What we could all learn from ‘Bazball’
At the Oval cricket ground in south London this weekend the England cricket team have a chance to make it six victories out of six in this summer’s Test Matches against West Indies and Sri Lanka.
They seem to be enjoying themselves, certainly a lot more than when fear of failure seemed to be crushing them as they went 17 matches with only one win until a couple of years ago. They have since won 19 out of 28.
Cricket lovers will already know that this dramatic revival began with the appointment of a new coach and a new captain, Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum and Ben Stokes respectively.
But that tells us who changed rather than what, and while it is obviously unwise to suppose that leadership approaches in sport necessarily work in other fields it would also be silly to neglect their potential relevance.
One of those is clarity of purpose. As (now retired) bowler Stuart Broad put it in a BBC interview when asked about the new regime: “Baz and Stokesy came in with a completely fresh approach and it was all about enjoyment.
“We are in an entertainment industry so let’s go out to make people watch us and have fun. Take the result out of it. There is no pressure on winning or losing. As long as we are playing in a style we enjoy and people want to watch, that’s our victory.”
The stakes tend to be rather higher in public services, but that makes clarity of purpose even more important. Take social care services, for instance: the attitudes and practices required to support people to live their best lives on their own terms are quite different than if their purpose is limited to harm prevention.
Another parallel concerns how practitioners go about achieving their purpose. While any team or organisation needs a shared vision of strategy and standards, micro-management stifles a nurse’s initiative as surely as it does a cricketer’s.
As McCullum himself has said: “The talent within English cricket is immense and I’m looking forward to helping these players reach their full potential. My goal is to create an environment where everyone can thrive.”
But don’t mistake that for lack of honesty or rigour. Responding to four successive defeats in India earlier this year, before this summer of success, McCullum commented:
“Sometimes you can get away with things, but when you’re exposed in the way we have been in the back end of this series in particular, it does require some pretty deep thinking and some adjustment to make sure we’re staying true to what we believe in.
“We like to operate in a really calm, enjoyable and positive environment, but we don’t mistake that for not having tough conversations when they are required.”
As Amy Edmondson, whose ideas about psychological safety grew out of her study of health care workplaces, and who draws on sporting analogies to explain them, has said:
“Unfortunately, at work, nice is often synonymous with not being candid. … Too many people think that it’s about feeling comfortable all the time and that you can’t say anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or you’re violating psychological safety.”
When McCullum and Stokes first took over, the new ‘Bazball’ style seemed to consist of a devil-may-care attitude, but now it looks as though the players simply needed time to navigate their way to a more mature mix of freedom and responsibility.
That could not have happened unless they had been encouraged to express themselves enjoyably within the rules and agreed guidelines, to learn from both success and failure, and to adapt accordingly.
From the outside, it looks as though the key characteristic of the McCullum/Stokes leadership approach has been to create the conditions for the players to find their own way. I think we can all learn from that.
(Image: New England captain Ben Stokes and new England men’s Test coach Brendon McCullum (right) during a nets session at Lord’s Cricket Ground, London. Picture date: Monday May 30, 2022.)