Tips on managing a winning team

This approach eased communication between himself and the players, but so did a willingness to listen and receive the messages being sent. Buchanan believes it is essential to know the target audience you are addressing, to know that your message is being received. He often reviews this process both formally and informally.

He also keeps an eye on the competition. “It’s about understanding how your opposition is most likely to play. If we can understand how they’re most likely to play it gives us a competitive advantage once we’re on the field,” explains Buchanan, who examines the statistics and quantitative data gained from each player’s performance. Businesses should similarly analyse their own and their competitor’s performance, to ensure they aren’t caught unprepared, he says. “We prepare for that before we go out on the field. We basically know our opposition’s game inside out.”

Gathering in-game analysis helped his players better understand their own game as well. “It provides us with a tool. It doesn’t replace human knowledge, experience, intuition, but it’s a tool to complement that.”

Assimilating & Improving

During his time as the Australian coach, Buchanan kept a close eye on integrating new team members too, first meeting with them to discuss their strengths and weaknesses. “We try to assimilate them in that way, give them tasks to do, or associate them with older members of the side, so that’s a bit of an orientation.” However, Buchanan feels team members need to know more than just what’s expected of them, and how to train. So they are filled in on the more informal things as well, including where to sit in the dressing room, and what to do when you’re the twelfth man and drinks go around. “They’re the more broad areas that allow young people and new people to assimilate into the side.”

Once they are assimilated, they quickly realise not to be satisfied with their achievements. “As soon as you’re satisfied with what you’ve done, then you become very comfortable in that environment and there’s no longer a challenge. You’re just happy to be where you are, and with that comes certain consequences.” He believes without improvement, whether it is technical, mental, physical or tactical, the opportunity to truly succeed will pass team members by.

This is not to say successes shouldn’t be celebrated. “There’s an opportunity to celebrate that, not take that for granted. It’s so easy for teams and individuals to do that, particularly when they’re winning,” says Buchanan, who encouraged his players to be aware of the effort and sacrifices that went into a win. “It’s all been designed so that we understand what’s just been achieved.”

Even for this seemingly unbeatable team, success was not always guaranteed, which became clear after the 2005 Ashes loss against England. But there is always a lesson learnt, and something to be gained. “The biggest thing from that was probably to try and stand back and realise that in there somewhere there are silver linings, things you can actually learn from it that are going to benefit you in the future. It does take some time,” says Buchanan, explaining that after the loss Cricket Australia realised the team needed a higher level of support.

The team then set out on the process again, this time with a facilitator, to identify the “handbrakes” stopping them. “These were just things that were preventing us from performing well. And those things could just be our intensity of training, were we taking any shortcuts, it could be punctuality, it could be team meetings. If we could identify what the handbrakes were, then we could actually go about fixing them. We set about addressing those as a group, and really showed the benefits of those right from the word go.” And after the next test series, the urn was again in Aussie hands.