A game is fast-paced, changes in a second, and demands decisions on the spot — which makes it a near-perfect model of what leaders face every day. In our latest Performance Blueprint webinar, Susan sat down with two people from our collective who have lived it: Matt, who coached at the elite level for more than 25 years across the Bradford Bulls, Canberra Raiders, Penrith Panthers and New Zealand Warriors, and Anthony Minichiello — Mini to all of us — 302 games for the Sydney Roosters, 19 tests for Australia, the 2005 Golden Boot as the world's best player, and a premiership-winning captain.
The conversation kept landing on the same, slightly uncomfortable truth: real-time leadership is not decided in real time. It is decided by everything you trained before the moment arrived.
The day is decided before it starts
Matt and Mini both opened with their mornings, and neither described anything complicated. Hydration before caffeine. Two or three minutes of deliberate discomfort — a cold shower does the job. Five quiet minutes before the day begins. Mini's phone spends the night outside the bedroom; Matt closes his eyes for five minutes and then asks himself three questions: How am I feeling? How do I want to feel? What do I need to do to feel that way?
The point they were both at pains to make is that none of this sits on top of the day. It stacks inside it — in the car, in the bathroom, in the gaps that already exist. As Mini put it, you want it to be your lifestyle, not a chore. And the reason it matters is not wellness. It is decision quality. Natural energy and mental clarity are what you are actually spending when you make calls under pressure.
Your state enters the room before your information or your words do. If I'm not present — distracted, tired, angry — that information isn't heard.
Clarity beats certainty
Susan raised the pattern she sees constantly in organisations: leaders delaying decisions because they don't yet have all the information. Matt's answer was to separate two things that get conflated. Certainty is knowing how it will turn out — and if you wait for it, you will be time-poor and your competitor, or the environment, will get the better of you. Clarity is different: knowing your fundamentals, your system and the direction of travel. You can have clarity today. You may never have certainty.
Mini's version, from the field: you will not get every call right, and that is fine — as long as the team moves on the same page. A wrong call executed together is reviewable and recoverable. Hesitation is neither. High performance is, by definition, performance under pressure — and under pressure you will make mistakes. The question is never what went wrong; it is how the mistake makes the team better.
Calm is trained, not summoned
When Susan asked how he stayed composed in the biggest games in rugby league, Mini didn't talk about the games at all. He talked about the training done long before them — including mind training. His practice is almost embarrassingly simple: three to five minutes, eyes closed, attention on the breath. A thought arrives; go back to the breath. Another arrives; back to the breath. That repetition is the whole mechanism — you are training the brain to return to calm, so that when the real noise arrives, it already knows the way back.
Matt added the science of what narrow focus costs. Lock onto one thing — the grievance, the error, the threat — and you signal the brain you are under attack; the amygdala takes the cognitive brain offline and peripheral vision disappears. The skill both described is keeping attention centred rather than captured: seeing the play in front of you and the whole game at once. On the field that is who's coming to tackle you and who's outside you to pass to. In a boardroom it is the issue on the table and everything the issue is connected to.
Know your people — not just their performance
One observation from Matt's coaching career translated straight into the boardroom: the best leaders can tell when something is off with a person before it ever becomes a performance problem. That radar only exists if you've built real relationships. If you don't know your people — what matters to them inside and outside of work — you can't tell whether an issue is structural or human. And if you diagnose that wrong, you'll solve the wrong problem.
The prescription is disarmingly simple: conversations with no agenda. Not an update, not a check-in — just listening. The leaders who know their people aren't gathering information; they're building the trust that everything else runs on when the pressure comes.
Standards the team writes are standards the team keeps
The most practical stretch of the conversation was about what actually holds a team together when the pressure comes on. At the Roosters, it wasn't the vision statement. It was three trademarks the playing group chose themselves — whittled down from a hundred words — with concrete daily standards underneath: no phones on the massage table, weights back in perfect order, your own strapping tape in the bin.
Because the group wrote the rules, the group could police them. A junior player could pull up a superstar — and it landed, because the standard belonged to everyone. And when the 2014 season started badly, the response was not a new game plan. It was a room full of players admitting they had gone loose on their own standards, and going back to them. They finished the year as premiers.
Matt's warning for organisations was the mirror image: values handed down from a leadership offsite and stuck on a wall are just words the team walks past. If your people didn't build the standards, don't expect them to defend the standards.
Control the controllables
Matt and Mini closed with the same discipline from different angles. Matt's hardest lesson as a head coach: the moment he poured energy into things outside his remit — sponsors, pathways, the whole organisation — his influence over the thing he did control went down. Put your energy where your control is, and the strange reward is that influence grows; people start coming to you. Mini's version for the overwhelmed leader: go back to the plan, the vision and the daily standards — and if they were handed down rather than built together, scrap them and rebuild them with the whole team.
None of it is complicated. That, Matt and Mini both insisted, is exactly why most people walk past it. The leaders who don't — who train the state, the calm and the standards before the moment demands them — are the ones who look composed in real time. They aren't reacting faster. They prepared earlier.