I never lose.
I either win or learn.

Sir Clive Woodward led the English Rugby team to success in the 2003 World Cup. In this interview he talks about talent, teams and the importance of defeat.

How should we address you? Mr. Woodward? Sir Woodward? Sir Clive?

Definitely Clive. The only ones who call me “Sir Clive” are my kids.

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.

You were knighted in 2004 for your incredible success in transforming the English Rugby team from an amateur one into a team that won the 2003 World Cup. Did you have a formula for success which made this possible?

Great teams are made of great individuals, so a coach’s chief 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 I tend to say, winning isn’t about doing one thing 100 % better but about doing 100 things 1 % better.

What exactly does that mean?

I simply don’t believe that you become the world’s best team or world’s best business with just one big idea. It’s more about doing many things better than before. I’m always passionate about details, it’s in my DNA. So when I took over the English team, I tried to find incremental gains in just about everything we did.

What kind of details were you passionate about as the England coach?

I could name hundreds, so let’s pick one which improved a lot; the baggy shirts we used to play in back in the day. When I took over, Jason Robinson one of our greatest players at that time, sent me a video with scenes from former games. “Look, no one is actually tackling me, they are grabbing my shirt,” he told me. Following that, we had a conversation with our supplier Nike and ended up with the tightest shirts of any team. Of course we were quickly copied by others, but this definitely gave us for some time a competitive advantage. A lot of those ideas came from the team, rather than me as a leader. You have to have a passion to improve everything you do and if every person in the team does this, you have a great advantage. Your main job as a leader is to make sure that everybody in the team feels comfortable about sharing their ideas.

In competition as in business, everyone – if united – can contribute to success.

You were also famous for inviting outsiders into your team to get new ideas and inspirations.

I always invited clever people who were successful at what they did. We had hedge fund managers and school headmasters; we showed them everything we did. Our deal was always the same: you can spend one or two days with me, but at the end I want at least one idea from you on what we could have done better. And of the 50 or so people I invited over my eight years as England coach everybody left with at least one enlightening idea for us. Which is quite amazing really if you think about it, a high-performing team improved by bright people who’ve nothing to do with the sport; they simply look at things from a different angle. That had a huge impact, I don’t understand why there are not more businesses inviting outsiders to look in at what they’re doing. One of my greatest personal sources of inspiration, for example was a self-improvement book, written by a dentist from Brisbane.

That sounds rather surprising. What did you as a rugby coach learn from an Australian dentist?

When I was still a rugby amateur, I worked for five years in Australia at Xerox, the technology company. At that time I took part in a course in which Paddi Lund’s book Building the Happiness-centred Business was recommended. It’s a small book, which you can read in a few hours. It’s the only business-book I have ever read twice. Paddi completely and utterly transformed the way he ran his dental practice. When you read the book it drives you nuts because everything is so straightforward and yet completely different from any other dentist. So when I was in Australia, I went to see him and found out that Paddi runs the most amazing and profitable dental practice in Australia. Incredibly, going for a dental check-up was a really enjoyable experience, going to see your dentist was something you looked forward to.

An exceptional trainer, Sir Clive Woodward is convinced that success is not a coincidence; it is something that can be precisely planned.

That’s hard to believe.

We all dread the dentist, but he completely changed this around. When you read his book, it comes over quite clearly that if you look after your team, they will look after your clients and customers. Sometimes in business we get that the wrong way around by putting a huge emphasis on our clients instead of our colleagues. Whoever asks me “What book should I read?” I recommend this fantastic one, because whoever wants to change a business or team needs to start thinking differently. And that’s something this dentist is extremely good at.

Your start as England coach in 1997 was quite bumpy and included some serious setbacks along the way such as losing to South Africa at the 1999 Rugby World Cup and 76-0 to Australia. How did you manage to recover from these setbacks?

Winning does not happen in straight lines, there are always times when things don’t go well. Indeed, we had some big losses; however, how you handle these setbacks is a key part of being a champion team. As long as you’re confident you did everything possible to win, life can carry on very peacefully and quickly. If you know deep down though that you took short cuts or didn’t work as hard as you could have and then loose, that’s not good. Handling winning is difficult, but handling failure is even more so.

How do you handle failure?

Well, one key to handling failure is to discuss it in advance. “What do we do if we lose this match” was one thing we discussed openly in the team and there’s nothing wrong with it. It means that if you do lose, you handle it better as you are prepared for it. Yet more importantly, it becomes clear that you don’t want to lose as you don’t want to go through all these processes to handle defeat.

Even if you don’t win per se, experience and skill can always be gained.

Winston Churchill defined success as “the ability to move from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”. Would you subscribe to this?

Totally. Winston Churchill worked extremely hard and had many setbacks. He was one of the best leaders we have ever had. I personally tend to say that “I never lose, I either win or I learn.” And with this personal mantra I never wake up in the morning with the feeling that I have to go to work. I love my work, even when times are tough.

Following your initial setbacks, your team had a record of 41 wins out of 46 matches from 2000 to 2003. What were the keys to this sustained success?

We had done all our homework, taken no shortcuts, so we started to win. It was a direct consequence of what I’ve just described and I can name those five games we lost better than the 41 we won, because if you become a world-class team, a loss becomes a huge deal.

As thinking differently and working harder absorbs a lot of energy, how do mobilise the necessary energy to go the extra mile?

In every organisation you have the energy sappers, those I call the “rocks”, and the energisers, those I call the “sponges.” I want every single person in my team to have a sponge between their ears, something which is porous and open to new ideas. I’m looking for people who take personal responsibility to take a new look at things. What I don’t want is a rock or energy sapper, someone who has stopped learning and often thinks of themself as unteachable or uncoachable. Often the rocks are the people who are the longest in the company. I always make it clear that the best ideas can come not only from the leaders or most experienced, also people who’ve been in the company the least amount of time. The important thing is to give them a platform and listen to them.

What do you expect from leaders?

When I coach senior executives they often show me their HR and training plans they offer their teams. And of course it’s great to work in a company which supports your relentless learning. Equally as important is the question of what each individual in a team does to develop themselves. Every team member should be passionate about developing themselves and become a sponge, because that helps you embrace all the changes that are out there.

Take, for example, the technology side of the business. It’s amazing how many of today’s senior executives are proud of not being involved in technology. I personally think that’s a big error. If you’re not up to date, you rely too much on other people. Change is going to happen, it’s never going to go away and we’ll probably never see bigger opportunities in the business and sporting world than today. Technology is at the heart of it. So as a leader you should not delegate it to others, rather stay right on top of the technology world.

According to Sir Clive Woodward, being successful as a team necessitates each team member being given the chance to contribute to their best.

Sounds like your former coach Jim Greenwood was right when he said about you: “Clive organises the England team as he would organise a big company”.

What he wanted to say is that running a team is no different at all from running a company like for example Hager Group. You try to deliver results through people. That’s what sport is about and that’s what business is about. I think my background in the business world, my time at the multinational Xerox as well as my own small IT-leasing-company, was clearly an explanation for my success as England coach. Both taught me a lot about how to deliver results through people and indeed I set the English team up as if it was a business.

Following a series of losses with the England team, you resigned only months after winning the World Cup in 2003. Would you agree that the repetition of a success is even more difficult than the success itself?

That’s a good point, although the pinnacle of my achievements as England coach was not the World Championship in 2003 but becoming the number one ranked-team of the planet, which happened in 2001. So 2003 was just a stepping stone, and as I said, even teams at the top of their game can lose sometimes.

Interestingly enough, you never planned to become a Rugby player or coach, you wanted to be a professional football player. It was because your father disapproved that you started playing rugby. What can be learned from that twist in your biography? Always taking the opportunities that life offers you?

Well, let’s not learn the wrong lessons from this. I was passionate about football when I was young; I still love it and am a fully qualified football coach. My father and I are still at odd about this. My father had been told by my school headmaster that I was talented enough to go to university, yet because I played so much football I would fail. So he tried to get me away from football by sending me to this pretty tough boarding school at the age of 14. There were only three sports played there: rugby, rugby and rugby. I hated rugby. After running away several times from that school I eventually got around to playing rugby because there was nothing else to do. I became quite good at it, went on to play for England and everything else… Do I agree with my father’s decision? No. I think you should never take away someone’s dreams and passion.