Tips on managing a winning team

As every smart business owner will tell you, your business is only as good as your team. We sit down with John Buchanan, former coach of Australia’s most successful cricket team, for his tips on managing a star team.

Hailed as a coaching legend, John Buchanan led the Australian cricket team to become the world’s best. His methods and lack of playing experience were controversial at times, but the success achieved and maintained under his leadership can’t be disputed.

Now, the recently retired coach is launching his book If Better is Possible, and sharing his secrets to managing a brilliant team. Not that he sees what he has done as extraordinary. “I believe everybody coaches–any person involved in terms of influencing the behaviours or actions of other people,” says Buchanan. “That’s why I believe coaching is so important. It’s about trying to help other people, trying to help them develop and be better in their lives.”

So what is the first step to managing a team? “Vision is always important. It gives everybody a certain direction, a clear direction of where we’re going over a period of time,” says Buchanan, but that is only the start. “Coaches need to very clearly understand what their philosophies are, what their cornerstones are, what they stand for. Because the coachee, if there is such a word, needs to know that the coach is a rock they can turn to when needed.”

Next step is to create an environment where everyone is comfortable experimenting and learning. “The learning environment was very much about encouraging the guys to step outside their comfort zone, to try to do things they hadn’t done before to improve their skills. It allowed us to dominate world cricket for a period of time, through our technical, physical skills improving in a way that we actually sustained performance.”

But emotions can run high when constantly working to improve skills, especially when team members are presented with a challenge they don’t feel ready to confront. In these situations, when faced with emotional responses and ego battles, Buchanan prefers to place his own ego in his back pocket. “I don’t want to get in an ego battle because there’s no winners there, there’s only losers on both sides,” he says. “If I get into an ego battle then I’m going to damage that relationship for some time, maybe irreparably. The last thing I want to do is tackle an individual, or try to win a debate, through my ego beating their ego.”

Expert Theory

Experience has taught Buchanan that placing himself as an expert doesn’t work. “A few times, as a teacher and as a student teacher as well, I would try to be the expert, and it was quite obvious after a short period of time that I wasn’t. Either that was through me demonstrating the fact that I didn’t have the expertise that was demanded of me, or people would ask questions that I couldn’t necessarily answer.” This severely eroded Buchanan’s credibility, as it would have any other team leader or manager’s, and diminished his ability to teach, leading him to eventually realise there was always going to be someone with more expertise than himself. “Certainly within cricket that was clear, because I didn’t have the playing experience, the playing skills that the players I was coaching had, so I would be silly then to place myself as an expert cricketer. Rather I placed myself as a person with some expertise in cricket environments.”