Bazball - Valuable Lessons For Business Leaders

For those of you unfamiliar with "Bazball" - it is the nickname for the new style of Cricket being played by the English test cricket team. "Baz" refers to Brendan McCullum the coach of the England team who joined in May 2022 at the same time England changed their captain to Ben Stokes.  Since this time the pair have brought about drastic change and revived Englands fortunes, overseeing 21 matches; winning 14, losing 6 and drawing 1 (yes you can play cricket for 5 full days and still not get a result!).  In the 21 games prior to the change England won just 6 matches, lost 9 and drew 6 and had been on a terrible run of results.  This remarkable turn-around has been achieved mostly through a shift in basic philosophy and has triggered quite a debate in the cricket world.  The learnings for business leaders and potential applications in day to day management are immense:

"Everyone says, 'What is Bazball?' It's our mentality, our way of playing. The fact that you can never look out on the field and think we are behind in the game, even if we are. That's a huge testament to the players." (Ben Stokes)

LEARNINGS FROM BAZBALL FOR BUSINESS

1 - Vision, Values and Spreading Belief Among the Team

"One of my desires as captain, away from the cricket and results, was how can we capture the imagination of the English followers again?" (Ben Stokes)

Bazball is a no-holds barred approach to Cricket with the team scoring quicker than any other team in world cricket and having a deep belief in what they are doing. The philosophy is to celebrate positives while not dwelling on the negatives or being too pre-occupied with what might go wrong. Of course the goal is to win matches but their stated purpose is deeper - to bring entertainment back to fans and revive the fortunes of test cricket, to make it relevant for young audiences and avoided being overwhelmed by competitor formats such as T20. You can see in every performance this purpose is something that excites the players and they have belief in the more positive way of playing.  This has resulted in some remarkable individual and team performances over the past two years.  I cannot think of a transformation in sport so radical and so quick - and it is all down to two incredible leaders.   

I am sure your business has a stated mission, some underlying strategies and a few core values that underpin these.  No doubt it has been developed into a nice visual and once a year your senior leader will present this to the organisation and the internal comms team might go as far as putting posters around the office and posts all over the intranet.  I think the key question for this is the resonance among colleagues within the organisation - is this a mission / vision they relate to and will tell their friends and family about, are they motivated  / excited by it and see how it links to their work each day?  If the answer to any of those questions is no then you need to have a rethink.

The connection to the vision and the mission is the ultimate motivator for people.  It is the hidden hand that guides your employees in their decision making each day and makes them give that extra 20% - 50% for you.  In the world of remote working, Gen Z who work for purpose more than money and a general collapse in societal support systems the leader has a much more important role in selling the dream.  They have to not just sell it but truly believe in it, be unwavering in reinforcing it through thick or thin and be relentless at reminding people of the collective purpose.

2 - Trust in People's Strengths, Believe in Your Team and Tell Them That

"Accept people for what they are, then it is going to be a place where people can thrive." (Ben Stokes)

The uptick in Englands performances was also remarkable because the majority of the team has remained unchanged.   It is the same core players who have been in the team for many years but their performances have significantly improved.  Stokes and McCullum trust in their players and consistently tell them to just go out there and be themselves, play their shots and enjoy playing the game they love.  They don’t tell players how to play their shots or seek to change how a player plays cricket.  Even if a player makes a mistake or has a bad game or period in a game they stick with them and encourage them to keep going.  In a recent match against India a young bowler named Tom Hartley made his England debut and had an absolutely disastrous start with the Indian team smacking him to all corners of the pitch.  At one point he was on track to have the worst bowling figures ever in a test match.  Most captains would have taken him out of the firing line but Stokes kept the belief and encouraged him to keep bowling - by the second innings Hartley completely turned it around, taking 9 wickets in the match and delivering the best debut performance by an England spinner for over 70 years.   

When the media attacks a player for making mistakes Stokes consistently defends his players and shows absolute belief that they will come good in the end.  In the world of sports this emotional security is sorely lacking as players are always looking over their shoulder as to who will take their place- in the past this clearly messed with the heads of players and they lost confidence in their own abilities, went into their shell and unravelled in a negative spiral of ever worsening performances until they got dropped.  Under Bazball all players knows that the coach and the captain has their back, and it makes a huge difference.  So often the media will write off a player and the next match that player puts in a match winning performance.  Stokes and McCullum seem impervious to outside pressure.      

In transforming businesses it is all too common for a leader to make wholesale changes to a team to shake things up and default to a brand new team to try to turn things around quickly.  This usually triggers an extended period of flux with the pains of integration of too many new people and a constant need to build a new team dynamic.  Often I have seen that the incremental business gains from too many changes is marginal and the negative disruption is significant.  There is no doubt that poor performers need to be moved on and new talent injected into the organisation but the first step of any leader should be to understand the strengths of the people they have, put them in roles where they can deploy those strengths and encourage people to be themselves.  Don’t jump to the wrong conclusions too soon…even though you will get pressure to do so.  You are inside and so you know best.  Take your time to assess people only then should you start to make the tweaks to the team - purposefully and surgically.

Have you had a boss who is constantly telling you what you are not good at?  How awful is that??  Imagine if the Argentinian coach had been telling Messi he needed to focus on improving his defending and tackling as that is the weakest part of his game…. I am pretty sure we would have had a French world champion!  Too often leaders get into a habit of telling their people what they are not good at rather than building on the persons strengths.  This can lead to a debilitating lack of confidence in team members who are scared of being themselves and making a decision and feel they need to check in before they do anything.  How often are you telling your people that you believe in them?  Are you truly demonstrating that belief?  There is nothing more empowering to a person than their leader trusting in them, believing in them and explicitly communicating that to them.  It leads to better performance every single time…yep every single time!       

3 - Be a Role Model for Innovation and Agility

"You think you have seen everything in this game - until you see the last five days," Nasser Hussain (Former England test captain commenting after England beat Pakistan away for first time in over 20 years).

Bazball has lead to some quite unconventional tactics and decisions by the England team.  (For those who don’t like cricket - don’t worry - I will not go into technical discussions of early declarations,  use of the short ball, reverse scoop shots etc.)  Some of these have worked spectacularly and some have failed, also spectacularly, but on balance they are working more often than not - as seen by the results.

Opposing teams have found it quite difficult to adjust to the way that England play - it is unorthodox, dynamic and at times extravagant.  Test cricket had become a very predictable sport with most captains deploying very similar tactics and displaying very little innovation.  Stokes and McCullum have deployed a totally new attacking style of play for batting and when fielding they have innovated, experimented and constantly adjusted their approach.   They deploy numerous new tactics but are patient with the process, even if results don’t happen immediately.  In fact they seem even not to be fazed by the odd loss of a match - as long as they have played well and developed as a team.   Commentators of the sport are often critical of Bazball and seem all too keen to write it off and recommend England go back to the more orthodox way of playing cricket…even though that was the way that saw England lose more matches…

I assume all business leaders have gone through the journey to make their processes more agile.  We have all read the books about agile approaches, kaizen, start up mode etc and have experimented with deploying agile teams and scrum masters.  But too often this is deployed on the margins of the business.  The core of the business is never really put at risk and we use the same tactics, processes and strategies that have been deployed for years and even decades.   How many businesses are truly embracing innovation at the core of the business and using agile methodologies here?  How many are questioning how to constantly adapt and improve in the pursuit of a better product or service.  I would suggest that most are going for the tried and tested approach and are scared by the fail fast mentality.  When you do deploy innovative and new tactics and shift the culture to be more agile it is really critical you stick to this.  It is the right way to go but it will take time, there will be wins and losses but as long as you do it correctly you can limit the scale of the losses and maximise the wins.  There will be pressure and criticism to go back to the tried and tested approaches for doing things but you as the leader need to resist this.

The leader of the team has to be the one who role models a mindset of constant improvement or it won’t thrive in the organisation and the status quo will just be accepted.  In fact it will be seen as the only way to go.   Leaders must create the platform for innovation and the conditions where people are not afraid to fail and are in fact commended for it as long as that failure came in a genuine pursuit of furthering the vision.  You may feel like this all sounds like anarchy but; in my own experience; when people share a vision that is centred on improving things for your consumer and are encouraged to make constant incremental improvements they will unleash positive ideas that otherwise would have never surfaced.  In the end you get much further than if you just kept doing things as you have always been doing them.

4 - Be Fearless and Take Smart Risks

"Baz's team talk was very much ‘let’s attack the danger, let's run towards the danger' so every part of your mind is about going for this win.”  (England bowler, Stuart Broad commenting on McCullums team talk prior to England’s comeback win versus New Zealand at Trent Bridge”.

Some people call Bazball reckless saying that players are taking too much risk in the way that they play and this results in silly errors.  There is no doubt that the style they play is high risk but it is also high return - especially if you compare it with what went before.  Prior to Bazball England players had an attritional mindset - hang in there as long as possible and don’t make mistakes.  All that really happened was that the cricket was really boring and we lost anyway!  By providing the players with the emotional security to take risks, play their shots and “run towards the danger” Bazball unleashed capabilities in players that we didn’t know existed.  The energy that this releases means that England are very difficult to stop once they got going.  The players deploy shots from other formats of cricket which up to now were largely taboo in test cricket.  This doesn’t mean that they are reckless, in fact they are actually quite adaptable to the game situation and have adjusted how the y play in matches and across series of matches.  They take risks that other teams don’t take but I believe they take a measured amount of risk to improve their chances of winning - at times this does go wrong but more often than not it seems to work!

The concept of taking risk in business is very dependent on the maturity of the business.  A start-up has to take risks everyday to survive whereas a large established business becomes naturally risk adverse as they want to defend what they have.   I believe for large companies this is mostly a false paradigm - leaders often stop taking risk and become more like a steward - protecting what they have and ensuring they don’t lose.  Conversely I think this means they becoming less competitive.  At large companies we have built too much of a reward culture for smart people who spend their days mitigating risk rather than driving growth or taking measured risks.  What usually happens is that management only realises this when it is too late, when a competitor steals a huge market share or an innovation makes your business obsolete.  Companies that don’t take enough measured risks hang around a while doing well but don’t tend to stay around for very long at the top.

Leaders need to nurture and reward risk takers - without them nothing new would be born.  The leader has to be prepared to defend those people against the haters - of which there will be many.  I have never really understood it but the mavericks in the organisation seem to have the most enemies and people seem to often be wishing them to fail.  A leader has a difficult position because you need to make people feel at ease in the company and confident where they are working but also feel the need to do new things and take risks.  How you contextualise risk and change this is critical.  Many leaders try to scare the hell out of people saying that we need to grow the cut costs or we are all screwed or deliver revenue growth or we are all fired.  I would choose positivity over fear every time and prefer narratives about how we can all be part of something amazing, deliver on our consumer needs and enjoy the successful feeling that comes with business growth.

5 - The Importance of Authentic Leadership and a Positive Environment

“I hate seeing talent wasted and stymied by pressures and negativity.“ (Brendan McCullum)

There is a great documentary on Ben Stokes and his career up to getting the England captaincy- I highly recommend it - even for non cricket fans.  He shows that he is an incredibly determined person and his sheer willpower has effectively won England two world cups and countless other games.  He also shows great vulnerability, opening up about his struggles with his mental health and how incidents in his life have affected him.  His authenticity when he speaks comes through loud and clear and you never feel as though you are being spoken to by a PR controlled spokesperson - all too common in sports like football where you hear the same banalities in every interview.  He is open, honest and direct.  It is clear that all of his players know what he wants and what is expected of them.  He shows trust in them and constantly reminds them to remember the reasons they love cricket and just to go out and enjoy themselves.  It is clear from his profile that he is very serious about winning but he also has the ability not to take it too seriously.  He creates an atmosphere where players are not overwhelmed by the pressure and that they can relax - even when they are facing tremendously stressful situations in a game.

In elite sports it is often said the difference between good and great players is mentality rather than technique and Bazball has deployed a philosophy that people who are happy and relaxed play better than those feeling pressure.  It seems to work!  Each time England lose or make a mistake this garners criticism that they are not serious enough.  I remember after a recent loss Ben Stokes was asked what England would be doing to analyse and recover from a game they lost…he replied that they are off to play golf and that was the plan if they won or lost.  The media went crazy and lambasted the squad for not taking it seriously enough.  The team ignored it, played golf, had fun and came back for the next match and won convincingly.

As Martin Luther King said, “darkness cannot drive out light; only light can do that”.   Of course he was talking about a much more serious topic but I believe it is very true in the corporate world.  It sounds obvious but people work better in a positive environment rather than a negative one and it is the job of the leader to set the tone for the environment.  I am not saying that you need to fill the office with ping pong tables and ice cream carts to get good performance, although many leaders make that mistake…I believe you need to set a tone of positivity and encouragement, consistently rewarding and acknowledging the correct behaviours and achievements.  Successes should be celebrated and people should be recognised when they do well.  This all sounds extremely obvious but you should ask yourself if you are doing it…are you encouraging people or applying pressure?  Are you rewarding or threatening?

The concept of authentic leadership is one that has been discussed a lot lately and one which I think many struggle with.  As leaders we feel we are expected to have all of the answers and to do what it takes to get results but sometimes that can lead to us playing a character - an almost David Brent type manager.    I think Ben Stokes is a genuine authentic leader who we can learn a lot from - he has defined a purpose and clearly communicates his core set of values that,  he is always honest and wears his heart on his sleeve, he displays tremendous empathy for fans and his players and makes decisions based on principle rather than short term success.  If we could all add a bit of Ben Stokes to how we lead and a bit of Bazball to how we manage then I have no doubt that our businesses would be much the better for it!