Mumbai, home to the match, probably the most exhilarating place in the world on the winning Saturday night. The whole City came to a celebratory standstill, as people face-painted with the red, green and white of the Indian flag danced on top of their cars along Marine Drive and the sky lit up with fireworks in all directions within seconds of the match win.

Coach Gary, a former South African cricketer’s favourite motto is: “There is no greater waste of a resource than that of unrealised talent”, (the words of the former U.S. president Roosevelt). Talent development is all about reducing the gap – the gap between current performance and desired performance. When you are on your knees utterly empty of any belief in yourself, the coach lends you their relentless confidence in you, “I was thankful to him for keeping his faith in me when I was going through a tough phase,” says player Suresh Raina. When the comfort of laziness creeps in, the coach, in as aggressive or warms a manner as is required, reminds the player to step-up and be all he can be.

As a coach he helped the players identify both their individual areas for growth and blind-spots in performance, as well as, in their strengths and weaknesses in the team functioning. He motivated them to believe in themselves, to believe in each other, that they could pull-off this outstanding result for their country. He worked with the team to develop their emotional as well as physical fitness, as well as their game-strategy.

Coaching business leaders has everything in common with coaching sports players and teams. In fact, several years ago, I worked with an Investment Bank, alongside Clive Woodward who at the time was successfully coaching the England Rugby team. The critical ingredient, despite immense talent, was that this global team had a crippling sense that they could not win accolades like Euromoney because a competitor institution was in their group mind “better, more talented”. They weren’t. The other team just had more belief in themselves. Through a series of leadership and coaching strategies we created a winner.

When the coach sits in front of a guy who he or she knows can reach higher and higher levels in his performance, the coach is looking at two things. Firstly, is the guy motivated to excel, to be the best he can be? What degree of skills-gap are we looking at here? A good coach is essentially an artist. An artist works creatively to get under the skin of another human being. Sometimes deliberately making them angry to evoke change, other times nurturing that tender spot in the psyche that has produced a highly critical voice inside the person that impairs their performance. It’s mind-training, it’s strategy-building and it’s behavioural training. We coaches end up loving those we nurture, especially the ones that fight with their hearts and souls to bring out the best in themselves and offer the gift of their talents to the world. Knowing you matter to the coach is highly critical for the relationship to work, “Gary treated us like family”, as player Sehwag put it.

Whether cricket, business or Bollywood, the person you want to coach is the one who wants to live his or her life asking “How can I do better”, “How can I show-up more”, rather than merely point the finger at others and say “But I couldn’t do it, because, because, because”. They are the curious souls who want to make sense of themselves, of why they do this, and why they don’t do that. For us coaches, they are treasured people who live in our hearts and minds, who keep us awake at night when they are in the throes of transformation, and remain with us, often many years after their physical presence has left our lives.

I don’t know who you are reader. If you’re a cricket fan, you can pretty much rest assured that Gary Kirsten gave everything of himself to coach that team. And he will have given up a lot in his own life to do this, especially his family. That’s what we do. We turn ourselves inside out to make growth and transformation possible, because it’s often what makes us feel happiest and most purposeful in our lives.

But something puzzles me about India. We have these incredible cricket guys, who clearly are entrepreneurs of their own growth and development. These players made a proactive decision to work with someone who can help them grow individually and collectively. Of course they may have been defensive and didn’t like the feedback at times. That’s natural because change is difficult. Yet, are business leaders in India as committed entrepreneurs to their own growth as these players? It seems to me that many business leaders in India tend to leave their growth utterly to chance or pay minimal lip-service to it.

Whether you are a cricket player or a leader, the only way towards higher level performance is through feedback. Feedback maybe about the way you relate on the pitch or in the corporate boardroom, feedback concerning how you manage your emotions and your energy when you perform. A good coach (read good leader) tells you, “I love the way you do x”, “I don’t like the way you do y”, and “What I want you to do is z”. One of the leaders as coach I worked with would be saying this sort of coaching language 30-40 times a day to her team members.

Discussing this over dinner, Indian friends tell me that I underestimate the way many business men and women in Mumbai dislike criticism. I try to explain that feedback highlights strengths, highlights areas for development. That feedback is not about who you are. It’s about ways to improve your behaviour. It’s the exciting fact that as we achieve one stage of potential, yet another emerges. What you do, when you start to interrogate yourself, with someone else, when you start to question your tacit assumptions about yourself about other people, you start to wake up. You also then start to be a different kind of person. One man, in his early forties tells me that few of his colleagues are prepared for even thinking about themselves, because their mothers have been telling them they are perfect, just because they are boys, since the day they were born. I respond that this doesn’t explain the profound commitment of the India Cricket team, who were also boys once, to their growth and development, which after all, led to a profoundly exhilarating ‘win’ for the whole country.

Perhaps there is something yet to evolve more fully in India, in terms of education concerning what personal and professional development is; particularly concerning emotions, communication and relationships.  Personally, I celebrate the courage of the India cricket team as role models of commitment to growth, to endeavouring to look in the mirror and ask “How can I improve” and having the courage to get expert help to make those changes real.

Perhaps this is the deeper, more profound lesson that Indian cricket offers. The true nature of winning is in overcoming ourselves.  It is also an enormous tribute to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, confident enough to graciously acknowledge Gary in today’s Asian Age with the words “I want to thank Gary. He has to be given credit as he instilled a bit more self-belief in us. We have been very consistent during the last two years and this is a result of that. I have really enjoyed my game under him.”

I want to end this blog with the words from a speech in the film “Any Given Sunday”. My appreciation and tribute to the exceptional Team India, a part of which was Coach Gary Kirsten. In the film, Al Pacino plays the coach to a soccer team (I’ve changed the word soccer to cricket for fun). It is a profoundly moving speech in the film, just before the team is about to go into the game like Sri Lanka vs. India, the game of their lives:

“I made every mistake a middle-aged man can make – I threw away all my money, I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me and lately I don’t even like the face in the mirror. You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. You find out that life’s a game of inches and so’s cricket – because in either game, life or cricket, the margin for error is so small, I mean half a step too late or too early, you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow too fast you don’t quite catch it. The inches are everywhere around us, in every break of the game every minute every second.

On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch, because we know that when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fxxking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I’ll tell you this – in any fight it’s the guy who’s willing to die for that inch. And I know if I’m going to have any more life in me, it’s because I am willing to die and fight for that inch. Because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face. Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got a look at the guy next to you and you’ll see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it, you’ll do the same thing for you. That’s a team gentlemen. And either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals.

That’s cricket guys. That’s all it is.”