by Cam Barber
External messages
Hawthorn Football Club has dominated the AFL competition since 2008. The word most commonly associated with Hawthorn over the last 8 years is ‘professional’. In fact, if you read a week or 2 of sports commentary, you’ll usually see a few references to the Hawks’ professionalism.
This is not an accident…
In early 2007 I conducted a Messaging project with the Hawks’ administration (Coach, CEO, Football Manager, Communications Manager, COO, etc) to get agreement on the key messages to represent the club. The top-level message agreed on that day was:
‘We aim to be the most professional club in the competition”.
This message was dropped into as many conversations with the media as possible. It also guided management and the playing group internally, as well as driving communication to members and fans via the website.
The sub message in 2007 was, “…and we’ve made some bold decisions to get there, and we’ll keep making the tough decisions (because the only way to succeed is to be the most professional club…)”. The sub-messages are updated each year as situations change.
The idea behind this ‘Message Hierarchy’ is that you have:
• Clarity about where you want media conversations to go
• Great flexibility because it’s not a script to repeat robotically.
These messages are the essence of living conversations. They guide the speaker and give them the freedom to explain ideas and answer questions from their own perspective. Head coach, Alastair Clarkson, said in 2012 ‘Cam Barber’s messaging strategy keeps everybody on the same page’.
Port Adelaide: ‘We will never, ever give up’
There are other recent examples of a message driving success for AFL clubs. For example, Port Adelaide’s current message is:
‘We will never, ever give up’.
This message coincided with a dramatic turnaround in less than 12 months. In post-game media interviews, Coach Ken Hinkley regularly referred to this message as part of the reason they won.
How did Port Adelaide’s message come about? At the start of 2013, Port President David Koch was told by his sister that she was thinking about giving up her membership of the once-great club. She told him she couldn’t stand watching games where the team gave up and lost without really trying. She wasn’t the only one. Membership numbers were poor. So Koch, chose the ‘never, ever give up’ message to drive the membership marketing from that point.
Within 6 months, the message had resonated with players and supporters alike. And the winning started. Port Adelaide made a dramatic turnaround from bottom of the ladder to finals contender - often dominating the last quarter to secure the win.
Fremantle Dockers: ‘Anyone, anywhere, anytime’
Fremantle Football Club have done very well over the last few years guided by their message:
‘Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime’.
Like Port Adelaide, this message was also crafted to address a specific challenge for the club. Based in Perth, Fremantle had to travel greater distances than any other club to play their games. The win/loss record showed that Fremantle was less successful when they traveled to play away from Perth.
So, what’s the message coach Ross Lyon chose? ‘Anyone, anywhere, anytime’. It worked. Fremantle won their first final away from home that year. One sportswriter described the message as “an encapsulation of their philosophy under coach Ross Lyon. A galvanising message can make a team feel like they are on a mission.”
The power and effectiveness of these 3 simple words has helped build inspiration and commitment in the Fremantle team.
Internal messages (to players and staff)
Of course, messaging doesn’t work if you don’t live it. In Hawthorn’s case, they live ‘professional’. Although, the messaging can help with that as well. It can be used as a constant reminder that drives everyone’s behaviour.
The right message conveys ‘who we are’ as a club. It helps build an identity for an organisation. This identity is the foundation of leadership. My former CEO, Paul Thompson, felt it was a leader’s obligation to provide this kind of identity and clarity of purpose. It not only gives people a clear reason to come to work, it aligns and focuses their energies.
This makes the organisation more effective and the workplace more enjoyable! On the other hand, lack of clarity creates confusion, frustration and uncertainty. Clear messaging reduces these energy-sapping menaces.
The Hawks message aspiring to be “the most professional club in the competition” is often used by journalists and commentators as a conclusion they came to themselves. They’ve heard the message (many times) and they’ve seen the professional behaviour, so it just comes together in their mind. It’s the same inside the club. That’s how good messaging works. It focuses your energy and leverages the support of others.
‘If you’re good enough, you’re old enough’
Messaging underpins success in all sports. In European football, Sir Matt Busby, who managed Manchester United to great success between 1945 and 1971, crafted many timeless messages. His quote, ‘If you’re good enough, you’re old enough’ is still on the wall in the Manchester United player’s dressing room.
We don’t have to invent new messages, either. There’s nothing wrong with appropriating a message that works for your situation. For example, the St Kilda Football Club finished 2014 on the bottom of the league table. Most commentators suggested that St Kilda would finish 2015 on the bottom as well, because the team was full of young, unproven players. The consensus was that they wouldn’t win a game and it would take 2-3 years for these players to be good enough to compete at the highest level.
Unless someone introduces new messaging, the consensus view of the media becomes the dominant idea the players are exposed to.
So, imagine you’re the new coach of St Kilda. What message do you want to drive home in the pre-season? How about ‘If you’re good enough, you’re old enough’?
Good choice. Not only does this counteract the negative messaging in the media, it focuses everyone on the goal: get good enough. This message provides clarity for players, direction for supporters and guidance to coaching staff.
This is one of the key messages head coach Alan Richardson has focused on. He supported this with; “We will judge players on what we see and the way they perform, not their birth certificate. We need to raise expectations and be much more consistent with our performance.”
Halfway into the 2015 season, commentators are now ‘surprised at the successes of this young team’.
Leadership messaging can drive behaviour
So we see that many of the most successful teams are associated with vivid messages. The question might be then: is it the messages that help make clubs successful by galvanising energy and focusing attention? Or is it simply that successful sporting clubs know how important messaging is and they include that as part of their operation?
Perhaps it’s a bit of both. But what really matters is the evidence to show that leadership messages, when done well, have a powerful ability to drive the behaviour and decision-making that lead to success. Everyone is aligned with the vision, and it unites people across different areas of the club.
The ‘glue’ that holds the team plan together
In July 2011, commentator Gary Lyon wrote an article about the new style of play introduced by Alastair Clarkson in 2007 that became known as the ‘press’ or ‘Clarko’s Cluster’. (http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/touch-of-greatness-20110701-1guz5.html)
The article was titled ‘A touch of greatness’ and focused on 2 things:
1. This new style of play significantly changed the game of AFL football.
2. This new style of play would have failed if the team did not execute perfectly.
It’s the execution of ideas that makes them great. And it’s impossible to have team execution without great communication skills. All new ideas require explanation and education to become reality.
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The ‘stolen’ grand final of 2008
Lyon’s article stated up front “Hawthorn’s largely unexpected premiership back in 2008 was one of the great coaching performances of the modern era.” His point is that Clarkson needed to convince his team to abandon the tactics they had used their whole playing lives.
In the lead up to the Grand Final, Clarkson banned the press and public from attending training sessions to practice the new plays. The existing idea that each player had one direct opponent and was held accountable for that opponent was replaced by the idea that players should take defensive responsibility for an area of the playing field.
Every player needed to understand their role
In order for the new ‘press’ or ‘cluster’ to work, each player had to understand their role perfectly. As Garry Lyon noted, Clarkson had to overcome the ‘not my man, not my fault’ mentality to successfully sell the new idea to his players.
This was no easy task. Some of the early strategy meetings the players attended were 2 hours long. It’s difficult for professional sports teams to focus mentally on new ideas when their bodies are already exhausted from hours of physical practice.
My suggestions to the Hawks coaching team were to restructure the ideas to make them easier to digest (chunk them), and keep the theory sessions to 60 minutes or less. The simpler an idea appears, the easier it is to execute.
Ideas are useless without great execution
As Lyon explains: “Coming up with a rather radical game plan or concept is only half the battle” because “any time the ‘press’ broke down, and it did, regularly, in the early days, the Hawks got belted”. If just one player failed to execute his role precisely (whether it be lack of concentration or lack of belief in the concept), Clarko’s brilliant cluster became a noose around the team’s neck.
Clarkson’s ability to communicate his message and persuade his players to commit to the new plan, was the glue that held the team plan together. The Hawks players executed that plan with complete trust and belief in what Clarkson had coached. This new plan was a great success. It forced all the other teams to adjust their strategies, and helped the Hawks pull off the surprise premiership win in 2008 (and 2 more since then).
Clarkson also used a clever message to motivate the team on the day of the grand final…
Game-day motivational messages
The game-day motivational message has a mythological ingredient to it. We see motivational speeches in movies like ‘Coach Carter’ (with Samuel L. Jackson), ‘Cool Runnings’ (“Look in the mirror and tell me what you see”), ‘Miracles’ (about the US Ice Hockey win at 1980 Olympics) and battlefield speeches like Braveheart (“They may take our lives, but they’ll never take away our freedom!”), Gladiator (“What we do in life, echoes in eternity”), even Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Captain of the World Cup rugby team (“How do we inspire ourselves to greatness, when nothing else will do?”). The life-changing motivational speech by the coach can have a bit of magic to it.
Actually, the reality is that the coach has to do this every game. It’s a difficult job to keep coming up with new and interesting ideas to motivate the players. The challenge is that players feel like they’ve ‘heard all this stuff before’ and the message doesn’t have the impact needed to win.
Alistair Clarkson has shown a great skill for identifying and conveying just the right message at the right time.
The coach’s message 2008: ‘The shark metaphor’
The Hawks weren’t given much chance to win in 2008. It was only Clarkson’s 3rd year as a senior coach and the Geelong Cats were highly favoured to win, having lost only 1 game the entire season. It was certainly his most important pre-match speech.
We are used to the image of a football coach shouting and swearing to pump the players up, sometimes asking for impossible, if not illogical, commitment - like 150% effort, no, 200% effort!! But Clarkson had something more powerful than that. An idea supported by the power of metaphor. An idea that focused and motivated the team. An idea that made sense, aligned with the game plan and was simple enough to recall - and therefore, guide the player’s actions on the day.
Here’s what happened. On Grand Final day, the Hawthorn team entered the coach’s room to find an outline of a shark on the whiteboard.
The situation was this: the Geelong team had great forward momentum and if you gave them an inch they would move the ball quickly and score. So the Hawks had to try to stop this momentum by limiting Geelong’s ability to run freely in straight lines.
They had to force Geelong to play wide, sapping the energy from their traditional game. But everybody knew this. What Clarkson did was get that extra focus and effort from the players by likening the Geelong team to a shark.
Clarkson explained that sharks must have forward momentum because as soon as they stop, they die. Which is true. Sharks must continually have water moving through their gills or they die. They must keep moving.
“This Geelong team is the same. If you stop them moving, their game will die” said Clarkson.
He did not raise his voice, but there was an urgency to his speech. Then he linked his message to the training and game plan they already knew. (Remember, a vivid message acts as a doorway to more information.) “You don’t need to do anything special. You know what will do it today? Just doing it over and over and over – your role – as well as you can, on as many occasions as you can, throughout the course of the game when the opportunity presents” he said.
“They are trying to come through us like a shark,” he said. “Good luck to them. [We are] the best defensive pressure side in the competition.”
The shark metaphor worked its magic. The Hawks beat Geelong to win the Premiership Cup that year, in what was called the ‘Stolen Grand Final’.
The Kennett Curse
A mysterious karmic debt seemed to be owed to Geelong as a result of Hawthorn’s 2008 Grand Final win, which led to a Hawthorn loss every time they played Geelong for the next 5 years.
It became known as the Kennett Curse.
The curse was spawned when the Geelong players made a private pact after the Grand Final loss to ‘never to lose to Hawthorn again’, and was brought to life at the start of the 2009 season when Hawks President Jeff Kennett publicly questioned the commitment of the Geelong players. Speaking on a sports program he said, “They don’t have the psychological drive we have. We’ve beaten Geelong when it matters”.
Was the curse real?
The curse seemed real when you watched the games. Following Kennett’s comments, Geelong proceeded to defeat Hawthorn in eleven successive matches. Nine of these games were agonisingly close. On more than one occasion, a miraculous score was kicked after the final siren. This 11-match winning streak against the Hawks is the longest by any team following a Grand Final loss to their opponent.
Commentators constantly discussed it, betting websites advised of the phenomenon, video parodies abounded and a Sports program employed a wizard, a steaming cauldron and Kennett voodoo doll in an attempt to break it.
Whatever sorcery was at play, this curse needed to be broken if Hawthorn were to win another Grand Final.
The Coach’s message 2013: ‘The white line’
To reach the 2013 Grand Final, Hawthorn had to beat Geelong in the Preliminary Final the week before. Clarkson crafted another vivid message to motivate the players and bring out that extra level of focus.
As the players walked into the room, a few noticed the large packet of Black & Gold plain flour near the lectern. Clarkson stabbed the packet with a knife, and poured it out on the ground to form a thick white line about 5 metres long.
Instead of sitting and listening to the pre-game address as they normally did, nearly every player got out of their seat to see what was happening.
The white line meant 2 things. Firstly, the metaphorical impact associated with the term ‘crossing the line’ - it means a challenge or a turning point; and second, the actual white line
the players cross when they run out onto the field.
Let’s face it, both teams are filled with elite and professional athletes. Both teams are focused, committed and drilled in their respective game plans. It is the elusive extra level of focus, clarity and engagement that can make the difference between winning and losing. This is what the ‘white line’ message was designed to access.
The coach started talking about the transformation needed from each person when they ran out onto the field the next day. He noted that the room was full of good people, some of whom were so gentle off the field, they ‘wouldn’t hurt a fly’.
Then he said, “Winning great contests requires a personality change. When you cross the fabled white line you have to become different people” to commit to whatever it takes (within the rules) to secure victory. Like warriors going into battle.
Clarkson’s basic message was not new of course, but his use of metaphor made it stand out. All great leaders know they need to repackage their key messages to keep people focused.
This message was so clever though. Because there is an actual physical white line the players cross as they run onto the ground on game day. The coach’s references to it worked as a powerful, emotional memory-hook, that opened a mental doorway to the rest of the plan.
Winning the mental game
It also gave the players a valuable second idea; they could stay calm and relaxed until they got to the game. The warrior mentality was only needed after the line was crossed. This helped to maintain mental and physical energy levels. (I’ve seen many speakers who are already exhausted before a big presentation, after adrenaline and anxiety have robbed them of sleep and sapped their energy reserves over preceding days.)