Humphrey WaltersLeadership Relay’s second interview is with Humphrey Walters. Humphrey has had a long and varied career. He started his own Leadership and Management business and later employed over 2000 people in locations all around the world. Following this, Humphrey completed ‘The World’s toughest around the World Yacht Race’. He later was an important part in establishing the culture within England’s World Cup Winning Rugby team. He has also worked with The British Lions, Chelsea Football Club and JCB. He has had experience of the Olympic Games and Formula One. Humphrey also talks about the lessons learnt from when he spent time with legendary American Football Coach, Vince Lombardi. In Part 2 of this fascinating interview, Humphrey talks about how he became involved within the England Rugby set-up and how he helped to build the elite 'World Class' culture. He also discusses various innovations, as well as the importance of knowing the motivation of the opposition. Leadership Relay would like to thank Humphrey for generously giving up his time to share his gripping experiences. As a leader in a Primary School, I also really appreciated how Humphrey was able to link his experiences to the times he has spent in schools. Thank you Humphrey. If you would like to find out more about Humphrey and the work he does you can visit his website at https://www.humphreywalters.com/ We hope you enjoy the interview as much as us! |
The Interview
LR - How did you come to be involved in the England Rugby set-up?
HW - I’d done a radio broadcast every week from the yacht and I thought the only person listening would be my Mum! I did about 50 broadcasts and Clive (Woodward) had listened to it. I got a phone call and he said that he’d been picked as the 6th choice as the new coach for England. He said ‘I've been listening to your broadcasts and I need somebody who would have great street cred with the players. They can’t say that you don't know what you’re talking about in terms of leadership.’
He asked if I would like a job and I said ‘Clive, I haven’t even got a tracksuit!’ He said ‘if you ever put a tracksuit on you’re out of here!’ He asked me to create a world class environment. I didn't have a clue what that meant. So the first thing I looked at is what we call Assembly Week. The team play the game on the Saturday after arriving the previous Monday, so I figured out there were 120 hours that these bunch of guys were together to play an 80 minute game on the Saturday, before going home on the Sunday.
I asked myself ‘what happens in business?’ People do lots of initiatives and the danger is that you just do lots of stuff. People often do lots of stuff, but they’ve got no idea why they are doing it. I had to have a structure and a process. I thought to myself, if you go to a restaurant, there is a whole series of things that have happened from the time you went in until the time you leave. If you leave saying ‘wow, that is a great restaurant’ that is made up of lots of different interventions. If I’ve left a restaurant having had a lovely meal, I think of all the steps along the way and about why I'd want to go back. It’s what I call the journey.
Think about a holiday. You get excited about your holiday, go through lots of brochures and go through and think about booking it. The whole thing is then a series of events. How do they handle you on the phone? Then you go to the airport. How are you handled by the airline? You get to the other end, what is the hotel like? So there is a whole series of things that happen. These are all controlled by different elements and different people. If they lose your luggage on the way back, you judge the holiday as rubbish! So I said to myself ‘if I’ve got to create a world class environment, I've got to look at this like a journey. The players arrive on Monday, what do we put them through so that when they leave on Sunday, even if they have lost, they realise that they are in a really professional outfit and nothing is left to chance?’ That is what I wanted them to have in their minds.
It’s like when I turn up in a school, I always do the ‘taxi test’. I jump into a taxi and I ask the driver ‘what is the school like?’ They’ll tell me everything. They might say ‘it’s a fantastic school, it’s a great part of the community’ and they’ll give me a whole description of what the school is like. If you pass the taxi test, you’re doing a lot right! You don’t often need the kids there to tell what they are like. You walk down the corridors and there is stuff on the walls. There are celebrations on the wall and you go into the classrooms and it’s like a Disney World of education. There are slogans on the wall and pictures of inspirational people like Mandela and that’s what I wanted the England Rugby environment to be like.
I questioned everything. What was the kit like? How can we have world class food? How can we have world class meetings? How can we make the bus really great? I looked at absolutely everything and I got ideas from all over the place. If you have a structure, it stops you doing stuff with no purpose and hoping it’ll come off. I said ‘we have got to find 100 things and do them 1% better.’
Everybody has the same training regimes. How can we make ours be 1% better? It could be enjoyment, it could be the environment that we are training in, but we’ve got to look for the one percenters. They are not massive things. I said to all the players ‘everybody can bring 1%.’ That’s what led to all of the things. We did the changing rooms up. Everybody realised that 1% was very easy to achieve so they’d try and bring 5 ideas. I think the big lesson is if you are going to take over something, say you’re taking over a new entity, think of the journey. Think of what is happening now. Ramp up what is great and analyse why the performance is good at this team and ask ‘can we just ramp it up a bit?’
LR- I take it the staff and players were all involved in putting those expectations together?
HW- Absolutely, we are all in this thing together. One of the ideas came from the girlfriend of one of the players. The Twickenham changing room was a dump. It was awful. It was like a garage with benches. I said to the players ‘look that’s really awful. Upstairs where the committee are sitting is wonderful but down here, and you fill the stadium, it’s a dump.’
One of the guys said ‘my girlfriend’s father is an architect.’ I asked ‘could you ask your girlfriend what we could do?’ She said ‘the first thing I think you need to do is to get in contact with a tv program called ‘Changing Rooms.’ I thought that was a great idea so we got them in. They did a before and after. Then the girlfriend's father drew up what he thought would be a really world class environment. I’d never seen the program and that’s the point, I don't have all the ideas. If you think about 35 guys in the squad and all the staff, you’ve got a lot of brain power there. On the program, you’d cover the door with brown paper and you’d burst through it into this new environment and that’s what we did.
LR - So you put your ground rules in. What would happen if, for example, somebody wasn’t pulling their weight in a certain area? How would that be managed?
HW - That’s a very very good question. How do you monitor and make sure that you pick that up? When we did it with the England team, I set the ground rules with them. In other words, they set it. I was the facilitator. One of the rules was right place, right kit, right time and right mind. You have to have all 4 and because the group had set the rules, they were the monitor of the rules. Therefore, if somebody slipped, I could have a quiet word and say to one of the other players. It’s not my job because they might say ‘get stuffed’, but when you talk to their peers, it’s a very different power. Leaders often think that it is their job to do all that, but it’s not. It’s the job of all the people that work together. I’ll give you an example from my first Lions tour. Right place, right kit, right time, right mind was critical.
We had group meetings where I would talk about stuff. Everything was nicely set out at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel, we had it all branded up and we were there for a week before we went to New Zealand. The rule was Lombardi time. 15 minutes early in the right kit and we had a dress code. One player came in about 2 minutes late. I always started and finished on time. It’s an absolute discipline. The player came in late, he was in the wrong kit and he had a huge plate of sandwiches. I thought what do I do now? I did nothing. Had I said to him ‘you know what the rules are’, the issue was I didn’t know who his mates are.
In that situation you would never please everybody. Some might say I'm picking on him, some might say I’m being too soft. It was deadly silent for a couple of minutes before he went out, put his food outside and came back in and sat down before I carried on. The Irish lads were brilliant, they came up at the end of the session and said ‘Humphrey, we’ll take care of him, don’t worry.’ That’s followership. They would say to that player ‘that’s not on’ in other words, we’ll sort out the discipline on this one. That is why these rules are so important. That is why the team have got to create the ground rules and not the boss, in fact Clive wasn’t even in the room when we did it. I told him what we did and he said ‘that’s terrific.’ I've said this to staff members in schools that you should get together in the staff room and ask yourselves, ‘what are the 7 rules we should have?’
In the rugby team, tell me once was a rule. Right place, right kit, right time, right mind was another. No gossip, tell them to their faces or shut up and we had 3 or 4 more. We created this into a book. I think it’s fundamental. People want to know how they should behave in a team. The worst thing is if they find out by chance. When we had new players coming in, they knew what the rules were and I would brief them. It might be say Jonny Wilkinson. He came in half way through my first season. Jonny was quite a shy and quiet guy at first. I said ‘these are the rules we are operating to timekeeping’ etc etc and then he knew exactly how to behave and he was off and running. We called them Teamship Rules. I said to the players ‘when we wake up on Monday morning you're coming to a new job. So I want you to come in with that in your mind and forget what is happening with your club.’
LR - I believe you were responsible for encouraging the England team to change their shirts at half time, becoming the first team in the world to do so as part of second half thinking. How did this come about? Do you have any other examples of innovations like this?
HW- Changing the shirts at half time was quite an interesting thought process. It came from a few different thought processes. The end result was that I wanted to make the players look bigger, stronger and more conditioned than anyone else. There were a number of important psychological factors. The first thing I noticed was Sampras. Pete Sampras. I was watching him play in the Wimbledon final. He was almost down and out. Sampras was struggling. He sat on his seat and he changed his shirt. He was a very hairy guy!
He was the first person I saw changing his shirt. It was not what you were supposed to do, but he did. It was a signal to his opponent that he wasn’t finished yet. He won the game and the Wimbledon trophy.The white shirts make you look bigger so we needed the kit to be as white as possible and not muddy. The other reason was I went to the Granada Studios in Manchester. We went around the Coronation Street set and I thought it was a bit miniature and it turned out that the set is 70% of the real size. I asked ‘why is that?’and it was because on television everything looks bigger.
So a combination of changing our shirts, the Sampras idea, it makes you look bigger and on TV we are going to be bigger anyway. We looked like a fresh team, we played against France in the Stade De France and it was quite muddy. I made sure that the French went out first. They had dark blue shirts and white shorts. The white shorts were very muddy and they looked bedraggled and our guys in white shorts, white socks and white shirt looking pristine. I made sure they ran out second and kept the French waiting. When you look at the film, you can see the french thinking ‘crikey, who’s this lot?’ Did that win us the World Cup? Of course it didn't, but we had another 50 or 60 things that we did and when you add them all together it becomes very powerful.
LR - Do you have any other examples?
HW- We were in a hotel in Richmond and it was a dump of a place. The staff were great, but we were in a terrible room, it was the wrong size, terrible equipment, stuffy and I thought this is not world class in a country mile. So we didn't know what to do. Luckily the owner of Penyhill Park was a complete rugby nut. I went to him and asked him if he would like to have the England rugby team at his hotel. As a rugby enthusiast he was so pleased. He even built a gym to our own spec. I wanted everything all on one site. If you go to Penyhill Park you’ll see there is a rugby pitch. So that was another thing we did, we changed the total environment.
After 99 when we lost in the World Cup to South Africa. I said ‘we’ve got to change the environment and we’ve got to enhance what we do because we are not world class at the moment.’ Another thing that we did, when you are in a hotel, it’s like a series of prison cells. You walk down the corridor and you've got no idea who is in which room. So what I did, I put names on every room so you could see where everybody was. We had a key system in those days and if your key was in the door that meant that you were in the room and if somebody wanted to come in they could come in. If it wasn't there, either you wanted to be left alone or you were somewhere else. We encouraged the young players to walk around the corridors to go in and have a chat. We’d encourage the role model players to leave their keys in the door because they had such an impact on the younger players. They wouldn't take too much of their time.
When we got to Penyhill, I said ‘look, these guys are here for a week, we’ve got to create a home from home for them. I got the team photographer, a great guy, and said ‘can you put pictures of the players in their rooms of them doing something well?’. So they’d walk into their rooms, and there would be a picture of them scoring a try, kicking a kick, completing a tackle, so when they walked in it was their home. All sorts of little things like that we did.
Another thing we did with the shirts, I walked into the changing room after a game and there was a pile of shirts on the floor. I asked one of the players ‘what happens to those shirts?’ He explained that they got sent to rugby clubs and they auction them off for their funds. I said ‘but that is the shirt that you have just played for your country in.’ The players were able to go and get a replica from the club shop. I couldn't believe it because that wasn't the shirt they had worn.
I was flabbergasted. I thought I’ve got to make this shirt worth something. That is why we got the shirts embroidered, if you look on the shirt tail, you will see red writing and it has the players name, the date, the match and so they are the only person on the planet who has got that shirt. One of the players had his flat broken into and his England and Lions shirts taken. He got them back because this guy had taken them to a car boot sale. Somebody saw the name on the shirt and he got them all.
I was in a big school recently in a very deprived area, the head was a great leader and motivator. He was always at the front when the kids came to school. If somebody didn't have their tie on he’d remind them ‘hey, tie?’ The school was immaculate so from a very deprived area they turned up and were immaculate. They had a sewing room where they made all sorts of things waistcoats and I thought wow, what a place this is. The culture that the headteacher had created was phenomenal and they kids were great.
LR- Was visiting the Marines one of your ideas?
HW - I live just over the road from the Marines base about 5 miles away. After the 99 World Cup, I said to Clive ‘these guys need to be with people where you don't have to talk about team work or loyalty, or excellence or all this stuff.’ When I had a business, one of the guys I employed, running some of my leadership was Sir Jeremy Moore, he was commander of the land forces in the Falklands. When he left the Marines he couldn't get a job so I employed him. I said to Jeremy ‘is there any chance we could bring the England Rugby Team?’
There was huge protocol, we were the first civilian team to go to Lympstone. Now they have the England football team. I went to ask them because I wanted the team, by osmosis, to understand what real performance looks like. They had to go and ask the Ministry of Defence. Eventually, I asked to go and see someone at the Ministry of Defence and he was a lovely bloke. I said ‘as a quid pro quo, we’ll have a press conference on the last day. You need to get recruits and here is a wonderful opportunity to tell the world how wonderful you are.’
We went twice. We had a fantastic time and the players loved it and there is no question, the groundwork for us winning the World Cup in 2003 was done at Lympstone with the Marines and all the things they stand for. I could talk for hours about it. It is an amazing place and the interesting thing was, I asked a young Marine, he was a young instructor about 24 years old. He looked the business and if I was in a tough spot I’d want him on my shoulder. I asked him ‘what is it like fighting for your country?’ And he looked at me and said ‘I don't fight for my country, I fight firstly for myself, I want to be the best Marine, the best trained, the most knowledgeable, the fittest and that is my first driver. Number 2, I fight for my mates, I fight for that person who is next to me. Number 3, I fight for my unit that has given me this Green Beret and the last thing is that I fight for my country. And that is what I brought to the team. It’s all about team and it starts with you. You’ve got to be the best there is at everything you do, turning up on time. Everything.
Interestingly, I've done some work with a Head Coach (names coach) recently and I phoned up the Colonel about going to visit again and they were up for it. He said ‘I was a major when you came last time’ but the Head Coach didn't want to go. I thought that was a missed opportunity just to add that little extra.
LR - I'm surprised by that because he seems to be quite open minded about visiting other places.
HW- Yes he does, what you’ve got to work out is, the Marines are all about what is in their soul, when the performance comes they’ve got something inside them that means a huge amount. Lombardi, the American football coach, called it ‘heart power’ I said to Clive, ‘we’ve got to understand who we’re up against and we’ve got to understand what is in their soul.’ It’s what the South African’s called ‘Gees’ and it’s Arikaans for Spirit or Ghost. What is inside their chest? I ran a marathon one year with Francois Pienaar, he was the captain who lifted the World Cup with Mandela, and he explained that South Africans are very religious, they say prayers before a game and their justification is that is their God given right because ‘God sent us to this country to create a country’ and that is what they believe.
If you talk to an All Black, an All Black never takes a step backwards, they’re as hard as nails, they never whinge if the referee calls a decision against them, they are always moving on. If a call goes against some other nations, they whinge about it for the next 10 minutes and then you’ve got an advantage. That’s when you put the pressure on because their mind is elsewhere. An All Black isn't like that, once it has gone, it has gone and you move on.
If you take an Australian, what is in their soul is revenge. I said to The Head Coach I'd been working with ‘you've got to understand these things.’ So when England came to the World Cup Final (2019), against South Africa. South Africa made an inspired choice in their captain, for a start. They weren't playing to win a World Cup, they were playing to inspire all the young kids in the townships. The whole team wanted to show what you can do when you are united in the rainbow nation. They were playing for something far more than winning a World Cup. That gave them the impetus in the scrum. If you look at the captain’s armband, it's got Jesus written in huge letters. That is more powerful than having the bonus of 200 grand for winning it. You have to think about the opposition.
I got that from General Montgomery, he lived in Hampshire. He had caravans that were his headquarters and he showed me around his caravans and in one of them, the planning room, there were pictures of the German generals he fought against. I asked him, ‘why have you got them?' he said ‘because when I’m sitting here planning, the most important thing is for me to try and work out what is in their mind. How can I take them by surprise? What are they going to be thinking? We know we are up against each other and I’ve got to figure it out so the closest I’m going to get to them is by having their pictures around me.' It was important we found out what the opposition's spirit is.
HW - I’d done a radio broadcast every week from the yacht and I thought the only person listening would be my Mum! I did about 50 broadcasts and Clive (Woodward) had listened to it. I got a phone call and he said that he’d been picked as the 6th choice as the new coach for England. He said ‘I've been listening to your broadcasts and I need somebody who would have great street cred with the players. They can’t say that you don't know what you’re talking about in terms of leadership.’
He asked if I would like a job and I said ‘Clive, I haven’t even got a tracksuit!’ He said ‘if you ever put a tracksuit on you’re out of here!’ He asked me to create a world class environment. I didn't have a clue what that meant. So the first thing I looked at is what we call Assembly Week. The team play the game on the Saturday after arriving the previous Monday, so I figured out there were 120 hours that these bunch of guys were together to play an 80 minute game on the Saturday, before going home on the Sunday.
I asked myself ‘what happens in business?’ People do lots of initiatives and the danger is that you just do lots of stuff. People often do lots of stuff, but they’ve got no idea why they are doing it. I had to have a structure and a process. I thought to myself, if you go to a restaurant, there is a whole series of things that have happened from the time you went in until the time you leave. If you leave saying ‘wow, that is a great restaurant’ that is made up of lots of different interventions. If I’ve left a restaurant having had a lovely meal, I think of all the steps along the way and about why I'd want to go back. It’s what I call the journey.
Think about a holiday. You get excited about your holiday, go through lots of brochures and go through and think about booking it. The whole thing is then a series of events. How do they handle you on the phone? Then you go to the airport. How are you handled by the airline? You get to the other end, what is the hotel like? So there is a whole series of things that happen. These are all controlled by different elements and different people. If they lose your luggage on the way back, you judge the holiday as rubbish! So I said to myself ‘if I’ve got to create a world class environment, I've got to look at this like a journey. The players arrive on Monday, what do we put them through so that when they leave on Sunday, even if they have lost, they realise that they are in a really professional outfit and nothing is left to chance?’ That is what I wanted them to have in their minds.
It’s like when I turn up in a school, I always do the ‘taxi test’. I jump into a taxi and I ask the driver ‘what is the school like?’ They’ll tell me everything. They might say ‘it’s a fantastic school, it’s a great part of the community’ and they’ll give me a whole description of what the school is like. If you pass the taxi test, you’re doing a lot right! You don’t often need the kids there to tell what they are like. You walk down the corridors and there is stuff on the walls. There are celebrations on the wall and you go into the classrooms and it’s like a Disney World of education. There are slogans on the wall and pictures of inspirational people like Mandela and that’s what I wanted the England Rugby environment to be like.
I questioned everything. What was the kit like? How can we have world class food? How can we have world class meetings? How can we make the bus really great? I looked at absolutely everything and I got ideas from all over the place. If you have a structure, it stops you doing stuff with no purpose and hoping it’ll come off. I said ‘we have got to find 100 things and do them 1% better.’
Everybody has the same training regimes. How can we make ours be 1% better? It could be enjoyment, it could be the environment that we are training in, but we’ve got to look for the one percenters. They are not massive things. I said to all the players ‘everybody can bring 1%.’ That’s what led to all of the things. We did the changing rooms up. Everybody realised that 1% was very easy to achieve so they’d try and bring 5 ideas. I think the big lesson is if you are going to take over something, say you’re taking over a new entity, think of the journey. Think of what is happening now. Ramp up what is great and analyse why the performance is good at this team and ask ‘can we just ramp it up a bit?’
LR- I take it the staff and players were all involved in putting those expectations together?
HW- Absolutely, we are all in this thing together. One of the ideas came from the girlfriend of one of the players. The Twickenham changing room was a dump. It was awful. It was like a garage with benches. I said to the players ‘look that’s really awful. Upstairs where the committee are sitting is wonderful but down here, and you fill the stadium, it’s a dump.’
One of the guys said ‘my girlfriend’s father is an architect.’ I asked ‘could you ask your girlfriend what we could do?’ She said ‘the first thing I think you need to do is to get in contact with a tv program called ‘Changing Rooms.’ I thought that was a great idea so we got them in. They did a before and after. Then the girlfriend's father drew up what he thought would be a really world class environment. I’d never seen the program and that’s the point, I don't have all the ideas. If you think about 35 guys in the squad and all the staff, you’ve got a lot of brain power there. On the program, you’d cover the door with brown paper and you’d burst through it into this new environment and that’s what we did.
LR - So you put your ground rules in. What would happen if, for example, somebody wasn’t pulling their weight in a certain area? How would that be managed?
HW - That’s a very very good question. How do you monitor and make sure that you pick that up? When we did it with the England team, I set the ground rules with them. In other words, they set it. I was the facilitator. One of the rules was right place, right kit, right time and right mind. You have to have all 4 and because the group had set the rules, they were the monitor of the rules. Therefore, if somebody slipped, I could have a quiet word and say to one of the other players. It’s not my job because they might say ‘get stuffed’, but when you talk to their peers, it’s a very different power. Leaders often think that it is their job to do all that, but it’s not. It’s the job of all the people that work together. I’ll give you an example from my first Lions tour. Right place, right kit, right time, right mind was critical.
We had group meetings where I would talk about stuff. Everything was nicely set out at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel, we had it all branded up and we were there for a week before we went to New Zealand. The rule was Lombardi time. 15 minutes early in the right kit and we had a dress code. One player came in about 2 minutes late. I always started and finished on time. It’s an absolute discipline. The player came in late, he was in the wrong kit and he had a huge plate of sandwiches. I thought what do I do now? I did nothing. Had I said to him ‘you know what the rules are’, the issue was I didn’t know who his mates are.
In that situation you would never please everybody. Some might say I'm picking on him, some might say I’m being too soft. It was deadly silent for a couple of minutes before he went out, put his food outside and came back in and sat down before I carried on. The Irish lads were brilliant, they came up at the end of the session and said ‘Humphrey, we’ll take care of him, don’t worry.’ That’s followership. They would say to that player ‘that’s not on’ in other words, we’ll sort out the discipline on this one. That is why these rules are so important. That is why the team have got to create the ground rules and not the boss, in fact Clive wasn’t even in the room when we did it. I told him what we did and he said ‘that’s terrific.’ I've said this to staff members in schools that you should get together in the staff room and ask yourselves, ‘what are the 7 rules we should have?’
In the rugby team, tell me once was a rule. Right place, right kit, right time, right mind was another. No gossip, tell them to their faces or shut up and we had 3 or 4 more. We created this into a book. I think it’s fundamental. People want to know how they should behave in a team. The worst thing is if they find out by chance. When we had new players coming in, they knew what the rules were and I would brief them. It might be say Jonny Wilkinson. He came in half way through my first season. Jonny was quite a shy and quiet guy at first. I said ‘these are the rules we are operating to timekeeping’ etc etc and then he knew exactly how to behave and he was off and running. We called them Teamship Rules. I said to the players ‘when we wake up on Monday morning you're coming to a new job. So I want you to come in with that in your mind and forget what is happening with your club.’
LR - I believe you were responsible for encouraging the England team to change their shirts at half time, becoming the first team in the world to do so as part of second half thinking. How did this come about? Do you have any other examples of innovations like this?
HW- Changing the shirts at half time was quite an interesting thought process. It came from a few different thought processes. The end result was that I wanted to make the players look bigger, stronger and more conditioned than anyone else. There were a number of important psychological factors. The first thing I noticed was Sampras. Pete Sampras. I was watching him play in the Wimbledon final. He was almost down and out. Sampras was struggling. He sat on his seat and he changed his shirt. He was a very hairy guy!
He was the first person I saw changing his shirt. It was not what you were supposed to do, but he did. It was a signal to his opponent that he wasn’t finished yet. He won the game and the Wimbledon trophy.The white shirts make you look bigger so we needed the kit to be as white as possible and not muddy. The other reason was I went to the Granada Studios in Manchester. We went around the Coronation Street set and I thought it was a bit miniature and it turned out that the set is 70% of the real size. I asked ‘why is that?’and it was because on television everything looks bigger.
So a combination of changing our shirts, the Sampras idea, it makes you look bigger and on TV we are going to be bigger anyway. We looked like a fresh team, we played against France in the Stade De France and it was quite muddy. I made sure that the French went out first. They had dark blue shirts and white shorts. The white shorts were very muddy and they looked bedraggled and our guys in white shorts, white socks and white shirt looking pristine. I made sure they ran out second and kept the French waiting. When you look at the film, you can see the french thinking ‘crikey, who’s this lot?’ Did that win us the World Cup? Of course it didn't, but we had another 50 or 60 things that we did and when you add them all together it becomes very powerful.
LR - Do you have any other examples?
HW- We were in a hotel in Richmond and it was a dump of a place. The staff were great, but we were in a terrible room, it was the wrong size, terrible equipment, stuffy and I thought this is not world class in a country mile. So we didn't know what to do. Luckily the owner of Penyhill Park was a complete rugby nut. I went to him and asked him if he would like to have the England rugby team at his hotel. As a rugby enthusiast he was so pleased. He even built a gym to our own spec. I wanted everything all on one site. If you go to Penyhill Park you’ll see there is a rugby pitch. So that was another thing we did, we changed the total environment.
After 99 when we lost in the World Cup to South Africa. I said ‘we’ve got to change the environment and we’ve got to enhance what we do because we are not world class at the moment.’ Another thing that we did, when you are in a hotel, it’s like a series of prison cells. You walk down the corridor and you've got no idea who is in which room. So what I did, I put names on every room so you could see where everybody was. We had a key system in those days and if your key was in the door that meant that you were in the room and if somebody wanted to come in they could come in. If it wasn't there, either you wanted to be left alone or you were somewhere else. We encouraged the young players to walk around the corridors to go in and have a chat. We’d encourage the role model players to leave their keys in the door because they had such an impact on the younger players. They wouldn't take too much of their time.
When we got to Penyhill, I said ‘look, these guys are here for a week, we’ve got to create a home from home for them. I got the team photographer, a great guy, and said ‘can you put pictures of the players in their rooms of them doing something well?’. So they’d walk into their rooms, and there would be a picture of them scoring a try, kicking a kick, completing a tackle, so when they walked in it was their home. All sorts of little things like that we did.
Another thing we did with the shirts, I walked into the changing room after a game and there was a pile of shirts on the floor. I asked one of the players ‘what happens to those shirts?’ He explained that they got sent to rugby clubs and they auction them off for their funds. I said ‘but that is the shirt that you have just played for your country in.’ The players were able to go and get a replica from the club shop. I couldn't believe it because that wasn't the shirt they had worn.
I was flabbergasted. I thought I’ve got to make this shirt worth something. That is why we got the shirts embroidered, if you look on the shirt tail, you will see red writing and it has the players name, the date, the match and so they are the only person on the planet who has got that shirt. One of the players had his flat broken into and his England and Lions shirts taken. He got them back because this guy had taken them to a car boot sale. Somebody saw the name on the shirt and he got them all.
I was in a big school recently in a very deprived area, the head was a great leader and motivator. He was always at the front when the kids came to school. If somebody didn't have their tie on he’d remind them ‘hey, tie?’ The school was immaculate so from a very deprived area they turned up and were immaculate. They had a sewing room where they made all sorts of things waistcoats and I thought wow, what a place this is. The culture that the headteacher had created was phenomenal and they kids were great.
LR- Was visiting the Marines one of your ideas?
HW - I live just over the road from the Marines base about 5 miles away. After the 99 World Cup, I said to Clive ‘these guys need to be with people where you don't have to talk about team work or loyalty, or excellence or all this stuff.’ When I had a business, one of the guys I employed, running some of my leadership was Sir Jeremy Moore, he was commander of the land forces in the Falklands. When he left the Marines he couldn't get a job so I employed him. I said to Jeremy ‘is there any chance we could bring the England Rugby Team?’
There was huge protocol, we were the first civilian team to go to Lympstone. Now they have the England football team. I went to ask them because I wanted the team, by osmosis, to understand what real performance looks like. They had to go and ask the Ministry of Defence. Eventually, I asked to go and see someone at the Ministry of Defence and he was a lovely bloke. I said ‘as a quid pro quo, we’ll have a press conference on the last day. You need to get recruits and here is a wonderful opportunity to tell the world how wonderful you are.’
We went twice. We had a fantastic time and the players loved it and there is no question, the groundwork for us winning the World Cup in 2003 was done at Lympstone with the Marines and all the things they stand for. I could talk for hours about it. It is an amazing place and the interesting thing was, I asked a young Marine, he was a young instructor about 24 years old. He looked the business and if I was in a tough spot I’d want him on my shoulder. I asked him ‘what is it like fighting for your country?’ And he looked at me and said ‘I don't fight for my country, I fight firstly for myself, I want to be the best Marine, the best trained, the most knowledgeable, the fittest and that is my first driver. Number 2, I fight for my mates, I fight for that person who is next to me. Number 3, I fight for my unit that has given me this Green Beret and the last thing is that I fight for my country. And that is what I brought to the team. It’s all about team and it starts with you. You’ve got to be the best there is at everything you do, turning up on time. Everything.
Interestingly, I've done some work with a Head Coach (names coach) recently and I phoned up the Colonel about going to visit again and they were up for it. He said ‘I was a major when you came last time’ but the Head Coach didn't want to go. I thought that was a missed opportunity just to add that little extra.
LR - I'm surprised by that because he seems to be quite open minded about visiting other places.
HW- Yes he does, what you’ve got to work out is, the Marines are all about what is in their soul, when the performance comes they’ve got something inside them that means a huge amount. Lombardi, the American football coach, called it ‘heart power’ I said to Clive, ‘we’ve got to understand who we’re up against and we’ve got to understand what is in their soul.’ It’s what the South African’s called ‘Gees’ and it’s Arikaans for Spirit or Ghost. What is inside their chest? I ran a marathon one year with Francois Pienaar, he was the captain who lifted the World Cup with Mandela, and he explained that South Africans are very religious, they say prayers before a game and their justification is that is their God given right because ‘God sent us to this country to create a country’ and that is what they believe.
If you talk to an All Black, an All Black never takes a step backwards, they’re as hard as nails, they never whinge if the referee calls a decision against them, they are always moving on. If a call goes against some other nations, they whinge about it for the next 10 minutes and then you’ve got an advantage. That’s when you put the pressure on because their mind is elsewhere. An All Black isn't like that, once it has gone, it has gone and you move on.
If you take an Australian, what is in their soul is revenge. I said to The Head Coach I'd been working with ‘you've got to understand these things.’ So when England came to the World Cup Final (2019), against South Africa. South Africa made an inspired choice in their captain, for a start. They weren't playing to win a World Cup, they were playing to inspire all the young kids in the townships. The whole team wanted to show what you can do when you are united in the rainbow nation. They were playing for something far more than winning a World Cup. That gave them the impetus in the scrum. If you look at the captain’s armband, it's got Jesus written in huge letters. That is more powerful than having the bonus of 200 grand for winning it. You have to think about the opposition.
I got that from General Montgomery, he lived in Hampshire. He had caravans that were his headquarters and he showed me around his caravans and in one of them, the planning room, there were pictures of the German generals he fought against. I asked him, ‘why have you got them?' he said ‘because when I’m sitting here planning, the most important thing is for me to try and work out what is in their mind. How can I take them by surprise? What are they going to be thinking? We know we are up against each other and I’ve got to figure it out so the closest I’m going to get to them is by having their pictures around me.' It was important we found out what the opposition's spirit is.