Here’s a hypothetical situation, which brings the real corporate world into the weird and wonderful world of the Australian national team.
William* is a young engineer who was hired by a multinational company and assigned to a project team.
William’s new team had done very well in the past but lately they were struggling against stronger competitors and William was hired specifically to bridge skills gaps that were considered to be the main problem behind team’s lacklustre performance.
William eagerly looked forward to working in the field with rest of team members but was asked to stay back at the office for time being.
For a few months, William kept waiting for his opportunity and in the meanwhile, William’s project team continued to perform poorly and things turned to the worst when they made a complete mess of an important project.
Significant losses were incurred due to silly and avoidable mistakes made by some of the existing team members.
Company’s management was not happy about this situation and HR head came up with the idea of having an offsite session for all team members to get together and think about ideas to turn things around. A memo with details of the session was sent to all employees including William.
Along with a few other things, all team members were asked to bring an old magazine to be used a team building activity.
Although William had little or no idea about what was going wrong as he was still waiting to get out in the field and become a contributing member of the project team, he looked forward to the meeting as he felt assured about his long-waited inclusion in the team for the next project.
He somehow forgot to bring the magazine that was required but was relieved to see a few others turning up without an old magazine in their hands.
‘Maybe it was not that important’, he thought to himself.
The company’s HR head was known for his attention to detail among many other things and he quickly noticed that a few employees including William didn’t bring magazines and thus had failed to comply with his orders.
‘This poor attitude must be the real reason behind project team failures’, he thought to himself and quickly shared his views with head of the project team who seemed to agree with him.
Instead of focussing on the issues directly related to team’s overall performance, the rest of the session was spent on emphasising that ignoring instructions from superiors was an indication of ‘poor attitude’ and could very well be the reason behind the downfall.
William and a few others were then banned from possible inclusion into the field team for the next project.
William’s story may sound ridiculous but many of us will identify with situations like these as they are not that uncommon in corporate sector.
The corporate world can make it easy to lose focus of what really matters to the organisation because you can’t see individual actions directly contributing to the company success. But you can easily find reasons behind a sporting team’s success or failure by looking at a team members’ on field performances.
Look at the last two Tests and it is easy to see that our failures are a direct result of our batsmen failing to apply themselves among a few other things.
With Micky Arthur’s announcement to leave Watson, Khawaja, Pattinson and Johnson out of the team for 3rd test, what is really being implied?
That, you are not accountable for your performance in the test match but you are accountable for complying with coach demands, some of those are now being laughed at by our past cricket legends.
Similar to what happened in William’s case, focussing on wrong performance objectives will only get you wrong results.
If ‘off-the-field’ behaviour becomes the primary focus, then how can you expect players to score runs and win matches when others can persistently fail and still not be held accountable as long as they keep submitting their homework.
Cricket teams are not hierarchies and individual performance on the match day should matter more than anything else. Making ten thousands presentations will not help Phil Hughes fare any better against Ashwin’s spin bowling nor will intellectualising about his batting turn Ed Cowan into a match winning batsman.
We are rewarding wrong behaviours and punishing on trivial matters instead of looking at real match performances. We must pursue the correct goals if we want to build a world-class team and there are better and more transparent performance indicators available to coaches such as bowling and batting statistics for players and win/lose ratio for captains than their ability to make presentations.
If we want to dominate the cricket world again, we need to immediately stop this unnecessary focus on things that barely have an impact on players’ on ground performance and stick to bottom-line performance.
John Wood
Roar Rookie
I can't believe I wasted time reading this gobbledygook!
Harsh Sinha
Roar Guru
Austrlalia will never be the same old ruthless team that they were. They miss their legends like Warne, Punter, gilly, haydos, etc. Nobody hss replaced Gilli or Warnie! Neither have they found a bowler like Mcgrath!
Harsh Sinha
Roar Guru
Irrespecitve of the team selection, India would make a clean sweep :P
Harsh Sinha
Roar Guru
Completely agree with all the points!
Rob na Champassak
Roar Guru
That would be prudent, but I'm not sure we can ever expect to see such a report. The only things that we can judge are the consequences of their decisionmaking. 1: Steve Smith replaces Watson. 2: Mitchell Starc (probably) replaces Pattinson. 3: Phil Hughes is NOT replaced by Khawaja. It does not make for good reading. It certainly doesn't encourage the view that Australia can win the next Test in Mohali. A lot of people who are upset with this turn of events are concerned that it shows that the team's leadership is not serious about trying to salvage the series. According to this line of reasoning, it doesn't matter whether the players deserved to be punished or not; the truly outrageous thing is that the team management would further jeopardise a tour that is already in a bad way as a direct result of bad performances from both players and selectors. In a way, the public dumping of Watson, Khawaja, Pattinson, and Johnson is more than just a humiliating soap-opera sideshow - it has hammered home the gravity of the NSP's terrible selection. Because now we have no choice but to select players that virtually everyone but the selectors know are not up to standard.
Stephen
Guest
Khawaja and Pattinson should be playing the 4th test, the real issue are the problems between Clarke and Watson, these youngsters got caught up in this. Arthur hasn't handled this well.
Fussball's AFL tracking spreadsheet
Guest
Another person with a wafer thing appreciation of the situation. Your analogy should really talk about the fact that William was asked to perform a simple task by management which would take him a few minutes at most, whilst on a business trip where he had large amounts of free time. He was then reminded. And reminded again. And asked one final time to complete the assignment. But instead William decided that golf, playing PS3 and talking with his mates were all higher priorities. So spare me the faux outrage about poor William, if he'd acted like a grown up the whole situation would have been avoided.
Ken Hambling
Guest
We are losing because our top order has been failing(i.e Hughes) and our spinners haven't been good enough(where is SOK and Haurtiz), yet these 4 are being used as scapegoats for the issues so far, seems Arthur is great at deflecting blame at others.
Ken Hambling
Guest
The reason for inclusion should be I can Bat, Bowl and Field. Let me have a crack at them, everyone else has, it can't get anyworse? Fairdinkum! perhaps the selectors and coach can provide a reason why they should be retained.
Ken Hambling
Guest
Good article Kamran, no doubt for me that Arthur is using this as a PR stunt to deflect attention from the fact that we are 2-0 down and blaming guys who didn't even play, Johnson and Khawaja haven't played a game yet. What its showing me is that we can't have the captain as the selector and coach as selector as it leads to issues.
Dcnz
Guest
It's the Pup way or the highway ... Just when he had created some likeability around his personal brand ....
I am quite surprised at the fact that Arthur is seen as the only bad apple in this equation, would it not be wise to wait for a full report (if it will be made available) to see exactly what the reasoning was behind the actions of Clarke and arthur?
James
Guest
Sorry, absolute rubbish article. If you continued with the scenario saying that William was asked to go away and come back with 3 ways in which the project team could turn around their performance then you would have a comparative scenario. And if there had been a history of people not following instructions then there would be repercussions. There is clearly a view in the leaders of the team that some people are not taking their responsibilities seriously and this is Clarke and Arthur saying very clearly that they are the ones who are in charge. Have a look at the comments made by Khawaja's manager.
Kamran Bloach
Roar Rookie
Good point but I am not sure if Mickey Arthur's performance is being judged at all on team's on-field performance as far as Cricket Australia is concerned. He has definitely lost a lot of respect and credibility with fans but if his paycheck is not being affected, he is probably not that much concerned about team's performance and more concerned about keeping his control and making those people happy who can help him stay in his job. One of the underlying issues behind all this is the lack of accountability for Mickey and other selectors.
Entwhistle
Guest
Cripes, the team is struggling and everyones crying out to do something , they do something and everyone whinges - like the drugs scandal in NRL only the insiders know all the facts and Clarke has backed the team management....
Reccymech
Roar Rookie
Good article with the analogy. Now, to play Devil's Advocate regarding the two coaches (Deans & Arthurs). Coaches, like players, of any code of sport play for their next supper. Why would a coach either perceived and/or deliberately sabotage their own career, knowing all full well that a losing coach would be, or is putting the 'full stop' on their career.
Silver_Sovereign
Guest
absolutely deans and Arthur are definitely onto something with coaching other countries. this bad and mediocre results that are accepted by both coaches show they don't give a stuff
Bradm
Guest
Completely agree
Big Merv's Jockstrap
Guest
First, the kiwis undermined our 2011 Rugby World Cup attempt by planting that double-agent Dingo Deans as our national coach. Well played, NZ. Next, the South Africans used exactly the same tactic by planting their own doubl-agent Mickey Mouse as our cricket coach. And who is now the world's number one ranked test team? Coincidence? I think not. The fix is in.
Kamran Bloach
Roar Rookie
+1