TEAM CULTURE

Building legacy.

It’s no secret that the best-selling book about the New Zealand All Blacks, ‘Legacy’, written by James Kerr, serves as a constant reminder to live our own core values each and every day.

Now, we’d be lying if we said our values and culture have not been shaped in part by the powerful and practical lessons for leadership and business that Legacy uncovers from the All Blacks’ camp.

Central to the Kiwi team’s success is the saying that ‘better people make better All Blacks’ – and we believe better people also make salesmen and women – as they do better fathers, mothers lawyers, doctors and friends. It’s about character and the pursuit of being the best version of yourself possible in whatever professional walk of life that interests you the most.

Taking inspiration from the All Blacks...

What’s fascinating to us in Kerr’s Legacy is his conclusions from studying the team’s winning culture. The crosshair attention the All Blacks paid on their culture and core values took them from a 75% win record to an 86% win record, and a little gold cup. For those that prefer football to rugby, it roughly takes a win percentage of 65% to win the Premier League.

Being the best in the world is about more than just technique – that’s why we’ve taken so much inspiration from the book’s lessons. Entrepreneurs and successful businessmen and women might be born with talent, but it’ll be their mentality that sees them go the distance.

The unilateral approach

While the leadership and mentoring skills of our Managing Director Glen Lowes would play a key role in achieving and living these values every day – it couldn’t come from just him. It had to be all of us.

We actually ended up summarising the 10 core values into 4 snackable main agendas that we wanted Start360 Group to stand for, that were slightly easier for outsiders to digest. We ensured that these four summarisations did not dilute our initial nine core values which we still preach internally.

Play Video

One thing that sums up your culture is that it’s all very well to do the right thing for your team when everyone’s watching, it’s whether your team will do the same when no one is, without taking shortcuts.”

Richie McCaw

Former All Blacks captain

As a man that has won 2 Rugby World Cups, is the most capped test rugby player of all time, and has made a key contribution in one of the strongest examples of a winning culture that’s ever existed – he probably knows what he’s talking about. At Start360 Group, we are striving to create a similar environment where individuals can create their own legacy – in Newcastle and beyond.