TEAM WORK Ray McLean has worked as a leadership and management consultant for the last 20 years and is the founding director and principal facilitator of Leading Teams Australia. Ray conducts team performance and leadership programs for a number of AFL, NRL and NBL Clubs and also works with a wide range of corporate, educational and community organisations. His first book, Any Given Team, was published in 2006. Ray first recognised his ability to work effectively with teams when he spent five years in the RAAF as a training and leadership officer. He was also a physical education teacher for eight years. He lives in Geelong, Victoria. Leading Teams is the largest and most successful provider of leadership and team alignment programs in Australian sport. They specialise in the delivery of teamwork and leadership programs for elite sporting and corpo- rate organisations, aligning teams by creating shared vision and behaviours that empower all members of the team to engage in open dialogue. Leading Teams develops leaders who model and defend the behaviours that the team identifies as non-negotiable. For more information visit leadingteams.net.au Praise for Ray McLean’s Performance Improvement Program ‘The culture at our football club is one we are all proud of and one we have worked very hard to achieve . it would not have been achieved without Ray McLean’s direction and guidance.’ Paul Roos, AFL Premiership Coach, Sydney Swans ‘It’s pretty confronting, but [Leading Teams] go straight to the heart of what behaviours are unacceptable. It had to be done for us to improve our performance and move on.’ Tracey Heenan, Principal, St Kevin’s Primary School ‘I don’t think it matters whether it’s a sporting organisation, a business or a charity, you still need to find a way to effectively lead people to where you want the organisation to go. Anyone can benefit from this program.’ Mark Evans, General Manager, Hawthorn Football Club ‘There are a lot of similarities between success in sport and business . The Leading Teams program challenged people and opened up previously closed communication channels.’ Allan Morris, Executive Director, RMIT University IT Department ‘Working with Leading Teams has been instrumental in equip- ping us with the capacity to cope with the huge impact of the bushfires on this organisation and this community.’ Bill Forrest, former CEO, Nillumbik Shire Council ‘Leading Teams helped us understand that each individual is accountable to the school as an organisation and to each other as members of the team. We now understand how powerful the collective capacity of the team is to improve outcomes for us all.’ Viki Miles, Principal, Trafalgar Primary School ‘Ray McLean is expert in assisting organisations to develop their culture and values. An outstanding facilitator and com- municator, he emphasises the importance of individuals taking responsibility and becoming leaders to achieve better team results.’ Brian Goorjian, the most successful coach in Australian basketball ‘[The Performance Improvement Program] is a very important part of what the players still do. It’s the simplicity of it that is the strength of it, I think.’ Neil Balme, General Manager of Football Operations, Geelong FC TEAM WORK Forging links between honesty, accountability and success RAY MCLEAN with Adam McNicol Text copyright © Ray McLean 2010 Diagrams copyright © Ray McLean 2010 First published in 2010 Reprinted in 2015 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Published by Leading Teams Australia Pty Ltd J95, 21 Hall Street Port Melbourne VIC 3207 (03) 9654 3744 [email protected] www.leadingteams.net.au Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, Melbourne National Library of Australia Cataloguing- in- Publication data: Creator: McLean, Ray J., 1959– author. Title: Team work : forging links between honesty, accountability and success / Ray McLean with Adam McNicol. ISBN: 9780994438409 (paperback) Subjects: Teams in the workplace. Leadership. Organizational behavior. Psychology, Industrial. Other Creators/Contributors: McNicol, Adam, author. 658.4022 For Sally who continues to be my greatest source of inspiration. For my children Courtney, Jackson and Jesse who continue to support me in my endeavours and to all at Leading Teams who have enabled me to make my vocation a vacation. CONTENTS Foreword x Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Empowerment 8 Chapter 2 Culture 34 Chapter 3 Framework 64 Chapter 4 Relationships 90 Chapter 5 Genuine conversations 114 Chapter 6 Holding your line 132 Chapter 7 Individual responsibility 152 Chapter 8 Warning bells 176 Chapter 9 Living the program 192 Conclusion 202 Further reading 208 Acknowledgements 211 FOREWORD Having worked with Leading Teams for several years, I wanted to write this foreword by way of thanks. As I sat down to write it, I reflected that 2009 had been the most tumultuous period in my twenty- five years in local government. As CEO of Nillumbik Shire, situated on the north- eastern out- skirts of Melbourne, I’d started the year with a new council, the majority of whom were not on the previous council, although this is not an unusual occurrence. The seven new councillors between them had fourteen and a half years’ experience in local govern- ment and were charged with setting the strategic direction for a $65 million organisation with over 100 programs and services. Then came the 7 February bushfires, which burnt 25 per cent of the municipality and resulted in forty- one fatalities. One con- tractor (a former manager) died, and six staff members lost their homes. The majority of the staff live in Nillumbik or adjoining x FOREWORD municipalities, so everyone knew somebody who had been killed. In this atmosphere of grief and loss the organisation had to lift its performance to an unprecedented level with round-the- clock services in response to the tragedy. Then, to top it all off, at the end of the year the council decided not to give me another contract of employment as the CEO. So what’s all this got to do with Leading Teams? Well, I’d spent the previous four years working with Leading Teams to improve performance in our organisation. We’d chosen them not because I was an avid fan of football (explained by the fact that I barrack for Richmond), but because our HR manager had worked with them in a not- for- profit drug and alcohol agency. Leading Teams came in at a point where I’d recently been promoted to the position of CEO and most of my direct reports in management positions were new to the organisation. We pretty much had to build a new team, and I found Leading Teams’ prac- tical focus on behaviours and values to be the best glue to hold together such a diverse organisation. Over the next four years the management team worked very hard, and I firmly believe that this work has been critical in the high performance of the organisation in such a resource- constrained environment. We deliver a suite of services similar to most councils in the state, and do it 40 per cent more efficiently, both in terms of staff numbers and expenditure. Our work with Leading Teams also proved to be critical in the development of resilience in our organisation, something we discovered through the tragedies of 2009. The ability of our managers to have hard conversations with each other about their behaviour in a time of extreme anxiety and pressure was critical to an effective response to the tragedy. xi TEAM WORK I’m proud to say that we got through the year without one WorkCover claim for stress, despite the enormity of the task and the grief that individual members of staff were feeling in the lead- up to the first anniversary of the tragedy. The work we have done with Leading Teams has enabled both myself and my colleagues to grow personally and professionally, and for this I am most grateful. Bill Forrest, former CEO, Nillumbik Shire Council December 2009 xii INTRODUCTION The focus of my first book,Any Given Team, was to allow people to gain an insight into how Leading Teams, the business, came into being. In some ways the book was a self-indulgent project because it also enabled me to reflect on my personal journey. For that project there was little collaboration, other than with a hard- working editor, Paul Conroy. Without his work the book would not have seen the light of day. The concept of the second book really began at a staff meeting we conducted at Leading Teams in 2006. We were having some broad philosophical discussions about our business, its place in the market and our product, which we have named the Per- formance Improvement Program (PIP). Thanks to many tweaks over the years, it has become a way of transferring much of the responsibility within an organisation to the staff, or in the case of sporting teams, to the players. This is done through a process of 1 TEAM WORK empowerment, whereby a manager/leader/coach recognises that the rest of the team has a great deal of expertise and knowledge about the running of the team. At this point it is important to note that empowerment is not a fluffy, new age management theory, but is in fact a hard-edged philosophy about aggressively improving team and individual performance.