The New Zealand All Blacks and Why Rituals Matter More Than You Think

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.

This week, I want to talk about the All Blacks and why rituals matter more than you think. Okay? Let me get started.

The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team are the most successful sporting team in history. Wait a minute. What about the New York Yankees or the Boston Celtics, but okay, I'm not going to argue with this author. This is from the CEO Daily Briefing, Dr. Lance Mortlock in April of this year. Okay, the All Blacks are the most successful sporting team in history and they don't dominate solely because of talent, they dominate because they deliberately design environments where preparation is sacred. Humility is non-negotiable and confidence is earned daily. One of the rituals that they undertake is called the Haka. What is the Haka? It's a traditional Māori posture dance from New Zealand involving rhythmic shouted chants, vigorous movements, and fierce expressions.

It's not merely a war dance, but a profound cultural expression, a pride, strength, unity, and identity performed at celebrations, funerals, and sports events to honor, challenge, or show respect. So the All Blacks, the rugby team, and the Haka, a traditional New Zealand form of dance. What is all this got to do with running a construction company? What about this is important to you, for God's sake? Well, Dr. Mortlock makes the point that rituals, whether it's in sports, in this case, or in business, are more important than you think and he'll give you some reasons. So I'll go through those in a second. Okay. Let us begin here.

For leaders, the question isn't whether rituals belong in business, it's whether you are intentional enough to design them with meaning and brave enough to live by them. I like that.

Now, what rituals do you have in your company? We have very few rituals here, but we do have a ritual. Every single week during our all-hands meeting, we go through our mission, vision, and values, and everybody's expected to participate with at least a piece of mission, vision, and values. And everybody does. Everybody here, at your peer group meeting or at Boot Camp, ask your facilitator, ask whoever may be there, Molly or Karen or somebody who may be there on the administrative side, ask them to recite PCA's mission or vision or values and they can do it 100% every single time. It's because it's a ritual and we practice it. We practice it every week.

Kieran Read, who is a famous member of the All Blacks, in fact, he's got some crazy resume, he earned 127 test caps. I don't know what that is in rugby. Neha, is that a good thing? I don't know. Captained New Zealand's All Blacks 52 times. He was the captain 52 times, won two rugby World Cups, and was named World Rugby Player of the Year in 2013. What struck me most in our conversation wasn't his resume, but the way he talked about leadership. Calm, grounded, no theatrics. He talked about the Haka, "Outcomes come from a great culture and culture isn't a nice-to-have." This guy's talking about rugby. Could he not be talking about the construction business? Could he not be talking about my company or your company? Sure he could.

"Culture isn't a nice-to-have, it's performance-based. That context matters because the Haka is one of the most recognizable cultural rituals in world sport and one of the most misunderstood. Right before it begins, there's a kind of charged stillness. The air feels tighter like the stadium is holding its breath. From the outside, it looks like intimidation. Inside the All Blacks environment, it's something hugely different." Lesson number one from Dr. Mortlock. He says, "The best rituals aren't theater, they're a tether." That's the way I think about our ritual. It's a tether. So whether a consultant is participating in our weekly all-hands remotely and he's in California or Texas or wherever else, it is a tether that we're all in this together.

We all have the same belief system when it comes to helping contractors get better. Five things that Mortlock discovered as he studied the All Black rituals, number one, preparation. He said that rituals release a cognitive load from the brain and they free it for higher order of thinking. That makes sense. Because the ritual is practiced over and over and over again, you don't have to be dialed into, "What's the next word? What's the next sentence?" It's part of you and it's freeing, in a sense. I can understand that.

Second, control. Rituals are about control. They help manage chaos. One of the things I've been reading, not that we're looking forward to a recession or anything, but one thing I've been reading about leadership is managing chaos. And whenever there's uncertainty in your business, maybe you have had some bad luck on new business procurement or something, managing chaos by staying ahead of it and delivering rituals to your people so that they can understand we're all in this together. We're all in something bigger than ourselves. That's a way to manage the chaos.

Three, focus. This helps them get into the zone. Four, humility. This is such an important piece of being an integral part of a team. Doing really small things to remind us of how small we really are. When we used to work with family businesses back in the day, this is before construction and PCA so much, we had a psychotherapist that we worked with rather frequently and she always wanted to do our fractious family meetings at the coast, near the ocean, or in the mountains.

Why? She said, "When you're exposed to the power of the water at the coast or to the grandeur of the mountains, you realize there are things in life bigger than you, bigger than your problems." And she thought that was so important to have people grounded in the sense that while our troubles may seem quite problematic at the moment, there are other things in life bigger and more important than us.

And the fifth thing is confidence. He said that meaningfulness keeps us grounded. Meaningfulness. And when we talk about our mission, we talk about our values. That's the meaning. If we think about culture and the definition of culture, which goes back to my friend, Steve Anderson, culture is how we treat each other on our shared journey. And it's so important to have meaning and groundedness among your team.

Okay. Lesson two from Dr. Mortlock. Rituals can be stabilizing in fast-paced environments. Of course they can. What's a faster paced environment than commercial construction? I don't know. There's probably some out there. Maybe you can email me and tell me, but I don't know what could be faster paced.

And lesson three, why do rituals fail? They fail because they're borrowed, inconsistent, or incongruent with how leaders behave. I've seen this. I've seen companies that have mission, vision, values, all that stuff, but leadership behavior is semi-incongruent. I remember getting a call from one of my favorite members, gosh, 15 years ago, 20, and there was a minority partner in the business that was behaving unethically.

And it was so inconsistent with my friend and so inconsistent with the values of the company, he knew that he needed to separate that person who was in a great position of responsibility from the organization because of this unethical behavior. He knew it. The only reason he called me was to ratify it. He knew in his heart exactly what he needed to do. He just called me because he wanted somebody to say, "Yeah, pull that trigger, man. You're doing the right thing." And he never looked back. That's the thing. He never looked back. When someone is behaving inconsistent with your values and you decide to separate from them, there's going to be anxiety. Nobody likes to have to let people go, but you'll never look back most likely from that and you will have made a decision that cements the values in your organization.

Lesson four from Dr. Mortlock. Leaders who ritualize their own behavior are calmer, clearer, and more decisive. Okay? I like this entire article. I think there's not enough ritual in business. There's ritual in all kinds of things, sporting events, religious events, weddings, funerals. There's all kinds of ritual that we experience in our weekly, monthly, yearly lives. I don't think there's enough of it in business. I really don't. Okay. Final quote, "For leaders then, the question isn't whether rituals belong in business. It's whether you're intentional enough to design them with meaning and brave enough to live by them." Okay. What do you think? Email me at [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.

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