Warriors have management psychology on their side
For serious Warriors fans, coach Andrew Webster’s press conferences are a must-watch. Webster invariably tells listeners how a particular game performance fits in with his goal to take the team all the way to the grand final.
On Sunday, after their win over the Newcastle Knights, he praised the defensive efforts: “That’s what we want to be (a defensive side) … If you concede one try a half its going to go a long way to winning a lot of games … the polish will come later.”
When the Warriors talk about Webster they often use the word trust.
It is common for players to utter “I trust Webby“.
Some remarkable research conducted by an American academic tells us why we should remain confident that Webster will repeat last season’s success, and with a little luck put us into the grand final.
Kurt Dirks, a professor of leadership at Washington University at St Louis, measured the impact a team’s trust in their coach has on their results.
He persuaded the head coaches of thirty NCAA men’s basketball teams to survey the players before the start of the conference season. Three hundred and thirty players rated how much they trusted their coach before the season started.
Dirks tracked each team’s performance and found the teams whose players agreed that “most members of the team trust and respect the coach”, and “the coach approaches his job with professionalism and dedication” performed significantly better. The two teams that reported the highest levels of trust in their coach early in the season excelled: one team was ranked as the No. 1 team in the nation for the latter part of the season before being upset in the NCAA tournament. The other team ended up in playing in the championship game for the national title.
Unsurprisingly, in the NCAA basketball analysis teams that have performed better in the past also won more games during the season under investigation. Great leadership produces a virtuous cycle. Trustworthy coaches promote success, we trust coaches who have helped us be successful and that trust helps generate future success.
Research by university psychologists highlights two other factors which indicate why fans should believe Webster has the character and ability to become a premiership winning coach.
The first has been Webster’s ability as an Australian to become “one of us”. Webster is arguably the most humble and respectful coach in the NRL. He is the opposite of the arrogant Aussie sporting stereotype. His respectful demeanour, his absence of ego, his deep, detailed knowledge of the game and the Warrior culture and actions, and willingness to commit long term to the Warriors captures the essence of how the players and the fans think they are or want to be.
In their groundbreaking book The Power of US, psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer show “one of the key consequences of shared identities is that they encourage people to trust one another”.
The final factor highlights Webster’s coaching skill at motivating players to play consistently well each week and continue to improve as the season progresses.
Instead of the coach presenting and lecturing to players after each game, Webster asks his players to bring in their own video clips. By the time Webster is finished with them, he’s been listening with them for hours.
When Webster asks a player to tell him what they need to do to improve, he is using a technique which psychologists call self-persuasion. When we are asked to come up with our own reasons on why and how we should change we are much likely to embrace the change.
Why? We trust the person who has come up with changes – ourselves. Hundreds of research studies show self-persuasion is virtually always more powerful than presenting and lecturing.
So can Webby be trusted to take us all the way? I am biased, but for the first time I am placing a bet on the Warriors to make the grand final.
Harry Mills has been a diehard Warriors fan for 30 years. He is also the subject matter expert on persuasion for the Harvard Manage programme and author of multiple books on motivation, leadership negotiation and persuasion.
Every single Japanese person will have the same surname – Sato – in 500 years’ time, unless the country allows married couples each to retain their birth names, an academic study has concluded.
By the year 2531, the country’s thousands of surnames, it suggests, will have been whittled down to one, in a Sato tsunami that will spread social chaos. The author of the report, Hiroshi Yoshida, a respected economics professor, conjures up a world in which everyone in a sports team, classroom or company will have to be referred to as “Sato-san”.
The apocalyptic scenario is a consequence of a peculiarity of Japanese law in which Japanese people who marry must adopt the surname of one or the other of them. In 95% of cases, this means that women give up their maiden names and take on the name of their husbands.
A series of legal challenges have failed to overturn this requirement, despite complaints about the way that it stifles individuality and disadvantages women. Until the study, however, none had recognised the unstoppable rise of the Satos.
Sato is the Smith of Japan, its most popular name. Prominent Satos include former prime minister Eisaku Sato, wrestler Jackie Sato, actor Koichi Sato, racing driver Takuma Sato, and Reiko Sato, the American actress who starred in The Ugly American with Marlon Brando.
The name Sato belongs to 1.53% of the population. By Yoshida’s calculation, the number of Satos is growing at 1.0083% a year. If that trend continues, more than half of Japanese will be named Sato by 2446. The last Suzukis, Takahashis and Tanakas, the next most common names, will die out in 2531.
If the law is changed to allow couples to have different names, then the Sato apocalypse will still take place, according to the professor – but not until 3310.
“Considering that a family name has a family history and is also a cultural symbol, its loss would mean that the history of the family name would also cease to exist,” Yoshida said. “If everyone becomes Sato, we may have to be addressed by our first names or by numbers. I don’t think we can call that a good world to live in.”
Opinion polls suggest that most Japanese – at least 60% – support a change in the law to allow people to keep their surname after marriage. But conservative members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party fear that it will compromise close family bonds.