Winning or learning, never loosing with Clive Woodward

Clive first got to learn about Hager Group when he was invited to our 2018 Management Summer School to discuss with one hundred or so of our top managers his experience as a rugby coach, business man and team player. He was then interviewed to feature in our Hager Group 2018/19 Annual Report. The interview with him reinforced what he said in summer 2018 and gave us lots of food for thought. We’ll be running series of 4 winning articles with Clive’s pearls of wisdom about team work, being inspired by others, handling setbacks & failures and running a business successfully through people.

The first article in our series is about how to transform a group of people into a team.

Why might we ask Clive this question? He was knighted in 2004 for his incredible success in transforming the English Rugby team from an amateur one into a team that won the 2003 World Cup. It is no mean feat to take a group of individuals, provide sense and cohesion to form one successfully performing group.

Clive’s formula for success is that great teams are made of great individuals, so a chief coach’s role is to improve every individual in the team be they a player, a coach or a doctor. If you help every individual to become the best they can be, there is no logical reason why you can’t win. As the saying goes, a team is only as strong as its weakest link, therefore having everyone on board and giving the best of themselves is a prerequisite for success.

Sir Clive is a details man. During the interview he stressed that it’s also not just about doing one thing better it’s about doing many things better than before and paying attention to details. To put a figure on it, winning isn’t about doing one thing 100 % better but about doing 100 things 1% better.

Paying attention to one particular detail gave his team an edge to win, other teams soon cottoned on and copied but over a certain period it gave a competitive advantage. The detail: tight rugby shirts. To understand better how this helped the team to win, please see the full article.

More about Sir Clive Woodward.

Sir Clive Woodward, was born in 1956 in Ely, Cambridgeshire. After a career as a rugby player, from 1997 to 2004 he coached the English national rugby team, which he led to victory at the 2003 World Cup. Sir Clive Woodward also worked for the multinational technology group Xerox as well as running his own small IT-leasing-company. Today he works as an expert for ITV and is a management coach. He was a guest speaker at Hager Group Management Summer School 2018, a yearly learning event for top management and talent.