It’s very easy as a captain to find your own performance levels slipping. You have so many more responsibilities than your team-mates, particularly off the field, and these can eat up your time and your focus. This applies across many sports, not just rugby. Tour de France leaders have to do hours of media after each day’s stage when they’d rather be recovering; cricketers often find their averages declining quite sharply when they’re captain.
Having to think about more than your own personal performance can be distracting, and at times can require two diametrically opposite mindsets – for me before a match, the distinction between my player headspace (ready to kill someone) and my captain headspace (talk to the ref and opposing captain, be nice to the terrified mascot, remember to ask them their name and what school they go to). And you’re under much more scrutiny than your team-mates, so even the slightest loss of form is immediately noticed, seized upon and dissected.
As a leader, you need to maintain your own performance levels, not just for the team’s sake – they can’t afford to be carrying a passenger – but for your own too. If you’re not pulling your weight in your own personal tasks, you’ll begin to lose respect from the others, no matter how well you’re performing your leadership role.
How do you go about doing this? By knowing when to be selfish. Sometimes the best way, maybe the only way, of being a selfless leader is to be selfish.
For example, you have to prioritise. When there are lots of competing demands on your time, assess each of them according to two criteria: importance and urgency. If something’s important but doesn’t need doing now, don’t do it. If something needs doing now but isn’t important, don’t do it. If something’s neither important nor urgent, definitely don’t do it! Only if something’s both important and urgent should you do it.
I tried to apply this to my own career. Let’s take a day during my playing career in which my schedule had ten things listed:
Clearly, if I had to do every one of these things I’d be running from pillar to post all day, which would give me no time to rest – and knowing when to rest is as important as knowing when to work, as no one can drive themselves indefinitely without seeing a drop-off in their performance levels and decision-making.
So which ones to ditch? Or, conversely, which ones are essential?
Anything directly connected to the core task is essential. In this instance, the core task was personal performance on the pitch, and the first four of these ten commitments – weights, skills, mental affirmation and physio – are all directly connected to that. So they stay.
The next two, the meetings with senior players and referee, were also connected to events on the pitch, but less directly. Ideally, I’d like to be at both, but do I really need to be? If I have to choose one and ditch one, which should I choose? It would depend on the circumstances. If there was a pressing issue the senior players wanted to discuss, then I would go there and let Gats and the other coaches deal with the referee. If the senior players’ meeting was a routine one and there was a specific issue I wanted to raise with the referee, then vice versa.
The final four are not directly connected to events on the pitch, but my responsibilities extend quite a long way off the pitch too. With sponsor photoshoots and charity appearances, there’s a large contractual element: both of these things are written into the terms of player agreements, though of course you can do extra on both fronts. If neither was mandatory, I’d ask whether one or more of the other boys could do it, not least because I didn’t want people just seeing me and a couple of other faces the whole time.
Particularly in the charity case, it would be important that it was a charity to which I felt personally attached and to which I could devote proper time. I could have spent each and every day doing charity work, but I never wanted to swan in and out of lots of different places. I wanted to give not just my profile but my time and effort too.
That leaves the press conference and the social night out. For the press conference, I’d ask if they really needed me or whether someone else could do it. If something to do with the captaincy was on the agenda, then of course it would be important for me to go; but if not, why not ask someone else? It wouldn’t even have to be one of the senior boys. Ask one of the younger guys in the squad; it would be good for their confidence and give the press someone new to write about.
As for the social night out – well, I’m such an antisocial so-and-so that I’d almost certainly give it a miss anyway. Sometimes you need to go for team harmony, but if it’s just a bog-standard night when some boys are going out and others aren’t, I’d rather get some room service and rest.
So these ten events are now down to about six, which is much more manageable. But of course whittling them down involves having to say no. Some people find this easy, perhaps unnervingly so. But for others, myself included, saying no is much harder. You want to help, you want to be available, you don’t want to let people down, and so the temptation is to say yes.
Andy helped me here too, even going so far as to give me a sheet of excuses! When someone would ask me to do something, I’d tell them I had to look at my diary, or check with my agent. That would buy me time to really consider what would be needed of me and whether I could justify doing it.
The flip side of stopping your personal performance from slipping is guarding yourself against any kind of complacency. Whether with Wales or the Lions, I never assumed I was going to be picked just because I was captain. This was another of the reasons I chose not to sit on selection committees. I liked going into team announcements and being on the edge like everyone else, not knowing whether I’d be picked or not.
For example, my birthday fell before the quarter-final against Ireland in 2011. I was sitting down at the dinner table with all the other players when in walked Huw Bennett with a huge cake, and all the boys started singing ‘Happy Birthday’. It was a nice moment, but then when the cake was cut I didn’t know whether to have a piece or not. A few days out from the match, when I was in great shape, a slice wouldn’t have made any difference to me physically. But it would have made a difference to me mentally. Before every game I need to know in my own mind that I’ve done everything possible to prepare myself. Chocolate is my treat after a game, but not before. If I broke that rule, it would have been easier to break the next one, and the next, and suddenly those standards I’d always set myself would have been slipping. Not by much, but that’s irrelevant. Either you set standards or you don’t, and when you set them you have to abide by them.
My commitment to personal performance also manifested itself in a way some people found a little strange: that I’d never ask my opposite number if they wanted to swap shirts. For me, asking that question implied offering them a respect I didn’t want to show. I didn’t want McCaw, for example, to think that I’d been grateful for the opportunity to play against him (even though a man who played 148 Tests would hardly miss the odd shirt or two).
McCaw must have played an endless line of young punks who wanted to show him they were the real deal. But in my own eyes, I was the real deal. I didn’t need to be grateful to play against him or anyone else. I didn’t want to be craven. I wanted him to think he was playing against an equal. It’s not that I didn’t think any of my opponents weren’t good: of course they were. It was just that I wanted to be better.
That said, I always swapped shirts with someone if they asked. Without wanting to sound arrogant, the shirt of a Wales and Lions captain is a big deal for someone who plays for a lower-level team like Uruguay or Namibia, and who may not even be a full-time professional. I genuinely enjoyed playing those matches and meeting those guys, so it was a pleasure to swap shirts.
And I was pretty happy after one of the matches we played against Australia when Pocock came into our dressing-room and asked to swap, because of all the men I played against he was the one I admired most, not just as a player (he was consistently my most difficult opponent, and the only one I think who got the better of me over the course of all the matches we played) but also as a man (he’s an outspoken activist on several issues, including gay rights and the environment).
His shirt, along with those of every player who’s swapped, reminds me of the essential truth about performance. There are no armbands on those shirts, no indication whether or not the wearer was captain. There’s just a number on the back, and that number signifies that the wearer was good enough to play for his country on that day. If that’s not the case, then no leadership in the world can make up for it.