When Bob McKillop, my former coach, agreed to sit down with me, I knew we were about to embark on a discussion that would transcend the boundaries of rugby. Enjoy the show!
0:03 Player Coaching
6:35 Challenges and Success in Coaching
11:06 The Importance of Communication in Leadership
17:41 Effective Coaching Through Collaboration and Communication
23:53 Navigating Coaching Career Authenticity
31:05 Coaching the Scotland Under 20 Team
42:02 Building Authenticity and Trust in Coaching
45:46 Coaching and Communication in Rugby
51:52 Career Progression in Coaching Rugby
55:11 Embracing Leadership and Collaborative Learning
1:07:40 Evolution of Rugby Coaching Strategies
1:20:38 Creating a Competitive Advantage Through Authenticity
When Bob McKillop, my former coach, agreed to sit down with me, I knew we were about to embark on a discussion that would transcend the boundaries of rugby. Enjoy the show!
0:03 Player Coaching
6:35 Challenges and Success in Coaching
11:06 The Importance of Communication in Leadership
17:41 Effective Coaching Through Collaboration and Communication
23:53 Navigating Coaching Career Authenticity
31:05 Coaching the Scotland Under 20 Team
42:02 Building Authenticity and Trust in Coaching
45:46 Coaching and Communication in Rugby
51:52 Career Progression in Coaching Rugby
55:11 Embracing Leadership and Collaborative Learning
1:07:40 Evolution of Rugby Coaching Strategies
1:20:38 Creating a Competitive Advantage Through Authenticity
Hello and welcome back to the when Coaching Goes Wrong podcast with me, the contact coach, craig Wilson, and just before we jump into this episode, I want to say a massive thank you to you, the listeners. The feedback has been brilliant and I just love how people have been talking about how they've really internalized a lot of the messages that have been coming out from the guests and using it to reflect and also put into their own environment. That's what it's all about, and I know this guest is going to be absolutely the same. He is full of wisdom. He's actually an old coach of mine, bob McKillop from Scotland. He coached me at Harriots back in the mid 2000s and he's just so great to have on the show lots of experience in the rugby world and the corporate world and how those two can merge together. So settle in and enjoy the show.
Speaker 2:Bob, how are you doing? I'm great, craig, I'm really good. Nice to see you again.
Speaker 1:Good to see you again. It's always brilliant talking and seeing old coaches and learning from our experiences. Just give us a little snapshot of where you are now and what you're up to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm sure this will come out. But I took a long sabbatical from rugby after we last met, concentrated on family and career and investment management. The last three years I've been back coaching at Harriots Rugby Club in Edinburgh, which is a club I love. You were there for a short time. I think we both grew to love it. So, yeah, I'm back there. I'm helping coach the second 15. I don't really have an ego. I was quite happy to coach the first 15 and days gone by, yeah, and just loving being back involved in rugby again after an eight-year break, because it was my life. It dominated my life for a long, long time.
Speaker 1:I can't speak highly enough of Harriots, one of the great clubs in one of the great cities. It's a special place of special people. But that's rewind the clock a little bit. Let's talk about your early coaching experiences. What was that like? Do you remember your first session or your first few sessions? Yeah, dig deeper into how you all got started with coaching.
Speaker 2:Well, when you get to my age that's a long time ago. So I first started coaching, actually at a left school and I joined a very small local rugby club. Cricket was my first love at that time, so rugby was something to do in the winter. I ended up captain of this local club at the age of 19. They had no coach. One of their former players, who'd gone on to play for a large club in Edinburgh, used to come back and help on a Tuesday, but I was basically throwing the reins on a Thursday night and thought, crap, where the hell do I start? So you know, read books, went and thought about it all Probably made a whole load of mistakes at that time, but that was my first experience.
Speaker 2:Then I hurt my neck quite badly and didn't play for 18 months. So again had a little bit of a period coaching, actually alongside Kenny Logan. We were teammates at Stirling County and we went and coached the Stirling County under 16s together. So that was great. It just made me. It kept me involved, craig, and I think you know I always say to players now when they get injured, please don't drift away from the game, please don't become just a supporter, because you always feel very much on the outside. You know, come and do tackle counts for me. Look at the opposition line outs. Come and get involved and be part of the club, because it can get very lonely when you're injured, especially if you're injured for 18 months and I thought I might never play again. Thankfully I did. I finally found a doctor who said I was fit to play and then really concentrated on playing, and I was at Stirling County at the time.
Speaker 2:And again I've been blessed with the clubs I've been at. So I agree with you, harriet, it's an incredibly special place. Stirling in the 90s was an equally special place. We'd gone all the way up from Division 7 to be Scottish champions in 1994, 1995. Just a wonderful journey. A local team, you know we modeled ourselves. Maybe some of your UK listeners will understand this the Wimbledon Football Club. We were a little bit like the crazy gang. You know, nobody liked us. We didn't care. That was our motivation. And we used to love going to the establishment clubs and, you know, literally beating them up in those days because that's the way you won rugby games. So that was great.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, as I got older and slower, I just gradually started to move into coaching, did a little bit of player coaching, which I found really rewarding, and then things probably really kicked off. You know, when I went to Dumfirm and Rugby Club and I coached there, we were promoted a few times and then, yeah, wound my way to Harriet's where I was head coach for five years, where we met and then just decided I had to take a break. I had a career in asset management that was thankfully taking off. I had three kids.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe one of the things you're looking for, things that go wrong, maybe one of my mantras has always been never to compromise and we can come back to it. But I felt I was becoming an average dad, an average executive and an average rugby coach and that didn't sit very well and I probably didn't realize it quite quickly enough. So, yeah, it's been quite a winding road, but I've now been coaching you on and off since I was 19 and I'm now 57. So, yeah, I've got plenty of mistakes that you can talk to me about if you want.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I think the main one not picking me enough at Harriet's. I think that was one of your big mistakes there, but we'll come back to that. The player coaching one for me was really interesting because I'll just give you a personal feeling. When I started off player coaching, you said you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:I really didn't enjoy it at all because and another thing that you mentioned there I felt I wasn't playing very well and I wasn't coaching very well, and there's reasons behind that. I was a very young coach making my own mistakes about. This is how you run an environment, a very dictatorship. I wanted everyone to know how clever I was, but also I was a player that needed to really focus on my player. It wasn't a natural thing for me. I had to really work on my game and I find myself neither working on the coaching side and or working on the playing side. So I would love to hear your experience about player coaching, because I always come at it with quite a bias point of view and that's my point of view. But you said you enjoyed it and I would love because there's people listening now who are on the player coach journey and like so what were the positives for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean don't get me wrong, I did enjoy it, but it is incredibly difficult. I find it easier on game day than at training. You know it's quite hard to run a training session. You know I'm a forward, I know you got to hang around in the backs, but I'm a forward and you're trying to do a tough rocking session and you can't ask the players to do something and stand there and watch. So you've got to get involved and suddenly you're at the bottom of something trying to coach when you know your head's rammed in the mud and you don't really know what's going on. So I found the training sessions more difficult than game day.
Speaker 2:I think, on, one of the things that saved me at training was I had two assistant coaches who were just wonderful, and one of them was a now world forwards coach who just was my eyes and ears of everything and somebody that I trusted implicitly sadly passed away a few years ago, but just a wonderful mentor and I trusted him because I guess, like you and I think you know, this is one thing I think we will talk about when we all start coaching there's a tendency to be a control freak, trying to control everything, and this my two assistant coaches never, ever overstepped the market was always quite clear. I was the head coach, which I guess, played to my young man's ego, didn't threaten me at all, but they also were my eyes and ears and were prepared to be quite tough eyes and ears. Why did I like it on game day? Craig's interest, and maybe is that part of it's that control freakery. So I mean, I was coaching just last Saturday and I couldn't believe. We had two midfield scrums and the first move we did is our eight, nine, 15 up the right hand side tore them to pieces where the scrum and exactly the same place, and we did something different. Why are we not calling the same code? So when you're, when you're the player coach, I guess what I felt I could do was make the right call at the right time. And it's quite interesting, I was again.
Speaker 2:I was blessed with having quite an intelligent team. Three or four of them had come through Scotland's age grade and they understood that we were winning games with the short, fat number eight, who was playing on one leg by that time. But we were calling the right lineups at the right time. We're calling the right codes at the right time and maybe that's because I was at a level where I could get away by being decidedly average as an individual. My player shortcomings were covered up by people around us around me but the value add was making the right decisions at the right time. And I think maybe one thing I one of the things I love doing and we'll talk about my international coaching finished in 2011. So a lot of those guys are now transitioning into proper jobs non rugby jobs, commercial jobs and I really love that transition and helping them with that.
Speaker 2:But I think one of them went down to play for London Scottish as a senior player and I met him after a couple of months of the season and I said, hey, how's it going? You must be loving life. And he said I think I'm a disaster. All of my stats are down. He was an ex pro player. All of my stats are down. I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that.
Speaker 2:I said right, okay, have you spoken to your coach? No, I said well, maybe you need to speak to your coach because maybe he's got a different definition of what success looks like for you. He said I'm going to speak to him, but I think I'm going to get sacked. He went, he spoke to him, he came back. I said hey, how did it go? And he said I'm really good Turns out I'm doing everything the coach wanted, I'm calling the right codes, I'm setting the right standards at training and they always knew that my playing performance would be down on where it was when I was a full-time professional.
Speaker 2:So I think with all as your coaching career grows, you know you go from player maybe to player coach to specialist and on. It's just really understanding what does success look like as you go? And I think as an old guy playing in the back row, I guess my definition of success was making sure the team were driven and steered around the pitch correctly. I was lucky enough that the team saw that value in me, because I think you're right. If the team's view of you is you're not pulling your weight as an individual, but you're still ordering them around, that probably is a recipe for disaster as a player coach.
Speaker 1:It certainly was, and there's some great advice around there. And I wonder did you have a captain of that team as well, because it almost sounded like you were a captain as well. Was there a captain there, or were you? You know what? Did you have the bus and were you driving the buses?
Speaker 2:It's a brilliant question. So I had two main captains when I was there and the team was quite polarized. It was made up of a core of very good late 20, early 30s guys who'd been there when Dunferm was two or three leagues higher and then a bunch of straight out of the under 18s Scotland under 18 champions. I arrived they got changed in different dressing rooms. They barely spoke to each other. It's like two factions within a team. That was pretty easy to break down.
Speaker 2:But in the first two years I had an older captain there who you know club legend and to be honest I overstepped the mark a couple of times and he quietly pulled me aside in a very, very firm way and said when we're on the pitch I'm the captain and you know I valued that honesty and I guess I realized I had overstepped the mark.
Speaker 2:I didn't at the time, but I realized when he told me very bluntly afterwards. We shook hands and moved on and you know what? He was a wonderful captain. And then laterally we appointed this young crazy horse hooker to be our captain, but he was 18 or 19 and he used to turn up with a notebook to training and you're talking the old amateur days turn up with a notebook to training and say, hey, coach, we need to try this, we need to try that. So again, he perversely almost helped me coach the team and he was only 18 and a half 19 years old. So, yeah, maybe, craig, I was really lucky that I had those very good assistant coaches, a captain who didn't let me overstepped the mark and some youngsters who I guess were very modern in their approach and wanted to help coach the team and move it forward. So, yeah, maybe I was just lucky.
Speaker 1:And well, I think a part of that is it shows you the value of just communication, and communication doesn't mean to be jolly and nice all the time. It was a respectful, firm word and you could all make a plan moving forward because of that. And it's so much better to save those words and get it out there than let things go over separate ways and then maybe come to a head and maybe a more uglier scene. But they're a quite word, better, firm word. I think that's really powerful too and that can work also from coaching down to the players, if it's done respectfully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I know we want to talk about the mistakes from that I've made and there is loads of them and I hope you've got a load of time but I think as a coach, you also learn from the mistakes of others, and I think the one thing I probably do you're playing in the 80s and 90s was the lack of communication, and communication in any high performing culture. I think it needs to be two way and it needs to be very honest and with a nice mixture of warmth and hard edge to it. And the one thing I said in my career was I'm always going to be honest and even if I'm breaking somebody's heart by telling them they're not in the team, I will be honest with them. It's then my job to pick them up and work in partnership to build them back up again. And one of the lessons I learned I used to hate selection night when I was playing, and I remember sitting outside our selection room in my main club when I was playing. We had six selectors and five of them all walked out and went yeah, I voted for you because you didn't make it one by one and it was only the sixth guy, who was the most mild mannered guy who came out and he said I didn't vote for you, I didn't think you played very well last week and for the first couple of days and I think this is really interesting for the first couple of days he was the one that got you know, he was the one I felt most of my negative hatred towards hatred is a strong word, but he was the one. He was the one that in my head, I'm going gee. So I didn't play well and, yeah, I was 19 at the time. A couple of days after that it's like you know what? At least you had the balls to tell me and I think you know little stories like that.
Speaker 2:Growing up in that era when, when communication was dreadful, is something that I've always, always stopped by. And if you ask me about you know that period when I thought I was being an average coach one of the things I one of the, I guess, moments that was real catalyst for me to walk away from rugby I dropped the ball on communication with a player that we left out of the team. I thought my assistant coach was doing it, he thought I was doing it. That was something I really prided myself on and suddenly it fell down and it was non-negotiable. And that very day I decided I was going to take a big walk away, a walk away from rugby.
Speaker 2:I mean one one thing I've learned and developed as I've gone Craig, both from I guess I've been lucky enough to be a I am a chief executive in in the business world and head coach in the rugby world and and the similarities are are massive and the transferable skills and approaches are are massive and work really hard in a work environment on what I call my senior players group and I do think that they are the key, key communication mechanism in any high performing environment. And I I model it again on the military and I look at the, the role of a non-commissioned officer and what is that? And I think you know you and I have talked in the past about the you know statements from the US Army about we'll never be beaten in a proper face-to-face battle by an Arab army because we've got a functioning NCO level that they don't have. Well, why? Why is that important? Because when messages and orders and communication are coming down the way, if that's validated by your senior players group, the rest of the player group go well, I trust these guys. They're in the trenches with me every day. You know Bob's the, you know he's coach. I'm not sure what he's talking about, but if these guys believe it, wow, that's really important. But likewise you've got to got to, as a coach, stay close to that senior players group because they should be the key mechanism on the way back up. That's brave enough to say you're getting it wrong. The boys don't buy into that. They're not really sure what you mean.
Speaker 2:So I always say to young coaches two things on communication get your senior players group working. And the second one I guess when I coached you I'd never coached kids before and when my kids were growing up I did a few sessions with them when they were very young and you learn. The clarity of communication is really important. So if players are walking away trying to decode what you're talking about, as a coach you failed. There can't be any doubt in their minds what you're talking about as they walk away.
Speaker 2:So, senior players group and making sure that you're very, very clear and I think you said this earlier on don't talk just to sound intelligent, talk to get your message across. And my God, I wish, craig, I'd known all of this when I was an international coach. A lot of this has come with age, which is why I think what you're doing is wonderful, because if there's young coaches out there, you're a lot younger than me. If young coaches out there can just start to think about some of this when they're younger, that's wonderful. Right? That is fantastic for the legacy of our sport.
Speaker 1:Now absolutely. And this, this, that collaboration piece is is wonderful. And once I started doing that, maybe six, seven years ago, really leaning on my play, so, given the example here at Yale, I I know a lot more rugby knowledge than them just by virtue of playing the game and coaching the game and understanding that they're pretty, pretty new to the sport in general. So I was like, well, I, obviously it's all transactional, but I give you the information you, and then you just go and do it. But when I started bringing them into the, into the fold and it actually came from my master's degree I did through Sterling and it was a big piece on collaboration and communication it was amazing.
Speaker 1:The, the coaching environment and the whole environment got better because all of a sudden there was input from an outside, away from the coach. And remember, in America coach tends to be king still Like there's a very, it's very again that my, my brain, your body, sort of thing. So there is an element of cultural acceptance that if the coach says it you just go and do it. So I've really worked hard to bring that collaboration piece because they see things I don't see and that's what should be happening and that doesn't mean, in the conversation we're all completely in agreement, but after the conversation there's an agreement to an alignment and once there's alignment you can all go away and, as you mentioned, that kind of flow of of communication it comes from from the students, because they had an input in that too and I just find it it's so powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again, we always try and really target. You know we call it a collaborative learning environment and I think that's exactly what you've just described. It's got to be two way. It's got to be very inclusive. You know, as a coach, you've got to show that you're vulnerable. You don't know everything, which, again, is really difficult when, when you're a young coach, trying to convince players that they should place their sporting career in your hands, that's difficult. By the time you're 57 and you've been around there, you know. You, sadly, whether you deserve or not, you come with a level of respect and it's probably yours to lose rather than yours to gain. But I love this collaborative learning environment. You know we're open to ideas from the players and I think it's really important that when players don't always get it and they're not really sure that you want, you want challenge. So I do this in a work environment, I do it in a rugby environment. If somebody's brave enough to challenge me and alter the strategy, I almost name it after them and I celebrate every single step of the way. So if I take this away from rugby for a minute into a work environment, you know I've been chief executive of my latest company for a couple of years I did my typical 100 day in strategy presentation that I was really proud of.
Speaker 2:I worked really hard on it, me and my executive team. And one of the youngest guys in our company, when we presented it to the UK team, put his hand up and said why wouldn't you look at that type of investment strategy? And I said, well, that's really interesting. We did, but we discounted it for these reasons. But are you seeing something different? And in front of the whole office he said well, I just kind of thought you know, when the rest of the market's going up, this is the type of strategy goes down. It makes our profit loss a bit more robust, gives us a better diversification. You know the young guy's name was Harry and we nicknamed that Harry's strategy and we really celebrated it. Because by celebrating it you're saying it's okay, he proved me wrong in front of everybody. I'm happy to admit that he'd got that right and I got it wrong or I missed it, and it encouraged other people to come forward.
Speaker 2:Because I think the one thing again I'm a massive believer in collective intelligence. I think you know people like you and me left our own devices to coach rugby team. I think we'll do a good job right. We've got a lot of experience, we've got rugby knowledge, we've got EQ. We will do a good job. But we won't do as good a job as a team of coaches, everyone with different strengths, and it might be different rugby strengths.
Speaker 2:And I think this is where you've got to understand what. Who brings what to your coaching team. And the obvious one as well. He's a forwards coach and he's a scrum expert and he does lineups, he's very good at tackling his defense, he's a back, he's a backscourts, he kicks, he's skilled. That's, that's fine, and I think we need that rugby IQ.
Speaker 2:But what are the other roles that people play? You know who's the disciplinarian, who's the innovative thinker, who's the people person? You know I find it quite interesting watching we've got full contact the Netflix series, the Six Nations, going on here at the moment. It's really interesting watching the French coaching team Because Fabien Gaultier it's obviously incredibly intelligent, very cerebral in the way he coaches. It looks like Raphael Ibn Az is the people person. He's around having quiet words in people's ears. It looks like Sean Edwards and I think you know lots of us who know rugby league know this. It looks like he's the crazy guy who really motivates them, gets stuck into them. He's the hard, hard guy that I think every coaching team needs. So I think it's very interesting to understand yourself and what you bring in terms of technical skills and personality.
Speaker 2:But therefore, what do you need around you when you're building your team as a head coach or a CEO? And you can't you can't populate your team with people who already view the world through your lens. Or the modern mistake is I'm going to recruit a team that's really diverse. They all think very, very differently to me, but then I'm going to manage them so tightly that I'm going to pull them all in to behave and think exactly like I do. And it takes again. It takes experience and, I think, a bit of confidence in your own ability to allow people underneath you to do it their way, do their own thing, as long as they are operating in a sort of an envelope of acceptability. If we both agree we're trying to get from A to B, then if they get us to B, they've done their job. Do I care if they zigzagged or zigzagged? I probably shouldn't care, but again, it's the control freakery in all of us. When we're younger, that's quite difficult.
Speaker 1:So in terms of your coaching, so the firm went really well and it was building. Where did it? Where did it go from there and did you have choices in your coaching career about different roles to potentially take, or was there a linear path that you went as you progressed towards the international side of it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I left. I think one of the things that's quite important I learned along the way is try and leave a club when your star is at its highest, and I think if you hang around for too long you run the risk of the whole thing becoming cozy. You become quite cozy and relaxed in your position, but I think, probably more importantly than that, there's an element of competition for places that leaves the team Because your first 15 regulars they know their first 15 regulars they know Bob and Craig rate us. I'm going to be in the team next week, I'm okay. The guys who are competing for their positions in the second 15, yeah, we know Bob and Craig rate those guys higher than us, so their performance dips a little bit and the whole environment dips a little bit. So I think it's really important as a coach to know when to move and I think this is one thing. In a commercial career you talk about career management and I think for young coaches who want to be professionals and I had the chance to be a professional coach but didn't know how to manage that when you're a young coach nowadays, if you want to plot a career in coaching, then understand what the different steps are and how you're going to navigate that and what you bring to the table and what you're willing to do and not do. So I left on film and it was fantastic. I'm in an awesome club. I have I've been blessed right an awesome club and I went back to Stirling County and had a good two years there, but again more for work and family reasons.
Speaker 2:I moved to Harriet's and when I moved to Harriet's I had the chance to go to Glasgow Hawks, who were three times Scottish champions at the time, or to go to Harriet's, who had just escaped relegation by a point. Glasgow Hawks for people who are not in Scotland, were a relatively newly formed club, incredibly successful, almost like a Glasgow super club. Harriet's steeped in tradition, as you and I know, based in Edinburgh, in a leafy suburb of Edinburgh, but with the history of British Lions and Scotland players going back for years and years, decades and decades. I'm a traditionalist, so when Harriet's off of me the chance to go there, there was no doubt that's where I was going. I think Glasgow Hawks are a wonderful club. They're just a very different club.
Speaker 2:I guess in my head I was thinking they've been champions three years in a row, if they're not champions four years in a row, people say, well, what changed while we recruited Bob McKillip, so that wasn't great. And if they're champions four years in a row, well, we've come to expect that the new coach didn't have an impact. So I think it's really important when you're moving clubs but on the one hand, you try and move on when your stars at its highest, which can be really difficult Because if you're a good coach, you love your club and you love your players and it's really difficult, so you leave on your stars at its highest, but ideally you're looking for a destination where you can have an immediate impact. Now again, whether this was luck or design, dunfarmlet had escaped relegation on points difference when I joined there and we got three promotions back in five years. Sterling had just been relegated. They were my club where I played. We only lost one game that first season back and were promoted back into the top Scottish division and, harry, as you know, we bounced from just avoiding relegation to being a regular top half of the table team.
Speaker 2:We won the Scottish Cup in 2009. And I guess people tell me I set a little bit of a foundation for my successor. Phil Smith is still there to come in and they had a wonderful run through the 2012-13-14 period. So I think it's really important to manage your career in terms of the clubs you choose. Think about it, make sure you fit with the culture, I think, make sure your coaching style and philosophy fits with the culture. Your rugby style, I think, ideally fits, but I think you can be more flexible on that. You can join a club that has a culture of playing through its forwards, or you can join a club that has a culture in booting, 15-man running rugby, which is Harriet's. I think, as a coach, you should be flexible about that. But your own coaching style and philosophy I think you've got to stay true to yourself. I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:And talk to me about your experiences where potentially so been true to yourself. You can use the word authenticity or authentic. Talk to me about periods in your coaching career where maybe you weren't as authentic as you wanted to be, and how did that manifest and how did you get over it.
Speaker 2:So when I knew you were running this podcast and I thought you might call me, I knew the one mistake that we would home in on is always being authentic, and I think it's so, so important and it's probably the biggest lesson that I've learned and sadly I learned it when I almost at the peak of my coaching career. So let's just be really clear when I talk about being authentic, it is absolutely 100% the right thing to do to cherry pick the good bits and the bad bits from what you see in other people and you put that together to form a mosaic. But that mosaic has to be your picture. It's got to be you. Now I do bits that I've seen other coaches doing absolutely. I'm a rugby geek and I think in rugby we are absolutely blessed with people like Steve Hansen, warren Gatland, eddie Jones. I mean, if you can't learn off these guys, so you steal the best bits and you build your own picture. But it's got to be your picture and, I guess, sadly great.
Speaker 2:I learned that I was a club coach who was very comfortable in my own skin at Harriet's Thought I was doing very, very well, knew what I stood for, knew how I coached, knew what I really believed in and did very well, I think. So I was asked to coach the Scotland under 20 team and so at that time second most important team in Scotland in Scottish rugby after the international side, and we run a shadow six nations every year. So we ate the senior team and we run a junior World Cup every summer, and so I'm suddenly an international coach. I've never done this before. I'm a club coach. I'm used to coaching very, very talented amateurs who give it everything they've got. And suddenly I've got a team of professionals, semi-professionals, scottish Rugby Union Academy players sitting in front of me. Some of them that's all they do, that's their job, and I fell into the trap of coaching them how I expected them to be coached rather than how I wanted to coach. And what did that mean? I went overboard on the technical side of the game. I really got stuck into a level of micro coaching with them, which I can do. I kind of enjoy it, but I don't think it was where I was going to have the biggest impact.
Speaker 2:What did I underplay? I underplayed that requirement for physicality and probably a play to the Scottishness of the team to play our way, and it used to frustrate me hugely and some of the guys I coached with, who were good coaches but they would talk about we need to be really accurate because the Italians are going to be really physical and inwardly it cut me up because we're wearing our international shirt and they're wearing theirs. Why should they be more physical than us? You know this in Scottish Club Rugby, if you play in Edinburgh there's a perception that if you play in the south of Scotland your club means more to you than your club does in the city centre. That annoyed the hell out of me and you know, in Club Rugby I call that out all the time. But here I was in international world, thinking it must be the right thing just to focus on accuracy.
Speaker 2:And you know our results were okay, the performances were okay, but we finished the six nations in the south of France. We played in Lyon and it was probably the best rugby experience of my life. The French, the south of France, is nuts about rugby. It's the only time in a warm-up that the players couldn't hear what I was talking about. The crowd were going mad. We scored first. Sadly, we made them angry and we got absolutely thumped. And we had a really good night.
Speaker 2:We went for some beers, but I felt so empty. I didn't feel empty because of the result. We were in the transition from under 21s to under 20s. France had decided to play there under 21s. It was our under 20s. It was the end of the long six nations. We had every excuse going for getting beaten.
Speaker 2:That wasn't why I felt empty. I felt empty because I'd been a fake for six games at the peak of my career and I thought what if they don't ask me back? And I've wasted that biggest opportunity of my life trying to coach like somebody else. So I was lucky enough that John Jeffrey, the British lion, scottish Back Road forward, who was my hero when I was growing up he probably still is. He was our team manager. We were lucky enough to share a few beers with him and Greg Oliver, who was the head coach in the South of France. We had a heart to heart. They said Bob, you've been wonderful. I said, oh, really, oh, my God, I just haven't been myself. And they said well, you're coming back next year. So when you come back next year, it actually said yourself sounds pretty bloody good to us. So I thought, right, ok, I'm going to go in next year and I'm going to be really confident.
Speaker 2:I knew, I guess, greg, I had a bit of a safety net, but I knew that at the end of that second season I was going to have to take a step back because my day job and my family were picking up. So I had a bit of a safety net. I thought I'm going to do this my way. It's the only chance I'm going to get and I still remember the first session of the second season.
Speaker 2:So the thing I really wanted was to get into these guys' heads that just because you're in an international squad, you've not made it. So you've got a bag of kit and a tracksuit and thistles are all over your kit and everything. You haven't made it. You haven't really made it till you make the team and then you win in the team and to do that we're going to need to take our physicality to a new level and you can't just turn up and turn that on. You've got to train like that, in short, intense bursts of 10 physicality.
Speaker 2:So the first session back that second season, john Jeffrey was watching and we went to a very physical, intense, short and sharp forward session and three of our main forwards were carried off. And don't get me wrong, that doesn't happen every time I coach. Hopefully you remember that. It was just one of. And I walked over with my head down and he said, hey, what's wrong? And I said, oh geez, I'm so sorry, and he went. That was the best under 20 training session I've seen for years and years and years. And there was guys in that team like Fraser Brown who went on to play for Scotland and I mean just really Sean as being really physical individuals.
Speaker 2:Our performances in the second year were better. We were within a score of a very good Irish team who won the Grand Slam. We got beaten by three points by France and we had an OK Junior World Cup, but it wasn't really, again, great the results of the performance. I left that last season feeling quite fulfilled that I'd given it my best shot and I'd done it my way and it was so important. And on the back of that I was allowed to coach the Scotland under 19 team and I was the only time I was an international head coach and I decided that I was going to do this my way because I was definitely giving up and I had one shot. And isn't it funny how sometimes again, it's luck, not design.
Speaker 2:We turned up for our first training session at Murray Field and in the early hours a heavy frost had set in and the groundsmen said oh, all the pitchers are frozen, you can't train. I've got 60 young international rugby players from all over the UK who'd flown in for a training session. What are we going to do? And we decided, well, the only thing we can do is go inside. Okay, so what are we going to do inside? And we split them into tables, probably like you do at a corporate team building event. Split them into tables and said how are we going to differentiate ourselves? We think it's by being Scottish. If Scottishness is our differentiator, what does that mean? And these young guys? They're 18 years old, right, and you talk about that collaborative learning environment. That was one of the best sessions of my life. We didn't even put our boots on.
Speaker 2:They came back and said we have a word in Scotland called this gallus. It basically means being very confident. We think Scott sportsmen, when they're at their best, are gallus. They're very confident, they're a little bit cocky. We want to do that Tick. That sounds great to me as a coach. Let's be confident. Let's be ball players, not just ball carriers, let's go out and play. Scotland are a nation of inventors. We invent televisions and light bulbs and steam trains and things like that. We want to be innovated in the way we play Tick, love that. And then I think this table was predominantly forwards. They said the Scots guy in the movies as always, a psychopath. We want to be crazy Scottish psychopaths. So suddenly you've got a team of youngsters that say if you facilitate us as a group, we will be confident, innovative and aggressive as hell. And I'm thinking well, if I can bottle that, that is just fantastic. So we took that.
Speaker 2:This is a team sorry, I should have said this is a team that didn't win a game under 18 level, didn't enjoy their rugby under 18 level and didn't win a game in the Six Nations in the under 20s the year after. We only had two games, but we were unbeaten. They beat Italy by, I think, six tries to one away from home and we beat a really, really strong French team 35-30 in Glasgow. It's one of the very few times one of two times, I think Scotland have beaten France and under 19 level, and I track it back to that, the fact that it was frosty on that first day and that ability, I guess, is a slightly older coach, a bit more confident, to think on your feet and do something. But again, maybe when you're taking on again this is maybe for the coaches who are taking on a representative team or an international team there's a tendency to rush straight out onto the pitch because you're limited in time.
Speaker 2:Let's get going with what you guys call our X's and O's, and actually that's a false economy. Let's just stop. Why are we all here? Let's try and get a Y or a philosophy or a principle, something that binds us all together. I mean that group. I still keep in touch with a lot of that group. One of the tries we scored to beat France I'd never seen it before. It was an incredibly slick, integrated back row midfield move. Our left blindside winger scored under the posts. I'd never seen it before. But did I care? No, because they were being innovative and they said, oh, we ran that in the car park at the hotel last night. Coach, just honestly, the best Again. I've been lucky with clubs. I've been really lucky with players that I've coached, but that group will always have a special place in my heart. They were just wonderful.
Speaker 1:Now throwing a hypothetical at you Say you had that meeting and the players came back with something where it wasn't a natural alignment with what you were saying, it wasn't particularly native, it wasn't particularly physical, or they were saying things where you were like, oh, this is not who I am. How do you manage that as a coach? Because if it's coming from the players, they've obviously had input and they've thought about it or they may or may not have thought about it. Yeah, just how do you get that alignment when it doesn't necessarily go the natural way you maybe want it to go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and look it is. It's very difficult because you are, you know, again, we're back to our control, free career. We're seeding control of how that meeting goes. There's an element of trust there and I do find, whether it's in a work environment or rugby environment, if you pass that trust over, players tend not to waste it. So you know, nine times out of 10, maybe 19 times out of 20, you don't need to worry that you're going to get something back that just doesn't fit.
Speaker 2:I think where you need to be thoughtful is if it's something that actually makes you think and it wasn't on your list of desires, but it makes sense and it really makes sense for them as a group and they really believe in it. So I think, if it makes sense, I think you know, you do, you go with it and I think that's wonderful. Right, because that's me, I'm vulnerable. You've come up with something great and again you celebrate that. I think where you need, as a coach, to know that there's a spectrum of leadership styles and at one end you've got this very inclusive coaching style and at the other end there's a bit more of an autocraft. You don't go all the way along that spectrum to the autocraft. But I think you do need to move along and I guess it's back to that query theory of coaching through questions. Why do you think that's right? What are the rest of you think?
Speaker 2:Now, the bit that I missed and I missed because it wasn't relevant until you asked me this question one other table decided not to take it hugely seriously. I don't want to generalize or talk about, you know, prototype prop forwards, but there was quite a lot of prop forwards on the table and what they laughed and joked about, what they wanted to get out of the season was quite a lot of alcohol and running around in the pubs and clubs of Edinburgh chasing young ladies and it was quite interesting. And this way you know you've nailed it. As a group, some of the if you can be a senior player 18, some of the bigger voices just rubbish that before I even got there. But you know we would have. You know we poked a bit of fun at them. We would have ignored it. But I think you really know you've nailed it. When the rest of the group self-regulates, you know our captain, stuart Edwards, who actually now coaches at Ariotson our semi-professional team, was just a wonderfully mature 18-year-old and you led that team and self-regulated that team really really well.
Speaker 1:And how do you encourage authenticity in your assistant coaches or your coaching staff as a head coach, and have you had any difficulties along the way where maybe you've inherited a coaching staff where you're not necessarily line with or you've picked? So, essentially, the bigger question is around how do you manage your assistant coaches as a head coach, and also how do you make sure that they come across with their own point of view, their own authenticity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's interesting when you become a head coach. I think one thing a lot of head coaches messes. I also. You've got two teams to coach. You've obviously got the team, but you've also got your coaching team and your job should be almost to make yourself irrelevant. I've always said that at work. My job is to build a group of leaders that makes me irrelevant. The CEO of Netflix has got a wonderful. He said I'll go months without making a decision. Now, that's not because Netflix doesn't make decisions. It's because he's got such a good leadership team, specialist coaching team in our world that make those decisions for him, and I think that's got to be your aim as a head coach.
Speaker 2:I think what you need to do on the authenticity bit is you have to model it, and one of my desires since I went back to Harriet Scottish Rugby is seeing a decline in playing numbers and one of my desires was to get Harriet to add an extra team to their roster and finally got it. And would it be 2021 or fall 2021? And we had a game and it was our first game, but our second 15 that I'm accountable for had an important league game and I tried to balance getting two teams ready my passion for my second 15, but my other passion for having another team at the club and the second 15 lost their league game and I couldn't help but think it was because I didn't give them the attention that they really needed and maybe because I trusted them too much, maybe I thought they were ahead of where they are. But then I looked at their bunch of young I mean really talented but young guys. So the way I modeled I guess I didn't model like the way I felt.
Speaker 2:I walked in on the Tuesday night to our changing room, stood in front of them and said, okay, we're going to talk about what we can learn from Saturday and the whole theme of the podcast. Things didn't go right, so we have to learn and it's a collaborative learning environment. What can we learn together? The first thing I'm going to take I am going to take something off the table, but I'm also going to show that I'm vulnerable. I'm going to put my hand up and say the first thing that the thing that I got wrong last week as I took my eye off the ball on our prep, and I guarantee to every single one of you that that will never happen again and I'd like to apologize to you all because I let you down.
Speaker 2:One of my young assistant coaches is a really good mate and he's going to be a brilliant coach. He can't do that. He can't do that. He can't admit we got it wrong Now he was two months into his coaching journey and we've all been there right. You can't admit you're wrong when you're north of 50 and you've done a lot of things. You've done a lot of things, you're north of 50 and you've done a lot of stuff. I think you realise it's the right thing to say hey, we're in this together, yeah, sometimes.
Speaker 2:And then your point about how do you ideally you get to cherry pick your coaches who work with you and they're like-minded in terms of their philosophy, but other times coaches just want to do things differently to you and I think again, as long as they're in these parameters of acceptability, I think that's okay. When you're at a higher level and you have the ability to manage your coaches through video review and KPIs and stats, I think again, it's like you would do a corporate grade. You would have a vision of where you want to get to and you would say if a company or a team that achieved that vision. What would be the things that they would exhibit? And in a rugby world that can be really easy. Solid set piece, strong defence, our discipline, our ball retention those are the pillars of a successful rugby team pretty much around the world. Okay, that's interesting. How do we measure? Take defence as an example. How do we measure that? And then you get into the KPIs of individual missed tackles, line breaks against turnovers, one, and suddenly you could measure the performance of your defence coach.
Speaker 2:I mentored a professional coach in Scotland just recently and he was an ex-hooker and his forward coach was an ex-hooker and he said well, I don't like the way our line-outs are going. I said are you winning them? He said, yeah, delight them. I'm going to go and get involved and I'm going to be all over this guy because I don't like the way the line-outs are. So if you've spoken to him about the type of line-out ball you want to win, he said no, not really. I said but is he delivering the type of line-out ball you want to win? Yep, consistently, yep. Well, I just don't like. You know, there's too much movement. I don't like line-outs with too much movement. And I said, well, you've passed and this is tough. Right, you've passed on the control of the line-out to him. You should have said to him as long as we're winning 90% of our line-out ball in the right area of the line-out, on the right part of the pitch or mapping, is good and our success rate is good and maybe we're winning 20% of their line-outs, I'm happy, right. But the again, the actual exes and those of how he does that that's his job now, that's not your job, right. But if he's not meeting your goals same in the corporate world If he's not meeting his goals, you have a sensible coaching discussion with him, because you're coaching him, you're not just coaching the players underneath, and that's another difficult part of the coaching journey.
Speaker 2:You know I'm a forward and you'll know that Roddy Deans, who was our wonderful captain at Harriet's when you were there and sadly had to give up playing when he was young, like you did, and moved into coaching and was always going to be a wonderful coach. He was technically brilliant, passionate as hell. I let him coach the forwards and guys that had been my guys. They came to me with their rugby problems but also their personal problems. I ran the line-outs but they were my guys and overnight they were Roddy's guys and I mean Roddy is one of my best friends in the whole world. But I find that really tough and I'm so proud of him now. I mean he's director of rugby at Merkiston Castle School in Edinburgh probably one of the most successful rugby schools in Scotland but I find it really tough giving his boys of my boys. They became his boys overnight and sometimes we would have a little bit of a clash about the way he did stuff. But I think thanks again back to your question on communication Because we had such a close relationship and we knew we wanted the same thing we could be really blunt with each other, discuss things and then we would just move on. So it's really difficult.
Speaker 2:As you make I've mentioned a sort of coaching career thing a couple of times you tend to start as a specialist in some form, as you do in the work environment, so maybe you're a forward. So you start off as a specialist scrum coach and as you build your career I think the ultimate you want to never lose that specialism. That's your thing. But you should think about your career in a T-shape. So I've got deep specialism in one area but I understand the whole breads of a rugby team and how it hangs together, or the whole breads of an asset management company and how it hangs together. And the way you do that is you start to build your T-shape through the adjacent parts.
Speaker 2:So imagine I'm a young forwards coach today and I've given up playing and I move into the coaching world and somebody like you gives me a chance and they say we want you to look after the breakdown because that was your thing and I do a good job. For a year. And then you said you know what, bobby's done quite a good job. We'd like you to look after the scrum next year. Wow, that's great. So again, I'm building a very small T-shape. The next year you might give me a line out and then you might say you know what, just look after the forwards. And then it's forwards and breakdowns for the whole team. And then you might say actually just be the defense coach, move away from your unit.
Speaker 2:And that's where it gets tough, right, because in this modern world of attack and defense coaches, I don't have any. I don't have my guys. When I was the forwards coach, there's my forwards. If you're the back scouts, there's my backs. Now I don't really have any guys. So I've got this problem in my head again about where's my territory, and I think it's really interesting. Is that? Because the ultimate journey is to be a head coach? When you really are, maybe you've flipped that vertical part of the tee. You might be purely horizontal.
Speaker 2:I coached the Edinburgh. I'm lucky enough to coach the Edinburgh district team in Scotland. I've got a wonderful coaching team, but there's five of them, so I don't do much coaching. I'm this helicopter guy. That is the very big picture, and then almost the walking past micro coach. You know when you I don't know when you're jumping in the line you might just want to do this with your feet or that with your feet, and so suddenly I'm very big macro strategy and environment setting and only a little bit of micro coaching. But again, I've ceded control to those five guys.
Speaker 2:When we're on the pitch and some of them are quite young and I think they look at me going I don't really understand what your job is. You're the head coach, shouldn't you be coaching? Well, actually, as long as I'm organizing and coaching you guys, you do the coaching. So, yeah, I think it's really important, as you go through your coaching career, understand what you might need to give up at every step of the way until you've become a head coach or beyond that. Create a director rugby where you might even get to put a tracksuit on. You might be out fundraising and speaking at the pre-game lunch and you'd rather be in the dressing room. And when we talk about being authentic, you need to know what you are to know whether you're being authentic or not.
Speaker 2:And I know, at the age of 57, I'm a generalist. I love being a generalist. I love being a generalist in my working environment. I'm known as the guy who understands how to invest, how to sell corporate strategy. I'm a connective tissue guy and I take that into my rugby as well. I'm really happy being a generalist. I love setting the culture, setting the environment, coaching the coaches. Do I get turned on and excited by? You know the intricacies of line-out lifting and scrum binding nowadays Not hugely, not hugely. But then something new comes along. I don't know where you are with tackle laws in the US, but we've this year have introduced this below the sternum tackling into the non-professional game in the UK. I find that a real challenge as a coach and a great challenge, a positive challenge, because you can't get your. This is going to get really technical, so I apologize.
Speaker 2:But it's just a little bit of an example how, once a coach holds a coach right, how does a big guy get low enough to tackle a small guy who's bent over and get under his sternum Bending at the hips the way we used to when we're tackling doesn't get you low enough. So now you need to get that front knee that we always talk about in when we coach kids, foot in the hoop, foot in really close to contact. You've got to get a really bent angle on that front leg and the bending is now knee and the hip to get low enough. I get excited about that because that's new stuff that can really make a difference. And some of the younger coaches maybe just you know they just don't think innovatively about that or they need a bit of help. But as far as how the line-out runs, how our backs moves run, as long as they deliver for me, I just don't get involved anymore.
Speaker 1:I found with. Initially, when I went to head coachin' and I had a coachin' staff with me, I struggled being redundant. I wanted to be involved and I found that I was getting involved a lot more and as things progress, as you mentioned there, with experience and also you're seeing success of your assistant coaches and you see relationships they're building with the players like that became really fulfilling as well and you could dive in. Also, what I found being able to step away.
Speaker 1:I often find myself when there's a scrum session going on. I'm next to it as a head coach because that's building up my knowledge, because these guys who I've got a scrum coach and line-out coaches they do stuff I've got no idea about. But the more I hang around them, all ships rise right. All of a sudden I'm starting to I'm learning as well. It just because I'm a head coach doesn't mean I can't be learning, because you're always, always learning. So once I kind of got over that, actually I'm not being redundant, I'm doing a million other things to keep this whole environment going forward, as you mentioned, from booking buses to talking to alumni, to talking to the RAIDers, but actually it comes to a game, a practice session. I'm like, wow, I really I had to think about this, but the assistant coaches have already got it. They're already being empowered to do it, and that has been a really big learning moment for me as a head coach.
Speaker 2:So you're back into that collaborative learning environment again, and it really is. It's about everybody learning and I think again, I'm 57, some of the guys in my team are 18 years old, first year out of high school, but we're all learning right. So I've learned things. I've learned how to teach tackling better. This year the rules have changed so I had to, but I could.
Speaker 2:What I've seen from a lot of coaches around is that well, that's the rules fault and that's a problem. We've managed to flip that around and say what a great opportunity. Right, we're not gonna moan about the rules. We're gonna be the best chop tackling and jacking team in the league. We're gonna turn the rule changes to our advantage. But we're gonna have to learn as a group. How do we tackle, though? We've again. We've shifted the way we align. I don't wanna bore people now, but we've changed the way we align defensively to make sure that there's space still for two tacklers, whereas the way we used to align there wasn't enough space for two tacklers, so the second guy in was always getting penalized. But if you can't get a second guy in, every contact is one against one and the ball carrier tends to win those. So how do you get two guys in but get them both low enough? Wow, that's a challenge and I think you can't coach if you're not. I mean I'll say you've gotta be passionate about teaching, because coaching is teaching. You've gotta be passionate about your people. You love your players, right, and you'll do anything for your players the proper coach but you've gotta be passionate about the subject matter. If you're a rugby coach, you have to love rugby and you have to love solving rugby problems. And some of the best evenings of my life have been where people like you, where we sit down and we have a beer or coffee and we just talk about rugby and it's we're so lucky in our sport and you and I could probably talk about knee angles and tackles for 45 minutes and not be bored. We're just, we are absolutely lucky that that's the way it works in our group.
Speaker 2:One thing, craig it's really a really interesting exercise that I used to do more in a work environment than a rugby environment. We would sit with my leadership team and be really clear on our roles. First thing, let's all understand why we're here and what we do, but then I would do this exercise. Some people hate it, right, so everyone's got a super strength and I introduced sorry. I just did this with my leadership team at sorry, I did it with my senior players group, actually at Herriots, I knew I'd done it recently and we use the analogy of an Avengers movie and we saw it. So everybody, every Avengers got their super strength right and we know the way the movies go right Individually, they put up a pretty good fight but they lose. But the grand finale comes together when they combine their super strengths, which masks all of the individual weaknesses and suddenly Thanos gets beaten right.
Speaker 2:So I do this exercise yeah, tell me what's your grip tonight. I know what your role is. What are you really really good at? But now tell me, sorry, tell me, yeah, tell me your super strength and then tell me your grip tonight. What's your weakness? Because if I and I have weaknesses, right, I get bored with detail. Right, I do get bored with detail. I work, and at rugby I get bored with detail. So at work at the moment I've got a COO who works with me who loves detail. Therefore, together we're quite a good mix. He doesn't like big picture. You know conceptual discussions I get, as you can tell right now, I get bogged down in that stuff. So I think it's really good when you get your again.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things is again it's like that frosty morning at Murray Field. It's a false economy to. I've got a new leadership team, I've got a new rugby team to coach. Let's get out in the field and start playing rugby Actually let's and I'm doing this with the Edinburgh district team at the moment. It's almost like a pre-pre-preseason. We've had three or four coffees, we've got the roles clarified. The next thing we're gonna do is the, the strengths and the grip. Tonight let's really get to understand each other so we know how we're gonna operate out on the field. The next thing we will do is bring in the senior players group and we'll be really clear about how we're gonna coach and the type of environment we're gonna set. And the importance of them in a group is that two-way communication thing.
Speaker 2:And I will be really blunt, my non-negotiables are collaborative learning environment and then a phrase that I bring from work into rugby that profit and fund are not mutually exclusive. And I think that works in a business format and a rugby format and any sporting world. That we do our best stuff when we're having fun. Any good team that you or I have been part of. It will have had task cohesion right, we'll have understood what we're trying to achieve together and we'll be really tight around that. But the teams that have gone on to win championships and leagues and cups, they tend to have the social cohesion as well that they stick together off the pitch, they enjoy each other's company, they enjoy the journey and I sometimes think that's where the magic really happens. So we make it really clear that fun and profit are not mutually exclusive.
Speaker 2:We last year was the first time we'd had the district championship back in Scotland since a couple of years, before COVID and I know the other, and this doesn't always work right. We've again talked about learning from mistakes. We finished bottom of the pile, we were fourth out of four, but our mission was it's the first step back into this and we want to create excitement about it for the future. So we wanted that squad, regardless of results, to have walked away to be the biggest advocates of that district championship this coming season. So our first session was like a corporate team builder we did some crazy exercises and we had beers on a Wednesday night and then we had a bit of a pub crawl around Edinburgh whilst the other districts were whacking into pads. Now there's right ways and wrong ways to do all of this, but I do think that the environment needs to be fun. If you just focus we talk a lot about process over performance, but even beyond process, focus on having fun you enjoy the journey, one of the things you and I were talking in our preamble my second 15 won their league last Saturday and I said to the boys we've still got two games to go.
Speaker 2:Please enjoy the journey, because the Sunday morning when you wake up after the last game of the season, sadly you're going to feel quite hollow Because the thing that's been driving you for months and months and months, you've accomplished it and it's done and you've got to fill that time in your life. And I felt quite hollow this week because it's kind of like I've been planning from week to week selection tactics, strategy and then suddenly it's all done as of last Saturday at 3.30. And that's something I always warn people about, that enjoy the journey, because whilst the destination is great, the destination is just a moment in time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it's often where it ends, and it's interesting that it's almost trying to think of it in two fronts and I'm just thinking out loud now. But obviously you've got a tangible thing you're working for, but how do we create something which is a bit more ongoing, a bit more continuous, as opposed to maybe there isn't a destination and that kind of. Again, I'm just kind of spitballing here, but maybe the emphasis should be on the journey and not the final outcome, because it can then keep going and keep you fulfilled. But you need stops along the way, right? So maybe look at it as a stop along the way, as opposed to a final endpoint. But yeah, that's just something what sparked my brain going there.
Speaker 2:So I like to use themes and images for the guys. So you are our journey. We've talked about it being a train journey and we said winning the league last week was an absolutely massive train station on that journey. But we've got two league games left that are very important destinations as well. Now I think we've all gathered in this podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty old, I've been involved in rugby playing, coaching for 47 years and I've never gone unbeaten in a league season. And I'm trying to say to these young guys you've got the chance to do that almost at the start of your career, so that's a great extra two stops on the journey. So we use the sort of journey destination thing. But you're right, why should the journey end at the end of the season? Those young guys have got, hopefully, 20 more smaller journeys as part of their overall rugby journey. So yeah, it's really interesting. How do you get them to understand that we don't get all it doesn't become all consuming just to win the league? It's. You know, you've got to enjoy the journey. You know this for me, but I dream about rugby. I dream about rugby at least once a week, but I never. And I love coaching, but I never dream about coaching. When I dream about rugby, I'm always playing and I think, yeah, I keep saying that you've got to enjoy the journey.
Speaker 2:And some guys get disillusioned and think I'm going to give up. And you try and say to them please don't give up, please keep going, it's got to be your decision. But what I wouldn't give to have the opportunity that you've got and it's different. You know you and I are mates and you were injured and had to give up playing and that's a different type of mental challenge to get over. But I always feel for the guys who almost make the decision for themselves that please don't do it. You don't know what you're walking away from. It definitely is a special game.
Speaker 1:You look back and I almost think now that I think I had the best of both worlds playing, because I was never good enough to break the record, I was never good enough to break into any professional ranks, but I was good enough to be around good environments and good players without having the pressure of performing on the weekend. Else you lose your job or you lose your contract or anything. Essentially, it allowed me to explore other things, which eventually became coaching within rugby. But it was at a high enough level that I was always exposed to good things. But you could have a really good time along the way. That's not to say you can't do that at the top end as well, but I really think of it now. I lucked out. I just loved the playing environments I was always part of, because they were enjoyable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think People often ask me that sort of performance element business versus rugby. I saw that they're absolutely the same, but the feedback loop in rugby is much, much quicker. So the average CEO probably lasts seven years. Not sure how long the average rugby head coach lasts, but it's probably not seven years. So I always feel like a CEO's tenure is almost like one season for a rugby coach.
Speaker 2:And the feedback you get as a player you get it bluntly every Tuesday night or whenever you have selection. You get that feedback in some form Good job, you're still in the team, or hopefully your coach has an honest conversation to explain why you're not still in the team. But that feedback comes really rapid. If you're a coach, you and I both know you'll get it in the papers on a Sunday morning. Nowadays you get it online and people love to comment, but you quite often will get it and sometimes this is a bit that cuts the most right You'll get it in the bar from club members afterwards people who you respect. So the feedback loops are constant in coaching and the need to keep moving forward. Imagine in business if your competitive advantage was analysed by specialists from other companies every week your latest new moves and new products were really analysed by video every single week. But that's the world that rugby coaches live in. I mean, our games are available for all of our rivals on a Sunday morning at first 15 level. I think the other thing, craig, that I hope will change.
Speaker 2:I was lucky enough to play in the amateur area and then into the professional area era and I think the two things that the professional era probably took out of the game the first one was the characters and the fun, and I think I go back to that profit and fun and not mutually exclusive. When I first took back first year of under 20 coaching, I met a couple of the guys in the team that I knew from my hometown club and I said, hey, you guys have just come back from an under 19 World Cup into bye. Wow, I bet that was great. And they said it was awful. I said how can it be awful? Because all we did was train and talk rugby and play rugby and talk rugby and play rugby, and there was no room for fun and we weren't allowed to joke and I thought, wow, what a way to run an environment. It felt like it was some sort of concentration camp. So I think you know, and for a while I think we took the characters out of the game.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing and I love I know he's a Marmite character I love listening to Eddie Jones. I think he's one of the smartest guys who talks about rugby and the one thing I like about him is he uses his story here. So he came into professional rugby coaching with the Brumbies. He made the Brumbies one of the most successful super rugby teams going. They were rehearsed through I think six, seven, eight, nine, 10 phases, so it was almost like a game of chess. Why? Because the coaches were in that professional environment that you outlined that my job depends on winning. So I'm going to control this. I'm going to take all of the decision making away from the players and I'm going to make it and I'm going to steer them around the pitch from the sidelines and it's going to be carefully regimented and I think what we've got now is that defense coaches have come in and have got used to defending against very regimented attacks and the way and this is where Eddie Jones is now so the value on individual skill it's been Russell type player is really high and we've got to go back to having characters who, using my Scottish word for my under 19s are a little bit gallous, a little bit cocky and are prepared to try things to break down well organized defenses. But that means that coaching has had to go full circle.
Speaker 2:From when I first started playing, you didn't have a coach, you had an advisor to the captain, you know, into those early days of highly controlled from professionalism to a much more devolved decision making going forward. Now we have a phrase I try and coach situations, not structure. I try not to tell the boys what to do. I might say here's some scenarios and here's what you might see in those scenarios. Now, here are some scenarios that I might have to go through. Here are some of the options. Again back to being collaborative. But what am I missing? What else could we do? You tell me what we do if this happened and that happened and try and get them to recognize situations as one.
Speaker 2:And my reasoning on that is you know, let's use the simplest example is there's a midfield rock and there's an overlap. Now the traditional way to coach, that is, the winger sees the overlap, he shouts, whatever code you've got, that there's an overlap. It's normally something hard to crack like hands or hot. He feeds that in through his centers to his standoff. Who has to call to the scrum half, who drives the forwards off over the top of the rock to clear the ball quickly and off we go and hopefully we execute our overlap. But that communication process probably takes two or three seconds. At the highest level. Three seconds is long enough for a defense to reorganize. So we're trying to get this is a work in progress.
Speaker 2:For me is if we all just recognize play with our heads up and recognize that situation at once, there's not really a need for a communication chain. We just go with it, we just do it and we hopefully are two to three seconds ahead of the defense, whereas we wouldn't be in the old fashioned world. So we're trying again to devolve decision making back to the players. But players are coming out of high school. I don't know what's like in the States, but players are coming out of high school here, very regimented. So I get that, bob. That sounds really exciting. What's the call? What's the code? There is no code, right, there is no code. We're going to play. I'm going to give you a set piece and a starter play. Those are your foundations. I am going to trust you guys to make all the decisions after that. So, from the brumbies of eight, nine, 10 rocks for one rock, and that's where I think the game has to go, because we're in the entertainment business, it's got to be fun.
Speaker 1:It can't look like regimented robots running into each other Now that's so important and then your training reflects that, right, yeah, so OK, we might not be getting it right now and training could look like talking about it. It could be talking. Right, these are the scenarios on a whiteboard or it could be filmed. And what could we do here? And, yeah, just reflecting we I use the word games in context, so it's a situation all over the structure. Right, these are potential contexts. What might be out there? How do we ever come it? And then you go through different repetition, repetitions with people with different places and different balls, different weather, whatever it might be. I love that.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. I'm just going to say that I'm going to keep it short Because I think we're short of time. The word context there is the key word. Yeah, craig. So I think games for games sake are good, fun and maybe teach the guys some decision making, but I think they need the context that we're going to play a game training tonight that is going to be focused on what we discussed inside on the whiteboard, on the video analysis, so that they understand that you are focusing pretty much on one thing in that context. So I think games and context is the great phrase for all of the coaches to remember.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just big on that and also it's a framework for me as well when I'm designing session plans or talking with the coaches. A biggest question I often ask what's the context? What's the context, what's that? And I just think it's a really nice. It's a nice kind of visual, but it also has many, many options within that, because the context could be different every time. So, yeah, I use that word a lot, but in terms of you're an experienced coach who is clearly always looking to get better, so any kind of words of wisdom for where you find your kind of next learnings or where you're pushing yourself to get better that we can share with the listeners.
Speaker 2:I think the key thing is just be prepared to look absolutely anywhere for an advantage. I guess I've cited examples from the military. I think teaching, coaching, leadership are all very similar if you're at that coaching end of the leadership style spectrum. So don't be shy about looking at what are good teaching techniques. Again, I didn't know what the word pedagogy meant till I was probably 15 years into my coaching career, but I think how you teach is really important. I think how you lead and the environment you set is really important, and I think it's being prepared to look anywhere and be prepared to look beyond just the technical skills and I don't ignore the technical skills but how do you tackle in this new tackle while that we live in now? That's really important, right, and you're going to look for has anyone nailed this already? What does it look like? But I think also look for the environment that you set. Look how are you going to lead as a coach or a leader? It's the same as being a CEO, but as a coach, you're also a teacher.
Speaker 2:So I think just looking much wider, well beyond just rugby union tactics, rugby leagues are well trodden paths. I think the games are getting more different again, so maybe that's not the best place to look, but other tackle techniques or tackle lessons to be learned from NFL they're footwork lessons from NFL. What about basketball? I mean, john Wooden is probably the coach that we all aspire to be. Just look wherever you can Be a zealot. I tell people I'm a rugby geek and I think geek is probably a word that's got negative connotations. I am so proud of being a rugby geek. I'm a coaching geek. I will look anywhere I can for that advantage, because just remember that your exes and those are being analyzed on video the day after your game. Every coach you think has players with good individual skills, the right mental skills and right physical conditioning. Every coach will talk about the pillars of what a successful game will look like set piece, set plays, defense, discipline. So you can't ignore those. You have to have those. But if you want to differentiate yourself, it's what sits on top of that, the themes to your game plan, how you encourage your ex factor players to do ex factor things, what's your environment.
Speaker 2:So you've got to think, I think, craig, in terms of how do I construct a competitive advantage here If I'm coaching against you? What are you doing with your team? Because I need to do something different, because we'll do the same. May the world's boring as hell, but if we all do the same, I look at the world I will be quiet. If I look at the world now, it's populated by five man liners. So if every team is doing five man liners, I guarantee every team knows how to defend against a five man liners. So we do four man and seven man liners and I always see the first few of the game the opposition going hold on a minute. This is what I was expecting. So you know what. I guess we're going full circle in the comments. By being authentic, you're being yourself. So be different, don't be the same. Be curious. Just hunt out different things and just be yourself and have some fun. Your coaches are going to enjoy the journey as well.
Speaker 1:Great. I remember what you said about Super Strength and you mentioned the Edinburgh District Team, socialising. I think socialising was definitely one of my Super Strengths, so I'd sign me up for the social chair for the Edinburgh team. We'll dial you in, but, bob, this has been a wonderful, wonderful chat. I always love our conversations. I'm glad this one can be shared with the listeners as well, because so much wisdom, and I look forward to connecting again in the future, because I know you're going to have a few more nuggets, because you're always looking for more and more. So I just want to say thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:It's been great to speak to Craig, as always, and look, I think you're doing a wonderful job, so you know, proud of you. I hope you all have some great harp up the good work.