The All Blacks are one of the most successful national teams in the history of sport. For decades they’ve maintained an extraordinary level of performance in one of the most demanding sports in the world.
Part of that success has to do with a decision that goes far beyond physical preparation or technique: choosing the people who form part of the team.
For the All Blacks, talent matters, but it isn’t the only criterion. They also value the ability to fit into a culture, contribute to the group and reinforce a specific way of understanding teamwork.
That’s why, when they evaluate a player, they don’t only look at how they compete on the field. They also observe how they relate to others, how they respond under pressure and what they bring to the group.
Over the years they’ve gone as far as ruling out players with enormous potential when they considered that bringing them in could harm the team’s culture.
It may seem like a hard decision to understand from the outside. However, a team’s performance doesn’t depend only on the sum of individual talents. It also depends on those people’s ability to work together and pursue a common goal.
From this comes one of the best-known ideas within the All Blacks:
“No individual is bigger than the jersey.”
The jersey represents the team. It represents those who came before and those who will come after.
Each player receives it for a time and takes on the responsibility of honoring what it represents.
This idea has influenced many of the decisions the All Blacks make, both when bringing people in and when exercising leadership and protecting a culture they consider essential to their success.
One of the team’s best-known images comes at the end of the match: the players themselves tidy up the changing room before leaving.
No one requires it of them. They do it because that gesture reminds them that being part of the team brings privileges, but also responsibilities.
At a time when many organizations compete to attract and retain the best professionals, the All Blacks seem to have understood that talent, on its own, isn’t enough.
You also need a culture capable of integrating it, guiding it and turning it into collective performance.
An organization can gather brilliant people and still run into difficulty collaborating, sharing knowledge or building relationships of trust.
That’s why team culture holds an increasingly relevant place in many organizations today. It influences the way people work together, face challenges and build lasting relationships.
And it also influences a fundamental decision: the decision to stay.
For years, the conversation about talent retention has focused on things like salary, professional development opportunities or benefits. And all of them remain important.
However, there’s another factor that often comes up when people explain why they stay for years in an organization: the sense of belonging. The feeling of being part of a group with whom they share goals, relationships of trust and a common identity.
It’s hard to leave a place where you feel you’re part of something.
That’s perhaps one of the main lessons the All Blacks leave us. The strongest team cultures aren’t built solely around performance. They’re also built from bonds that make people want to keep being part of the group.
When people feel they’re part of a group, collaboration flows more easily, commitment strengthens and staying in the organization stops depending exclusively on external factors.
Creating teams where people not only work together but feel part of something shared is one of the great challenges of today’s organizations.
With this idea we’ve developed the workshop “My team, my tribe: ancestral dynamics to create elite teams”.
An experience designed to work on some of the elements that sustain team culture: trust, cohesion, collaboration and the sense of belonging.
Teams aren’t strengthened solely by defining common goals. They also need experiences that help people recognize themselves as a group, better understand how they relate and build a shared identity.
That’s perhaps one of the main lessons the All Blacks leave us. When people feel they belong to a tribe, the team stops being just a work structure and becomes a place worth continuing to contribute to.
If you’re interested in exploring how to strengthen team culture, trust and the sense of belonging within your organization, we’ll be glad to tell you more about the “My team, my tribe” workshop.
— Berta
P.S.: If you had to choose only one: talent or team culture. Which would you go with?
