Dave
Today, we're very fortunate to have Pete Steinberg. Pete, you've got an impressive history in the sporting arena, both as an athlete, but more prominently as the women's USA rugby coach, two World Cups, an Olympics. It's interesting to see what you've done with the knowledge that you've gained from that. That's what we're going to dive into today for our listeners. The vast majority of the people who listen to Brain in the Game are athletes, coaches, and parents. We're going to let them listen in on our conversation today. So thanks very much for making time to speak to us.
Pete
I'm excited to be here, Dave.
Dave
You're in the US. It's Sunday afternoon there or evening, and it's very early hours in the morning here in Australia. I think that's a really good metaphor for where we start this because that adaptability is an important part of leadership, isn't it?
Pete
Yeah, I think so. In fact, I would say the way I would think about it, Dave, because we had some problems connecting, is that when you ask, 'Could I do it this time?' What I had to do, because next door, I'm in the basement in my room. So if we hear the kids next door, just let me know. But there's a piece of me where I had to be really intentional because I had to say, All right, is this worth giving up an hour of my time with my kids? I travel a lot for work. Tomorrow, I leave and I head on out. And so I think it's the intentionality, right? So it's being adaptable, but being really intentional about it that's so important.
Dave
Someone interrupted you already?
Pete
Yeah, my seven-year-old, she's like, No, we'll stay in the basement and we'll keep it quiet. And already she's trying to get into the office. And I'm just like, No, you don't get in the office. So sorry about that.
Dave
That's all good.
Pete
Now I'm being adaptable. Now we're being adaptable to the distractions that can happen, which is another good leadership challenge.
Dave
So obviously, we're going to talk about your new book, Leadership Shock. But before we get into that, and that was a really good read, by the way. I really enjoyed that, and I just came away from it with so many questions to ask you, so we could talk for several hours, I'm sure. For my listeners, can you give them a bit of an abbreviated version of you got to where you are today? From the UK to what you're doing today.
Pete
Sure. Grew up in the UK, was a very mediocre rugby player, but my dad was American, and so thought maybe I could go to grad school in America and play rugby for America because they're mediocre, too. Ended up coming to Penn State to go to grad school and realising that graduate students, so post-grads, couldn't play for the university team. Which I think in Australia would be different, in the UK would be different. And so found myself at the age of 23 unable to play, so I started coaching. Spent a couple of years in grad school not getting my PhD, Dave. So that is a longer conversation, but ended up transitioning to the business school and worked in executive education, which is short courses for business executives. And Penn State brings professors from around the world to do three days on marketing, four days on finance. And so for about six years, I got an informal education doing that work.
Pete
And then I realised I learned as much as I could at Penn State, but my rugby career was really taking off. The coaching career, I was still coaching at Penn State. I was coaching with the USU 23s by that point. I was having lots of opportunities to go shadow and realised that if I really wanted to do this rugby thing, it doesn't pay enough, but I couldn't have a normal job and still do it and so started up in 2001, my own consulting business. Then for the next 15, 16 years, spent half of my time coaching rugby and half of my time coaching executives. It was a really interesting journey.
Pete
In 2017, I retired after the 2017 Women's World Cup. The US women made the semifinals for the first time in 20 years. That was the end of my coaching career. I've done some commentating for Major League Rugby, which is the professional league over here, I've been doing some of that. I ran a coaching session for the Under-8s, for superior Under-8s rugby about three weeks ago, which was touching, it was coaching again for the first time. I will tell you that coaching the Under-8s is a lot harder than coaching at the Olympics. A lot harder. I'll just tell you, it was crazy. So that's the short version.
Dave
That's fantastic. And look, I have to, first of all, thank you, because when I was reading your book, it made me realise that I'm not a unicorn because I have that same philosophy, like sport and leadership in sport and leadership in business, there's not a lot of difference. I thought initially I was missing something.
Pete
It isn't. It isn't, yeah. It's funny because people ask me, they'll say, Well, what did you take from sport to business? And what did you take from business to sport? I'm like, I did it for 16 years. It's the same stuff in a different context. There's definitely some different things about it, obviously. It's different, but the principles are the same. It's leadership, it's skill development, it's motivation. I mean, those things are all exactly the same.
Dave
I'll often say to my clients, unless you take your brain out and put a different one in when you go and to do something different, it's the same brain that turns up. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You just got to have the same set of tools in there.
Pete
Exactly.
Dave
I want to ask you a couple of really big questions before we get down into the nitty-gritty. What is leadership for you? I'm often asked, when we're putting leadership groups together in teams, what's the components for making a good leadership group? But for you, if you and I were in an elevator right now and we had 30 seconds, what is a leadership group or what is a leader?
Pete
I will tell you what for many years my definition was. My definition of a leader is someone that would take me where I would not ordinarily go. A leader is someone that makes me do things that are not beyond my capability, but beyond my normal world. They push me, they stretch me. I think there's probably a tagline. I think it's probably more effectively something like a leader takes me where I wouldn't ordinarily go to meet my goals. I would say that's probably a fully-rounded leader. But probably in the last five or six years, I think I've changed my thoughts around it. I think what I would say is: Leaders create great citizens. And what I mean by that is, leaders are people that actually create an environment where people want to be their best and at their best and be their best selves. It's much more...
Pete
It's less about the leader and the actions that they do and more about the environment that they create. I have conversations with clients and they said, We have a leadership issue. I always ask, Do you have a leadership issue or do you have a citizen issue? Are the members of your organisation being the way they want to be? I think that leaders create better citizens. And it's a little bit less tangible. It's a little more fuzzy, but I think it captures leadership in a more holistic way. What about for you, Dave? How do you currently define leadership?
Dave
That's really interesting because when people ask me about what I do, obviously, my focus is very much on the psychology of performance. I'll often say to them that I'm like a linguistic choreographer. My job is to dance you to somewhere where you didn't know you needed to be. When you just described that from a leadership perspective, it made a light bulb go off in my head of my leadership style is to be able to use my words to get people... Because I don't do the physicality side of things anymore. When I used to coach, it was all about the physical. I want to dive into that with you, your coaching in a moment. But to be able to move somebody's motivation, to move somebody's mind, then often you're going into a place that they've never even thought about. When you're saying what you said about the leadership role, that's very much introducing those thoughts and those actions that people just don't normally think about. Is that right?
Pete
I think that's right, yeah. I think in both of my definitions and in your definition, it's actually about, I mean, cliché maximising potential. For me to run as fast as I can, I actually have to run faster than I think I can. And so for me to perform in a role in business, I actually have to do more than I think I can. I think that's what leaders do, is they get you to be better than you ever thought you could. But I think there's different levels of leadership, and this might be related to... Now I work... Ten years ago, I was working with people, vice presidents, directors, and now I generally work at the C-suite. At the C-suite, the really interesting thing, the more senior you get, the less cause and effect is true. If I lead you, Dave, I can do something and I can impact you. But if I'm a CEO, I do something, I don't know how it impacts people. I think that's why I've evolved my thought process to better citizens, but it's still the concept of stretching people to be better than they think they can. But now it's a collective, and it's not me doing it to an individual.
Dave
That makes me want to ask you the question about metrics. In my world, it's very much about how do we measure this. When you're working in somebody's mind, it's very difficult to measure that. When you talk about a CEO, you're right, they can't measure the impact that they directly have. They measure the impact of what other people apply what they do. Is that right?
Pete
That's correct. Yeah, absolutely. It's indirect.
Dave
No, go on. Sorry.
Pete
I always like to say it's funny with my background. Often when I work with my clients, I never talk about my sporting background. And one of the reasons I do that is, I think sport is a good place to understand leadership, to understand performance. But I think sporting teams, we don't have very good metrics for. So what we see is a team wins, and then we say good team. And when we see a team lose, we say bad team. That's a terrible metric.
Pete
And you find that in business as well. The guy that becomes the sales director is the guy that sold the most because that's what we can measure. But that's a terrible metric. The guy that sells the most, you should not make the sales director, but that's what we use. I think metrics are really hard. I don't think we've solved it in the leadership space. You have 360s, there's different measurements. I am seeing adjustments in selection of leaders. The easy things to measure are experience and skills. The hard things to measure are mindsets and attributes. I'm seeing more sophisticated companies being like, You know what? Selecting someone for an experience to be the CFO is a terrible metric because a year in, he or she will have all the experiences you need. We should actually select for attributes and mindset, the way they think and who they are. The challenge is that that means you have to go and say, Well, actually, what are we actually looking for? What is it that we want this person to do? And most organisations haven't thought about that. So there's a real metric issue, very similar to the one you described in your role.
Dave
Yeah, absolutely. Building team leadership groups was one of the first things I always get asked to do when I go and work with a team. And often the head coach will say to me, I want this, this, this, this, this and this. Or this player has been playing really well so we want to make them on the leadership group. I'll have the same conversation with the head coach and go, Okay, what is it we're trying to get this leadership group to do? How do we measure the success of them? I think an analogy that I use in rugby, it doesn't matter if I'm working with a racing car driver or I'm working with a tennis player or I'm working in a team, it's what's the purpose here? Is it fit for purpose? I'll use a rugby analogy of Scrum. I want to talk a bit of rugby to you, first of all, and we can nerd out on this. When I'm talking about a rugby team and there's eight people that come together in a Scrum to get an outcome, they've all got very different roles, haven't they? They've all got very different jobs to do, whether they're the prop or the hooker or whatever they are in that ruck, the outcome is the same, but how you get there, what you want from them is different.
Dave
How do you identify that? If you want to make somebody a leader, they've been promoted to the position of a leader, how do you get them to be the best version of them rather than be a version of the current leader?
Pete
Well, I think it's interesting, Dave, and you've probably seen this a lot, but I was always uncomfortable as a coach when I selected the leadership team. Because I don't think I'm the right selector. Because the goal of the leadership team isn't to serve me. The goal of the leadership team is to serve the players. But then you have to be okay with them choosing people that you don't agree with, right? Or maybe you disagree with. And throughout my career, I think I have learned that the players are much smarter about this than I am. That they would choose someone that I would say why? I remember there was... I mean, this was back in my early Penn State days. We had a big senior class that were all graduating, and the team selected a woman called Barb Kudis to be the captain. And I was like, Really? I don't think Barb really understood the rules. I think that she wasn't very vocal. I was like, How is this? How did they select? And the following year, we went on and we won the national championship. And she was an amazing leader, and now she's the CEO of a company.
Pete
I just didn't see the intangibles that the players saw. For respect. So I think, first of all, I would say, you have to check your own biases when it comes to things. Leadership isn't three numbers. It's not three things. It's a combination. And the most important thing is respect of the people that you're going to lead. And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter what else you have. So I would say that. And then the second thing is, I'm going to go back to our definitions of leadership. To help the leader become the best leader they can be, you got to sit down with them and say, What leader do you want to be? And then what help do you need from me to become that leader? And so I think that to me is... One of the things that is the same as a coach, particularly in rugby, and a really great leader, is that you cannot make it about yourself. It has to be about the players or as a CEO, it has to be about the organisation. And if you make it about yourself, then it's always going to get in the way.
Pete
So honestly believing that the people on your team and the people in your organisation are smart, can make good decisions, and letting them do that, I think is really critical. I think it starts with how you select the leader, and then it's helping them go on the journey that they want to go on.
Dave
I know that's really interesting, and I think you and I share a very similar philosophy to that. The question I'd ask you then is, you often hear about people say, are they a natural born leader? That always puts the hairs in the back of my neck up a little bit. But I'm going to ask you the question, do you think leaders are naturally born, or is it something that's crafted? Are they a good leader in one area, but maybe not in another?
Pete
Yeah, Dave, this is really interesting. I'm working with a colleague called Adam Russell. Adam played for the US in rugby a couple of times, is a cultural anthropologist, and actually did work in performance for the elite Department of Defence and Intelligence Agencies for the US. So he's in this performance world. And now he's doing AI. So he's a super smart guy. But we've been talking about this concept of third-wave thinking, and you see it coming up every now and then. So first-wave thinking is in performance is you select for it. This guy is tall, so I'm going to select them, or this guy is a natural leader, and I'm going to select them. Second-wave thinking is, Oh, We can actually improve performance if we hack it. If we get this leader to speak more, or if we get this leader to do this one thing, then they'll be a better leader. Third way of thinking is actually there's this system that we don't really understand, that we have to somehow navigate. The best way to navigate is through experimentation and feedback. This is something that we bring directly to our clients in business. I actually think this is something that athletes don't realise they do, but it's a really important... They're like, Hey, you know what? You want to improve your passing? Hold the ball like this. So the athlete tries it, and they're like, Well, I don't like it like this, but I like it like this. Oh, it works. That's experimentation, and that's iteration. Athletes don't realise they do that all the time, but in business, we don't do that enough. What I would say is that leadership is the ultimate third wave, because it actually isn't the leader themself. It isn't just the leader. I could be a great leader in team A and not a good leader in team B and behave exactly the same because I'm in this ecosystem. I believe in change. I believe that people can be better at it. But I do believe there are attributes that can help people be good leaders. It doesn't mean they're required to have them to be a good leader.
Pete
I think there are some people where some parts of leadership become more natural, but those can also be negative. If you're a very vocal leader, you might be difficult to talk to or difficult to approach. To me, it's actually about the way you define leader.
Pete
When people say they're a natural-born leader, what they're really saying is there's a leadership model that that person conforms to, which is my bias, and so therefore a good leader, when actually they do something well, but it may not make them a good leader. So I think that to me, that model of that is good leadership, therefore they're a natural born leader. I don't think they're a natural born leader. I think there are people that are better at certain things than others, and they may be useful in leadership in this role. But as a third-wave thinker. This is the hard thing, Dave, in your world and my world, is the coach is going to come to you and say, Oh, well, what happens when I do this? And you're going to be like, I don't know. I have an idea. The same way the CEO comes to me and says, Well, what happens if I do this? I'm going to be like, I don't know. We don't. But the most important thing is when you do it, you have a feedback loop. When you do it, you actually know what's happening afterwards. I think in leadership, it thinking about those biases, trying to put them aside, and trying to create that feedback loop for any leader so they can improve.
Pete
Wow, you did say, I can talk till I'm blue in the face. I might be getting blue in the face on the answer to this one.
Dave
No, I love it. I'm sitting here nerding out on it. I'm absolutely loving it.
Pete
But Dave, I just want to come to you. You've worked in lots of different sports, right? Do you think there are certain things that a leader has to be able to do to be a leader? Not saying that it's an attribute that they bring, but is there something for you that you're like, Yeah, look, if you're going to be a good leader, you have to be able to do this? Is there anything that jumps for you?
Dave
So not really, other than how they communicate. Now, some people are very external communicators. They can talk til their blue in the face. I'll often say to people, I can talk under wet cement for a fortnight. So for me, being able to talk about what I'm passionate about is easy. Other people, their communication modelling is very different. They might go and have a cup of coffee with one person. And that domino effect of that one conversation could be a really good leadership modelling process. Short answer to that is, no. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all of a good leadership process. The longer answer to that is it needs to be, as I said earlier, fit for purpose. I think the big mistake I see coaches make, and I see this so, so frequently, is they'll select a leadership group to solve the problem for now, but never put a team together for the long term. Essentially, they create this cycle of constantly going through, 'Well, the leadership group is not working anymore.'
Dave
Well, no, we've moved, we've evolved, we've grown. Therefore, the role of that leadership group is different. Do we encourage those leaders to grow, or do we just get rid of that group of leaders and then put the next format in?
Pete
Yeah, it's really interesting. You're saying something that's really hitting me, that is a direct link between the sports work that I did and the business work, which is this idea of purpose of the team. I like to say that great teams are never created on the grass. Everyone practises, everyone plays. It's stuff outside. And in business, it means great teams are never created when you're doing the work. When I shadow a team, I'll jump on a call, and if the call kicks off at 12, before 12, I won. They're like, Item one. Okay, let's talk about this thing. I'm like, All right, this isn't a team. This is a group that's getting together to do work. One of the things that I ask the team is, I'm like, Why are you here? Why do you exist? And I think asking that of a leadership team in sport is really interesting, and doing it on an ongoing basis. So it's not, Why do you exist forever? It's, Why do you exist for this season? Or, Why do you exist for this half of the season? And it might be, Why do you exist now?
Pete
And at some point, we should probably... Any of you guys can be like, Hey, let's revisit our purpose, because something doesn't feel right. Something's changed, right? And we often do this in the big team. In the big team, we do it, but it's harder to do it in the leadership team, which is a mini team. But that mini team, to your point, I mean, How amazing would be a leadership team where they understood their purpose and understood their roles. And someone said, Hey, the team's evolved. I'm not sure I should be on this team anymore. So it's just you say that. I don't think I'm adding it. If they could do that, I'll go like, bing, bing, bing, bing. That is an amazing team.
Dave
So interesting you said, I actually had that experience last year with a team where I got brought into a team in another country. The first thing the leadership group said was, 'We're not effective.' I'm going, Okay, why? What's your purpose? What are you here to do? What are you trying to achieve? They outlined their identity, their DNA. This is what we're trying to achieve as a team. One of them goes, Yeah, that's not me. We need to put X in. And I think that's one of the first times, to your point, I've actually seen a leadership group self-evolve. Somebody stepped out, somebody stepped in, and it was seamless. And I went back to the coach and I said to him, Did you orchestrate that? And he's gone, No, I've never seen that before. But I actually think that was probably one of the most evolved leadership groups that I've seen.
Pete
Right. And I think part of it is I've been doing a number of podcasts for the book, and some of them are in business and some of them are in sport. One of the sports ones, the question was, What makes you a good coach? I'm like, Oh, I'm not a good coach. I was a terrible coach yesterday, and I'll be a better coach tomorrow, and I don't know what I am right now. I think that commitment to improvement and journey is really important. I think that's really important in teams. To the point that everyone... I'm working with an executive team right now, very large organisation. They've never been explicit about what they wanted to do as a team. And so in business, it can actually be quite hard because everyone's really siloed. Here, this person's finance, this person's marketing, this person's business unit one, this person's business unit two. And if the CEO isn't careful, they don't ever have to talk to each other. Everything runs through the CEO. And I actually call that a work group. I'm like, That's not a team. Teams work together. They don't work with the leader. I'm now working, and it's just been really interesting to work with them. But to have them understand, No, I am not going to come in and spend two days with you and you're going to be a great team. The only thing that makes you a great team is if you want to be better tomorrow than you are today. That's the only thing. I think that the evolved teams, and what you saw is a team committed to being better tomorrow than they are today. When you get there, I think you'll see more of that self-selection. Hey, we want to be better, so it has to be we. Therefore, I'm going to be out, because someone else can make us better. I think that's really... It must have been amazing to see, Dave. You must have been...
Dave
Well, I actually, I said, I'm not sure what I'm here for now because they've just done that themselves. It's almost like I was selected out. But you started talking about coaches there, and I want to come to a coaches in a moment, but I just want to wrap up something about the athlete themselves. We've talked about how to become a leader. We've identified different strategies around leadership. Why? Why would an athlete become a leader? In your mind, in your experience, because it's a tough gig, right?
Pete
Do you mean motivation, or do you mean why could they become? Why do they want to be a leader, and why could they be a leader? Two different things.
Dave
Correct. And I think there's part of that. You talked about implicit and explicit. So I think implicit, when we're talking about mastery over what we do, there might be a drive inside to be, I want to go to that next level as a performer, and part of that is orchestrating the team on the paddock. Or there might be that external thing where as a leader, I get paid more.
Pete
Yeah. I actually think that athletes are intentional. And so I think that's a competitive advantage in the business world because most people aren't intentional. Then I also think athletes like to have control. I think control might be a reason why you want to be a leader because you might actually have less control over what you do, but you have more influence and voice. I think those are probably two things, the intentionality. We took a bunch of leaders from one of the big four accounting firms in the US to go train with the US Women's Sevens team that are training for the Paris Olympics. We got them to... I mean, it was a great day. They got to learn about rugby, but they also got to learn about what it is to be a great team. Then we had them do some rugby stuff. You're there, got them to do some rugby games, and then we got them to be coached by some of the younger players on the teams. These are 18, 19, 20, coaching senior partners on a big... I mean, these are people that earn a lot of money and lead large organisations.
Pete
At the end, all the 20-year-olds They're not very good in teams. They don't know how to go together. I'm like, Yes. What you have, elite athlete, is you have something that these very successful business people, you have a secret sauce. And your secret sauce is you're a great team member. You know how it is to be in a team. I actually now have my clients going down to the Olympic training site, recruiting the women to come work for them after Paris. I've taken a couple of clients down there and they're like, These women are amazing, and they don't know what they're going to do. And they're like, Well, we want them to come work for us. So I think that athletes don't understand that they have intangible skills that will be a competitive advantage in business, and therefore, they will be successful. Goal orientation, communication, open to feedback. There's all these things that business people are terrible at, and athletes just do it naturally. And so these 20-year-old women were working with these 50-year-old men and women who were probably some of the most successful people they've ever met. And they're like, 'We're better at this than they are.'
Pete
And I'm like, Yes, you are.
Dave
Yeah. Actually, just on that, there's a rugby player I was working with called Ross, who was coming to the end of his playing career. And I remember him come up to me one day and he goes, 'Digs look, I'm going to have to go into business. I don't know if I can start at the bottom.' And I've gone, Why would you be starting at the bottom? He goes, I've done nothing in the business world. I've played rugby all my life. I said, Most companies around the world would look at somebody like you, can put you in front of 100,000 people, survey the situation, come up with a strategy, communicate that, and execute that. People spend years at university, will never understand that. The question I have for you is, how do we get athletes to understand that their unique skill set is marketable?
Pete
Yeah, actually, so interesting. I'm just going to add one more story, and then I'll get to that answer. So I took the United Airlines managing director. So United Airlines has 100,000 people, and I've taken them twice down to the Olympic training site. And Lauren Doyle, who's about to go to a third Olympics as the captain, stood in front of this group and was like, I'm 33. I have nothing on my resume for the last 12 years. Who would hire me? And 40 hands went up.
Dave
Yeah.
Pete
I'll hire you. They all wanted to hire her. And so I think I think there's two things. One is I think we do a disservice, and maybe this is too strong a word. I don't think we do enough of a good job in sport in exposing our athletes to business while they're playing. And there's two things about that. One is business people want to meet our athletes while they're playing. They have a special... That's when they want to do it. The day after you retire, you're less interesting to me. One is I think we need to do a better job of that. Then I think in our sports, and I'm committed to doing this, particularly in women's rugby in the US, we need to market our athletes to businesses who are looking for the skills that they have. We need to create recruiting channels that say, I want... I know in the US, there's a number of companies that recruit elite athletes because they know they're special. They know they have special skills, and they come in and they have an accelerated programme to get them on board. That's what they do.
Pete
And then, because I don't want to disempower the athletes, the athletes need to be putting their hands up while they're playing and saying, Hey, in the off-season, I want to come to All you have to do is go to your club's sponsors. You're playing for your club or your province. Who are the sponsors? And be like, In the off-season, local company, I'd like to come and spend two weeks shadowing someone in your organisation. Right? Like your club, your union, your national governing body all have sponsors. Any of those companies would love to have someone walk through the door who's an elite athlete, and they would see it as like, Oh. This is the disconnect, Dave, right? Is that the athletes are like, oh, I hope they let me in. And the business is like, Oh, I hope they come in. There's this gap where we haven't made that connection.
Dave
Yeah, and I agree with you. Again, I think the key challenge here that we're seeing with retiring athletes, and there's a huge industry about how you transition athletes out of sport and into the real world, for want of a better expression. But when you think about corporations, they want the athletes sporting success, and athletes think that they're only valuable because they have sporting success rather than they have this- .
Pete
It's a metric issue. We go back to the metric issue. It's how we're measuring how effective they are. We don't look at it as a holistic third-wave thinker that says they have all these skills and attributes. We look at the very narrow thing that they do.
Dave
Yeah, exactly right. Going back to your earlier thing, they get siloed into, you were great on the paddock, or you were great in the pool, or you were great on the ice, but that doesn't cross over, that doesn't cross platform into business. Where, yes, it does. I think there's a communication issue there.
Pete
Yeah, I think there is a communication issue, and I think that actually I'm a great believer in, and this is something that I'm working on in the US. For rugby in the US, it's most, for women, it's a college sport. It's not only a college sport, but the Varsity programmes are like Harvard and Brown. They're like the Ivy Leagues, they're Stanford. There's really amazing schools that have strong rugby programmes. I'm committed to be like, the women's rugby as a sport could generate revenue by making their athletes accessible to businesses who want to recruit those sorts of women, which is almost all of them. I think that we need to be more intentional. I actually think unions are leaving money on the table by not making those connections. A recruiter will get one to two times the salary of a senior leader that they recruit. I'm sorry, they'll get 20% of the salary of a CEO The rule of thumb for a recruit in value is twice their salary. In other words, if I get the right person and they're paid $100,000, that's worth $200,000 for me. For me to get the right person, I'd be willing to pay $20,000.
Pete
And so unions are missing this. They have siloed their athletes into, You're good on the paddock, you're good in the pool, as opposed to, You're an amazing person. You're a talent pool that businesses want to recruit from. We should make that easier for you, and the sport that you play for should get a benefit out of that. But that's very third-wave thinking.
Dave
Yeah, absolutely. That leads me into the coaching world. I lecture at university for the degree in coaches. The first thing I ask each coach when we first start the unit, the psychology unit, is why do you want to coach? Because you've coached at the elite level, at the high performance level, and it is a thankless task. I often say to them, Why do you want to be a top-level coach? Why are you doing this? Often they'll say, I want to either influence the sport or I want to get paid big bucks. If I want to get paid big bucks, then I've got to have this degree behind me and I've got to be on a national team. The disconnect we're seeing with athletes and the business world, I think there's a missing step between how coaches are treated, too. So that siloing of a coach where you're a good rugby coach, or you're a good hockey coach, or you're a good netball coach, rather than you've got this skillset How do we get better coaches to see leadership differently?
Pete
Yeah, it's interesting. So when I take a group of executives to hang out with the US Women's Sevens team, I have Emilie Bydwell, who's the coach, come and talk to them about strategy. She comes in and I'm like, Emilie, if you went and did that for another client, you could get paid $20,000. You just come and talk for two hours. The value, because part of it is... What's really interesting in coaching is that... And what's really interesting in elite sport, and this is where Dave, you and I, I think for our business clients, this is what we do bring, is that while we have a metric problem, we have very strong metrics. Therefore, that makes us be very, very intentional and specific about what we're trying to do. When you look at a four-year cycle for an Olympic team, guess what they're not trying to do every day or every tournament? They're not trying to win every tournament. They recognise that there's this journey.
Pete
I took a group to the Olympic training site, an executive team, and the leader of the executive team walked away and was like, We try to win every day. I'm like, Yeah. When you try to win every day, guess what you don't do? You don't get better. Because you're not allowing yourself to have some moments where you're like, We're going to get by today, but we're going to try something new. We don't know if we're going to be good or not. When you try and win every day, so that ability to be like, Hey, in this tournament, we're going to do it. The way coaches think about strategy, and then taking that strategy and breaking it into blocks, and then taking those blocks and taking it down to tactics, then taking that down to what we do at practise and measuring every single minute of practise and having it be valuable, those are skills that do not exist in business. The time management that an elite coach needs to have to be effective is... I have not come across any exec, and I've come across some amazing leaders, none of them understand the value of time like an elite coach. We understand that this 10 minutes, if it's not good, that can affect the Olympics next year.
Dave
Correct.
Pete
I think some of that's true. If I just come back, I just want to touch on something that you said that was very particular to my journey as an elite coach is I never cared about winning, and I was never going to get the big bucks.
Pete
The only reason I coached is I wanted to help. I wanted to leverage the sport to help women be amazing in their lives. I would actually argue, and I think I learned this, that that's actually incongruent with elite sport. When I went to the World Cup in 2014, my focus was, I want this to be a transformative experience for the athletes. And if we do that, then we'll play our best. And we didn't play our best. They had a transformative experience, but we didn't play our best. It's what I call a good culture, but not a performance culture. In 2017, I was like... And then I also realised, Dave, as a reflection, I was coaching to my goals, not the athlete's goals. The athletes want to win. So 2017, coach to win. I probably used the sports psychologist more than the athletes did at the 2017 World Cup because I wasn't coaching to my purpose, to the things that were important to me. I found it really hard. But we got to the semifinals and the athletes got what they want. I remember maybe when I was on my journey, and it's easy to do this once you've been there, When you talk to...
Pete
I was talking to a coach, he'd coached the men's national team. He goes, Pete, just recognise it may not be worth it. It may not be what you want it to be. To be an elite coach isn't what it is. I believe that the next generation of wellness is going to be coach wellness. I think we're doing a good deal with athlete wellness. We're being a lot more sensitive to that. I think there's more programmes, but I don't think we've touched on the coach wellness, and I think coach wellness is a thing.
Dave
Really interesting you say that because I've been doing this for a really long time. And periodically, I'll dip my toe into coach development. And initially, I'm not sure if it was motivation, or investment or fear of change. But coaches were really, really resistant to looking at their development. This is like, this is my coaching trajectory, and the athletes either fit in or they get out. Over the last three to five years, I've seen this evolution in coaches wanting to do it different. I get more and more coaches leaning into me in teams now than as much as I do athletes.
Pete
Yeah, absolutely.
Dave
I agree with you.
Pete
Yeah. There's both a wellness piece and a performance piece. How can I be an elite coach with an expectation that my athletes are going to grow and develop if I'm not willing to do it myself? I think the challenge is as a coach, especially as the head coach. The head coach is a very insular role. No one wants to tell you the truth. The athlete don't want to tell you the truth because you select them. The assistant coaches don't want to tell you the truth because they want to go to the World Cup or the Olympics. No one wants to tell you the truth. And so you need someone else. It's just like an exactly the same role as a CEO. CEOs are very isolated. I was just working with a CEO, he became the CEO last summer, and he's like, I don't get any feedback. No one's told me I've done anything wrong in the last six months. He goes, There's no way I've never done anything wrong in the last six months. But he's the CEO, so no one's going to tell him. Coaching is exactly the same thing.
Pete
Now, he has an executive coach that works with him. They do intentional assessments. They do a lot of stuff, so he gets the feedback. If I'm a head coach, I need that ecosystem around me so I can continue to grow. I'm glad to hear coaches are open to it, but I still don't think we put the infrastructure around a coach, especially at the elite level, to go on that journey. It's still hard to do that.
Dave
I'll share a very quick story with you that highlights that. I got called in to work with a team that was going off to an Olympics, and the coach said to me, I need you to come in and fix that athlete. They're broken. Which, again, hair's in the back of my neck. But I went in, I watched this athlete train, and they were phenomenal. The next day, they went and did a trial for the Olympics, and they capitulated. And so the coach turned around to me and said, See, they can't compete. I said, Look, with the greatest respect, it's not the athlete, it's you. And so first thing they did, they fired me. I went to head back to my hotel room. Then I get this phone call and he goes to me, Okay, come and explain to me why is it me? I said, There's a difference between the student version of your athlete when you're teaching them stuff, they can go and make mistakes, they can push boundaries, they can try new things. And then there's a performer version. You've got to trust them to go out and have autonomy to go and do their job.
Dave
And he's gone, Okay, I can see that I kept them in that student mode. I was constantly telling them, You got to correct this, got to do this. And I said, But that's the same thing for you as a coach. There's a time when you've got to learn, and there's a time when you've got to apply. So if you expect that from your athletes, and you're not doing that yourself, what message are you sending? So full credit to him. He went and adjusted what he did. But from a coach's perspective, how do we encourage them to make mistakes, learn new strategies?
Pete
I think they have to be vulnerable, and we have to create an environment where they can be fallible.
Dave
But they get fired, right?
Pete
Well, this is where we come back to the original metrics. The challenge you have as a coach is that I have to be fallible, but I still need to win. That's the challenge. I actually think it's a mindset issue. The mindset, the second wave thinker is, I'm the coach, I have to control everything. Because that gives me control. Therefore, I don't even know if second wave thinkers believe that it helps them perform at their best, but it gives them a sense of control. Maybe mentally, I can handle that. The third wave thinker is, I can't control any of this. So I'm just going to try some stuff, and I'm going to learn from it. I think that having the right mindset that is, performance is a nonlinear journey. To me, and this is why in Olympic sports with the four-year cycle, it's very different than it is if you're in the premiership and you've got to play every week. But even in the premiership, when you're playing every week, you're still identifying peaks, you're still identifying times when you can experiment. You have to be able to do that.
Pete
The most important thing as an elite coach is to recognise when is it that we have to be at our best and when do we have an opportunity to experiment and do something differently. I think that's why I go to the mindset, where letting go of the control and recognising that the experimentation and learning... When I was doing coach development and I headed up coach development at USA Rugby, and I do this now, but there's a difference between coaching and learning. Coaching is what I do. Learning is what the athlete does. So if I can be focused on learning and not coaching, I think that opens up opportunities for the way that I can interact with the athletes.
Dave
So that's a structural thing, though, right? So we have to give them the space to be able to do that?
Pete
I wonder, you said something that I thought was really interesting when you first start working with coaches in your degree programme, which is, why do you coach? I actually think coaches could benefit a lot from really doing some deep discovery work on their purpose. Why is it that you're actually coaching? And then building a coaching model that fits their purpose, versus what we generally do is use a coaching model that we saw another coach use. So opening up the doors and being like, Look, if you want to coach like this, what does that mean? Let's say you've never seen anyone coach. What would that look like if you coach like that? Because I think in the book, I always talk about authenticity, and there's something called the authentic leadership model. I actually think fundamental to sustainability, whether you're as an elite coach or an executive, is to really understand that what you're doing is important to you, and what you're doing fills your emotional tank and linking it to your purpose. I think if coaches can truly understand their purpose, then they can build a coaching model that is really linked to what's important to them, and then, and I think Dave, what we have to be careful of is... we don't judge, right? They could be a second-wave thinker, controlling and really focused on winning. No problem. As long as you're doing it because it's the way that you actually want to do it. You and I would argue short term success, maybe long term, not so much. Which, by the way, also requires you as a really great coach to recognise, like you said, sometimes a performer, sometimes a student, is actually that the great coaches are the ones that can have multiple styles and approaches. But I think helping people understand that, I think, is important. Now, structurally, yeah. I think if we could have more third-wave thinkers at the top of unions, at the top of professional clubs, the people that really understand performance, that would be great. We're probably a generation away from that because the people that are up there played in the '80s where it was probably first wave. You're a big guy, so you're good. It wasn't even second wave. I think that there's probably a little bit… Dave, if we were going to do that, you need to go and educate the board of the Australian Rugby Union.
Pete
You need to go and educate the CEO of the Brumbies or whatever it is, because those are the people that are going to give… If they don't understand that way of thinking, the head coach at the elite level, they're not going to survive third wave thinking.
Dave
I want to pull a bit of a hand break up on this because we could talk for hours on this. I want to bring this back to your book because you've talked about structure in there, and that's a big focus of mine, building that framework and building that structure. Why did you write the book?
Pete
Probably two reasons. One is I retired in 2017 from coaching. For 20 years, I had my rugby coaching business and my leadership consulting business, and all of a sudden, I had a lot of time on my hands. That's probably one thing. The second thing was I felt like I had learned something that would be useful for others to learn. The book is Leadership Shock, and I'll just give you a brief story to my journey as an executive coach, is I kept coming across leaders that had the same problem. Their calendar was crazy, their teams were confused. At the end of every week, they're like, What have I done? They were only fighting fires. I kept seeing it over and over again, and I kept seeing it in a very particular place, which is when people were elevated to a new role. Probably, I should have come and realised this faster. I was like, Hold on, there's something here. There's something in a leader's career where something changes and they get into what I call leadership shock. It's like physical shock. It's like your body in shock, your heart pumps, you can breathe, all those things, but you can't actually do anything.
Pete
I was coming across leaders who couldn't do anything. They had meetings, they would talk to their team, but they weren't able really to do something. This is something I took directly from sports. Really, it's about how do you develop your principles of play? How do you, as a rugby coach, get your athletes to be able to play in a coherent way? You need to create frameworks and structure, and you need to connect pieces to build that. You have to understand what's the game that's being played? What's the game that we want to play? What are our athletes like that allow us to play that way? Therefore, what are our principles of play? You put all these pieces together. And so what I did as an executive coach is I started putting pieces together. I'm like, Oh, well, okay. I really started with the very tactical stuff, which is like, All right, to be good as a leader, you have to know what's expected of you, and you have to have an idea of a vision of where you want to go. And then I built the authentic things around it, which is purpose, so understanding your purpose, the strength that you bring, and then what are your leadership beliefs.
Pete
If you look at those five inputs, you can identify where you should prioritise and what sort of leader you should be. How do you want to lead? Those are very intentional outputs. The leaders that I work who were very successful. In fact, the problem is, it's like this is the career success feed. The problem is they've been so successful, they got promoted to a new role, but their old style and their old approach to leadership didn't work in the new role. And that's, again, blue in my face, Dave. One question, five-minute answer.
Dave
Yeah, I love it. I absolutely love it. I often say to my clients, if there's one thing you take away from this, what is that? So what would you want people listening or watching this? What's the one thing you would want them to walk away remembering?
Pete
I would say that one thing. Man, you're tough. I don't want to be in your class. I would say probably the one thing that you and I have talked about the most that I think is important for your audience is that organised sport was created to develop leadership skills outside outside of sport, to make people successful. I mean, rugby was invented to create leaders that could grow the empire, right? And so sport still does that. That's exactly what sport does, right? It is not there just to go to the Olympics. It's not there just to go to a World Cup. It's not there to win a medal. Sport develops elite life skills that will make you successful moving forward. So whether it's a parent, an athlete, or a coach, that's why sport was invented, and I think it still does that. If you're an athlete and you want to be a great business leader, you have all the more difficult things to teach or to learn. Learning how to make a widget, learning finance, those are actually easy relative to the skills that an elite athlete has.
Dave
Yeah, outstanding. I've absolutely loved talking to you today. As I said, it's nice not to be that unicorn. I've enjoyed hearing you talk and a lot of very similar philosophies. If people want to get hold of your book or want to get hold of you, what's the best way for them to be able to do that?
Pete
Sure. So thanks, and I appreciate the opportunity, and I've loved this conversation, too. So, yeah, Amazon is the easiest place to get the book. So please go on to Amazon. You can find it Leadership Shock. You can find me at petesteinberg. Com. There's a monthly newsletter that you can sign up. We talk about elite sport transitions, transfers, things that we learn, as well as Leadership Shock topics. I love it when people connect with me on LinkedIn because it allows me to see what they're doing. So find me, Pete Steinberg. You can find me on LinkedIn there, too.
Dave
Fantastic. Thank you so much for making time and with your family. I know you're going away, so I really do appreciate your time. I'd love to continue this conversation at some point and go to the next level with that. So thank you so much for your time.
Pete
Absolutely. We'd love to do it, too. Absolutely.
Dave
Enjoy your travel, and I'll speak to you soon.
Pete
You, too.
