Damian McGrath Book edit
Thu, Dec 14, 2023 7:24PM • 29:30
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
coach, book, work, people, thought, great, bit, coaching, traits, leader, approach, talk, authentic, felt, damian, team, spoke, world, damien, journeyman
SPEAKERS
Damian McGrath, Paul Barnett
Paul Barnett 00:00
Damion McGraw Welcome back to The Great coach's podcast.
Damian McGrath 00:04
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to come back. This
Paul Barnett 00:07
is all mine. Actually, I can't wait to talk to you again, you've you've written a book. It's a new book, The third that you've written, it's called, can you be fluent in success? But before I asked you about it, I need to start with Damien, where are you in the world? And what have you been up to so far today?
Damian McGrath 00:27
I'm back in the UK. written written the book, as you said, and I'm looking to Well, I was hoping I could retire. But I think similar circumstances to my wives, you know, demanding that I get out there and do something. And so I'm hoping to, if not coach again, then, you know, get out there and talk about leadership and coaching and maybe, you know, help other coaches or the businesses, just on my observations on leadership and coaching across the last 40 years? Well,
Paul Barnett 00:59
I can't wait to get into those observations, because a lot of them are in the book. But I guess, let's start with why. What was the impetus to put it together?
Damian McGrath 01:09
Well, it was a throwaway comment. Several years ago, I came home on Christmas time. And as I always got together with my old school friends that we've always stayed together, and one of them said to me, given that you've lived and worked around the world, for so long, your language skills must be way better now than they were and to shamelessly admit that I still struggle with English, and I couldn't speak a word of anything. And he said, well, at least you can see fluent in success. And we all laugh that it was a throwaway line, but I thought, What a great line, and can you be such a thing is can you take the same principles and approach to different cultures, different countries? And, you know, what are the things that stay the same? What are the things that you have to do different that got me thinking, I got my jotting down my thoughts on all the things that have happened, and really having a look at how my approach, you know, to, to coaching and leading in different countries has evolved? Well,
Paul Barnett 02:09
it's not just different countries, right? It's different continents. You've covered off Asia, you've covered up Africa and Europe, you've done, you've done really well. But the book is, it talks a lot about leadership. And it also talks a lot about coaching. But it also talks a lot about people and how to get the most out of working with people. But without spoiling the book for everyone. David, I'm wondering if you could just take us through some of the key leadership traits that you've identified that make it possible to be fluent in success.
Damian McGrath 02:42
Yeah, it was. It's amazing. You should say that because the more I, I wrote, and then scrapped the pebble and threw it away several times. And I thought, it really is all about people. It's the memories I had, were all people driven not you'd think it'd be any, any successes. In metal metals, any Trove is any anything that you will know, where things went well, but it was all about people. Every time I started writing something was it was the members of people what they said what they don't have that made other people feel that got me going. And then I tried to just to get the book started, I tried to catch what what did I think, a real leader, one of the, you know, the best of people, a top level Coach, what did they need to be and I came up with a phrase man for all seasons, which is the title of a famous player, I get about St. Thomas Moore, one of the great English figures of history, who stood by his principles and was beheaded by Henry the eighth. He was known for his integrity. And that got me thinking because we studied that at school and what was a man for all seasons, you know, it's someone who can work on in under different circumstances and had certain traits that that made them appealing. And to be to be a top level leader, I tried to think about all the greats I've met and the people who I met who, who didn't quite hit them out what was it they didn't have, as well as what was it that needed to happen? You know, you needed to be a craftsman good good at what you did. You know, a real leader in your field, you need to be salesman, because you have to sell your your approach to life. You have to be a journeyman which in modern terms has a quite a negative thing. It's seen as someone who just jumped from club to club, a bit of my coaching. But a journeyman its truest form was a medieval term for someone who was learning their craft and traveled around to different areas before they became a craftsman. So I thought that's that's a great way of looking at coaching leadership because it's a journey. And then one of the other things is a nobleman and I don't mean noble as in a lord or lady but noble purpose.
people think that being a great coach or leader is as a coach who maybe is just picking the team for the weekend game or leading, it's just sending out an email to tell everybody what to do. But there's so much more to lead in people. And that that takes then the rest of the book as I talk about those traits in different ways.[PB1]
Paul Barnett 05:36
There was a story in the book that I had never heard. It's about a bass player called Herbie Lauer's. I'm wondering if you could tell us about it and why it connects with you so much.
Damian McGrath 05:48
Yeah, it's what I'm talking about. There's three types of leaders in my mind are three types of coaches. There's the followers who who follow the the accepted way of doing things. You know, they get their coaching badges, or they get their ABCs of how you how you approach things, is what they do, they never veer from from that. That's the norm. Then there's the adopters that are people will look around and the thing Well, if you take soccer in Europe, for instance, at the moment, Pep Guardiola is the is the is the is the Star Man, he's the streets ahead of everybody else. People will adopt whatever the best team or the best was, what's he doing? Well, I'm going to do what he does, even though they might not have the ingredients or the tools to, to operate in the same way. But then there's the innovators who look at what they have, and decide if they can use it in a better way. You know, what's the best approach for the for the, for the players that have if you take it in coaching terms. And it's not always been when you think of the word, innovative, it's always about doing something completely different, or that's the picture that often gives to people, but sometimes it's just tweaking things. It's not accepting them as they are. It's just making little differences and that can be an innovative approach. David Boies my great musical hero, and I was aware that Herbie flowers, it was a name I always used to see on the credits for lots of his songs in the early days, and he played bass on boys fame, famous hit Space Oddity, which was a worldwide hit.
Boy, then, in the early 70s, produced Lou Reed's famous album transformer, the album that sort of pushed Lou Reed into into world stardom. They needed a bass player for the sessions. But we obviously caught on Herbie flowers were used on his hits. And flowers came in and gave him a baseline. He said, Do you mind if I just a little bit you didn't say it was still the same baseline is simply I think he took it 10 notes higher and just added some, some reverb and things like that to it. And from that came the haunting baseline of work, walk, take a walk on the wild side, which even if you're not, if the if the title doesn't strike to you, as soon as you hear it, you know exactly what we're talking about. So all he did was was take something that was there and just tweak it a little bit. He didn't just discover something brand new and go out on a limb and do it. He took what was already there and adapted it for what he felt was the best outcome. And that's always strikes a chord with me, because I think that's what the great coaches and leaders do. They don't necessarily change things and go outside the box completely. But they look at all options and what's available to me. What can I do with it to get the best from it. And I think that's what the best coaches and leaders do.[PB2]
Paul Barnett 08:56
One of the other ideas that resonated me with me in the book, I've actually tried this at the dinner table with my two daughters is the doubt percentage. Yeah. Now could you explain the exercise and how you use it?
Damian McGrath 09:11
Well, originally, I was a teacher. And it was this time of year again, this we're coming up to Christmas now as we speak. And as a young teacher, we were winding lessons down before the Christmas holidays. And I said to the class, if, if you'd like to do something a little different today, put your hands up as high as you can, and you probably get the mental picture of nine and 10 year olds all with a forest of hands in the sky, you know, as high as you can and they're all pushing their arms up. I said now, if you can push them a little bit higher, we'll watch your movie. And somehow, you know, they found another couple of inches and and I thought that's, that's so typical of human life people are with you, and they'll give you what they can but if it's something that really want to find that little bit extra. And I found that in coaching that, as I mentioned earlier, one of the great traits is been able to sell your approach your vision. And I equate it to in the book to, to Germany, where were the last time we spoke, I was in Germany, great group of young men who have no particular outstanding traits as from a physical point of view, they weren't particularly fast, they weren't particularly particularly strong, but what they, what they had was a good understanding of each of those things. And the combination together, I thought, we can do something a little bit different here a bit along the Herbie flowers line, we can maybe try and play an old court game, which, which would use their strengths in a much better way than the one they were using previously. So I sold that vision to him. I told him, why are we all in? Yes, we are. And they gave it everything I saw, I thought, and we trained. But as the first couple of months, went on, the leadership group, spoke to me said, Look, we we just don't seem to be able to get it, the mistakes are still there. We don't feel we can we can, we can quite grasp what we're doing. It just so happened that the analyst had been doing the KPIs on on the different factors I thought were key to, to making this work. And I showed him the numbers that had come over the over the training sessions, and there was a map jumping in data. Now I know, particularly in a sport. numbers aren't always the answer. But in this particular case, it showed that they were running that little bit further mistakes were getting less and less. And that suddenly energize them, they saw that there was a way forward that things were getting better. And if anything, their energy levels at training, then jumped again, because they could see that what they were doing was working, whereas they felt it wasn't working to begin with. But once I gave them some numbers that I could have easily made them up for all their new work. It took away their doubt that yes, it is working, yes, we are getting better. And we found those extra few meters in training that there was a little bit more energy than we had before.
And I just think sometimes that we can all see the value in things, and we'll give it what we think is everything we've got. But when we see working, we can often find a little bit more to take it on to the next level, though. I think I'm not a psychologist, but I'm just guessing here that there's a human trait that just holds a little bit back in reserve, just in case it's not. It's very rare, you go out all out on everything to begin with. Because it's not always a surefire thing. So that was my thoughts on the doubt percentage and why I felt it was important to mention it.[PB3]
Paul Barnett 12:49
That's a great idea, Damian. Just so you know, in my dinner table, I used it to encourage the girls to try a little bit harder to clean up to get ice cream. And it worked well. In the book is a great quote, it's in the middle, you say the most powerful influences are great at planting dominant thoughts in people's minds, and then coming back and watering them as you would a seedling. Now, it's a wonderful, wonderful sort of metaphor. And I'm wondering, was there a person or an event that helped you learn this
Damian McGrath 13:25
my biggest influence on my career was a guy called grim Marine, an Australian who had an impact on me. And he, he often would, would put little things in, in conversations that I saw on grid didn't make a huge impact to begin with. But over time, I saw how it made a difference. The first thing he said to the players and staff when he got them together was from now on, please and thank you will travel everywhere with us. Great, yeah, we all we all just not didn't see it as anything. But it was the first it was the seedling that changed a toxic group of individuals into a team because everybody's any police stick quite hard. You know, everybody had to acknowledge things that people did for each other. And it it brought brought us together in a way I hadn't expected and it stuck with it stuck with me ever since is that just the simple act of saying please and thank you all the time wherever we went, whether we were together or whether we were out the meals or traveling to games, but it brought a respect into into into the whole approach of the team. And he built on that and small things like that. Throughout his tenure In built one of the best coaches I've ever been part of
Paul Barnett 15:05
so many Damian in the book, you talk about the authenticity paradox. I hadn't heard this term, but it's, it was it was a term coined by professor, her minea Ebro, ha, I've got that correct. And the paradox is when you find yourself facing a choice between being yourself, or doing what it takes to be effective, now, this is something we all face every day, if not frequently in our lives. But is there a moment, a particular moment when you've been faced with this paradox? And what did you learn through looking into it?
Damian McGrath 15:45
Well, it was probably the, the chapter that's closest to my heart because it either acted as a handbrake or was a strength for me to begin with. I'm a very shy or was a very shy as a secure person, as a child, and I didn't like to push myself forward. You know, I thought the authentic me was a reserved, introverted, quiet person, but obviously to work in, in sport, and particularly in a leadership role, that that's not going to get you very far. So that was always at the back of mind that I needed to change that approach. But also, I also then I felt that my authentic coaching self was someone who had substance rather than style, you know, it wasn't about the showmanship, it wasn't about putting it, that people would see me for who I was, which was a good coach who could, who could make a difference and make things happen. As I as that as time went on, I saw that other people were maybe with no more knowledge and skill than me were getting the rules that that I would have loved to have had. And was it because they were pushing themselves more and been putting themselves out there being more of a seal them and what they do, and I was left with that, that choice, do I sit back and hope that people recognize me for being a good coach, which which they were because I was always in work and people like to have make us I was good to have, and good help to be part of the team. But I didn't just want to be part of the team. I wanted to be leading the team, you know, as time went on, so I had to make that choice between being something I thought I wasn't, which was a more brash, not brash, that's probably the wrong term, a more forceful type of coach. And the thing that changed me again, was was understanding that I was a leader in my field, if it's not blowing my own trumpet too much that I that my coach could and would take me to another level, I had to be prepared to go out there and prove it to people openly. And the more I understood about my subject, the more confident and became and confidence I think is something that didn't help you. The thing that changed was my confidence. And I had a couple of close friends who, who gave me opportunities based on what they said, Look, you're the best at what you do. We need this. And I suddenly thought, well, people are recognizing me for that, then, you know, I'm confident to get myself out there and be the leader I feel I should be. And that was that was only that was what got me thinking about what is authentic, you know, is it is it the historical me? Or can you develop into something that you need to be to fulfill your life and, and your and your, your potential? I hope I've explained that better than it sounded. But it's something I found was key to me making the next step to lead in in different countries. If you take yourself over to somewhere in the South Pacific from from Western Europe, need to have confidence in yourself to lead and to put across the things that you think are important for the team to be successful. If if I wasn't prepared to do that, then I would fail miserably. Yeah, I felt I had the I had the wherewithal to do it. I just needed to be less of an introvert and I don't mean it to become completely the opposite but I needed to be have more confidence in myself and the authentic me out I think is more confident when it comes to the sporting side of my my life.
Paul Barnett 19:54
entity or the word authentic was actually the Merriam Webster word of the year for 2022. So I think you've, you've hit onto a theme that's prevalent in society at the minute. Damien, there was another idea in the book, the connected with with me and it was this idea of a mental highlights reel. And I'm wondering if you could explain to us how you've used this in your coaching.
Damian McGrath 20:20
This was a, this was a lifesaver for me, as it turned out, and I met the guy who I talked about in the bookshop, Professor John Neal. Only last week, we spoke on the forum for the first time for a while. It's how you deal with not crisis incompetence, but those down moments when when things don't seem to be going too well, how do you, I suppose you as resilience, it's how you deal with with those, those dips in in in Fortune. I just lost my job with England back in 2006. I was part of the National Academy and I write in the book about how I had an opportunity to go to bathroom the rug was pulled from under my feet in the most bizarre. I was probably as low as I've ever been. And you think well, I've given up so much I've I've sacrificed things with the family and they've supported me and we've got to this point now where looks a bit normal folding spot, maybe it's time to go back to teach, you know, look at something else outside of sport. Professor John Neal invited me to Ashridge Business College in in the south of England, which is one of the was at the time one of the top three business colleges in the world. They brought leaders in from from everywhere with the big multinational companies, to look at leadership and to be coached and mentored on different things Professor John Neal was, was there doing work with some of the big multinationals and one of these courses was on coaching. And he, he would invite six well known sports people to come in, and work in different groups with, with his candidates on on different, different ideas. Now, given that they were from all around the world, they might not recognize the names, and no of their background instantly. So that the course always began where each of us stood up and introduced ourselves and give a brief resume of what we've done. It saved me in the fact that I had to stand up and say, I'm Danny McGraw. And, you know, I've done this, this, this and this. And I thought, well, that's, that's something I'd forgotten about, you know, every time I stood up and spoke about where it worked, and what I'd be part of, it gave me a boost and a, and a push towards not throwing everything away, because it just, it was a highlights of what I wanted to achieve before. And that was on my mind all the time. If I can, you know, I've done this, I can't just give it away, I've got I've got more to offer. So that was my, my mental highlight reel. And I've used it ever since when, when those My wife always laughs She says you've had more success than Santa Claus. You know, when things don't go well, and you, you tend to you comes to an end and you're looking to move on. It can be as much as most of the time I always think I've been badly done too. You can you can feel down and think was it worth that, you know, all this hassle over, over a job. But then you think that mental highlights reel is there and you think about well, I've this is what I've achieved in the past, you know, I can do it. I know I've got more to gibbon. So that's that was my thoughts on the mental highlight reel. It's my, it's my resilience to the downturns in life. So
Paul Barnett 23:42
Damian, in the book, you outline the four steps that you need to go through as a coach in order to create a supportive and successful program. I'm not asking you to give away all the secrets in the book in this interview, but if you could tell us just high level what those steps are to be great.
Damian McGrath 23:58
The first thing you have to do is paint a picture. That your way you get the imagination going this is this is what I achieved together. This is where we could be this is what we could do. So it's why why would you want to do this, this is this is the these are the great things that in Matthew five their imagination, then there's illustration then then then you have to tell them how we're going to do it. And I always use fundamental skills is my USP. If we work on the basics, these are the things that we could achieve. This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it. This is where it will take us. So you're those those are the two key things. It's the Craftsman side of it. These are the things that me as the coach, I'm going to introduce the salesman side isn't isn't selling that the slim the way forward. And then we've got participation for them to be part of it. You need them as I said about Germany with the down percentage. If they if they get that, then they'll help push it forward. So their participation in in everything important if they grasp it, they'll take it and run with it and we can really take it to its limits. The last part is turning up every day and making it happen. And that's that's the bit I think that everybody misses. Sometimes you think I mentioned Pep Guardiola before if we use soccer as as the thing Juergen Klopp the thing that makes them so good is not that they have such a great approach to coaching live, but they they turn up every day and push it forward and make sure that we turn up every day. And we run with it, of police it because and then that becomes the culture that the coach isn't just the driver, you introduce it. To begin with you outline the way forward, you're the driver, but you almost slip into the backseat then as as, as time goes on. And that that last part is that is that is the key bit because once it's in there, you if you've done your job properly, they will take it and run with it. And you can just give advice from the backseat as it were and make sure we're still on the on the right track.
Paul Barnett 26:21
Today me towards the end of the book, there's this great paragraph where you say all the best coaches have a dramatic need. They strive to overcome the challenges they meet to get something and go somewhere. They seek the information and knowledge to forge their own path. Just love that last little part of that paragraph, we talk about their own path. And I'm wondering, when you talk to younger people today about that path ahead? What do you tell them?
Damian McGrath 26:48
I saw an interview with with James Cameron, the femmes movie director and he he talked about that, you know, actors in movies, and often directors in their own way, need dramatic need to go forward. But they need to overcome obstacles, the need to find information they need to succeed over, over whatever's in their way. And that resonated with me because I think as a coach to be successful, you have that need, you have to overcome obstacles, whether it's in your job or whether it's not not being successful as a team. And the thing is that as, as that dramatic need becomes obvious to you, you have to look at how how you move forward, because it's about a straight line, sometimes you have to step aside, more often than not, you may have to step back, you know, when if if things don't go well. And that forging new path is just is always going to have obstacles. And if you if you give in at the first sign of trouble, then you will never be successful. The way forward isn't always in your own hands. Either you you have mentors, you have friends, who just discuss things with take advice from people who can help you that that was what I was trying to get across without saying it that your path forward is never on your own shoulders, it's often events can happen that, that you've never foreseen and you have to not just be aware that there may have been but also be aware that you may just have to pull off to the side or, you know, go back and go round another route. You got to forge your own path. But it's not always the obvious one. I just think that as coaches and leaders, everybody and in day to day business and life that that seems to me to be an obvious thing that if you crumble at the first sign of a problem, then you may as well not start on the journey to begin with.
Paul Barnett 29:03
It's a great place for us to finish Damien. Thanks so much for catching up again. I will put all the links to the book in the in the show notes. It's called can you be fluent in success? Or highly recommended very easy to read. I read it in just a couple of sittings. And it's out now on Amazon and we're all good books ourselves.
Damian McGrath 29:23
Absolutely. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.
Paul Barnett 29:27
Thanks Damien.