New Zealand Rugby’s ritual of connection

For our players, you know, they go right back to connection. They will spend time off the field in the club rooms talking about who did they play for, how did they get into rugby, how have they come through, what does it mean to them, their culture. We are so lucky, we are so blessed with these different cultures and the values of Pasifika and Maori coming into our team environment. And so there's a lot of time really deliberately invested up front in building that really strong sense of connection with each other in order to become a high-performing team. So we have sort of have this framework that we use, connection, clarity, and courage. So once you're really connected, once you've built that strong sense of connection, you can get really clear about the mission. So as a team, how do we want to show up in two weeks? play? How do we want to show up not only on the field but off the field as well? What are the behaviors we want to exhibit? What are the values that we want to identify for ourselves as a team? And then I think the courage piece is the ability to put all of that together and go out and give it everything, you know, to win and to function as a team. And it's one of the things I've absolutely loved about learning more about our high-performance environments is the deliberate investment in that connection.