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- Do We All Still Agree?
When ‘Rassie’ Erasmus became head coach and Director of Rugby of the Springboks, the team were in disarray.
They’d won just 11 out of 25 games under previous coach Allister Coetzee, and had only recorded a solitary win against their main set of rivals.
There was disharmony. Politicking. Selection issues.
And all of this just 18 months out from the 2019 World Cup.
And yet, the first thing Erasmus did might surprise you.
He didn’t change the staff. He didn’t bring the players in and make them ‘work harder’, or put them through fitness tests to ‘increase the standards’. He didn’t introduce a new game model.
“We started with alignment camps rather than training camps,” he writes in his autobiography. “Instead of the players getting together for two or three days of training and then going back to their clubs, they came in for two days of talking about various issues, with them listening to us and us listening to them. We didn’t even go onto the field; we were aligning.”
This was a losing team. In a country that doesn’t accept this team losing. Eighteen months out from the World Cup.
Most other coaches would’ve filled camp with two-a-days and packed the rest with meetings, because there’s no time to waste. Right?!
Instead, Rassie took the time to align them before stepping foot on the pitch. Because if you’re not aligned to begin with you’re going to waste time, you’re just going to do it trying to re-align in the middle of competition.
For Erasmus, the camps also served as an opportunity for players to discuss issues that were bothering them. This is crucial, he says, because a lack of communication is where “they start imagining things, and soon the devil is in their head.”
These communication disconnects can derail even the most talented teams.
Alignment means getting everyone on the same page. Do you believe what I believe? Do you see what I see? Do you see where we’re going? Do you know what we’re trying to do? Do you want to be part of this? Do you have another opinion? In the alignment camp, everyone has the chance to voice their opinion. From there we establish our plan, and then we ask, ‘Do we all still agree?’
As I’ve written before, I do not believe teams spend enough time aligning, visioning, and talking about the path forward. Because ‘there’s no time to waste’ we hastily jump into training sessions and hope the rest figures itself out.
It’s worth taking the time.
Within a few months of getting aligned, South Africa had beaten all three of their main set of rivals, including a famous victory over the All Blacks in New Zealand.
And then, despite being ranked 7th in the world, South Africa won the 2019 World Cup.
“Being aligned means being dedicated to your team and its goals,” Erasmus says. “You don’t have to speak out if that’s not the kind of person you are, but your eyes will tell us and your actions will tell us if you agree, and if you are aligned.”