Dame Farah Palmer: What 3 World Cups Taught Me About Leadership

So towards the end, I realized that I needed to, because I was old school and the new generation were coming through, that I just wasn't the right person to be leading them.

What an extraordinary level of self-awareness.

I think very few people have that level of awareness and also the lack of ego to be able to say actually what's important here is not... can I be a leader? What's important is what does this team need right now? And I heard you just touch on that in two ways.

What you just said in terms of towards the end, you were feeling like you were old school and needed a new kind of leadership.

But even that very first one with the Who Moved My Cheese book, And I've been thinking about this a lot because, of course, we run the Crusaders Leadership Program, and Scott Robertson is one of the faculty on that leadership program.

And here you've got someone who coached a team to seven consecutive championships and then went to the All Blacks and had a much harder go of it.

And my biggest takeaway from that was that there is never – a checklist in leadership that or a template that you go, yep, this is how we do it and it's done.

It's always emergent from this team, this management group, this culture, this vibe, this dynamic that's going on.

And the leaders who are the most skilled are the ones who are able to release all of their attachments to, but I used to do it this way or we used to do like this and go, what does this moment and this person need?

Yeah, exactly.

And I've been very fortunate that in my day job at the university, I kind of started in a kind of sports sociology area and then had a bit of a stint teaching in the leadership and teamwork space and read a book by Donna Ladkin, which I really enjoyed.

And she talks about leadership as a moment and you have people who are the leaders and the followers and you have place and you have purpose.

And a kind of leadership moment is when all those things align.

Okay.

So I think for me, that's what it's like.

You've got to have the right people in those roles.

Well, not the right, but you'll have certain people in leadership and certain people in following roles.

You've got to have what place are you in? What's the context of that particular organization or team? And then what's your purpose? Is it high performance or is it community or is it something else? Yeah.

I think that's helped me to kind of like do a bit of a check every now and then about is my leadership approach right for this particular place, purpose and people.

That's so beautiful.

What is sports sociology?

It is understanding that sport exists within a context that has social and cultural elements.

So, for instance, you might do a personal training qualification and go in there with all of these ideas about what should work But unless you kind of look at it from a sociological perspective, looking at the history of not only the individual but the collective and what culture that person got brought up in, what are the social parameters that are influencing them, then...

That's how you'll kind of understand the bigger process.

So we look at things like gender in sport, ethnicity and racism in sport, social class in sport and how systems, social systems and structures impact on sport.