On Friday 18 February 2022, Jake White, the former coach of the South African national rugby team (the Springboks) came to speak to the Syft team about how to be successful internationally. He was greeted by some very enthusiastic rugby fans, complete with Springbok shirts and requests for autographs.

In addition to being the former Springbok coach, Jake White has also coached teams all around the world – from France, to Japan, to Australia. The first thing you need to be successful, according to Jake White, is to understand the organization that you work in and figure out how to motivate your team.

While working at Toyota in Japan, Jake learned about the principle of Kaizen. Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continual, incremental growth and improvement. Toyota applies the Kaizen approach to the manufacture of their cars by encouraging workers to stop production to fix errors or provide suggestions to management about ways in which they could reduce waste and improve efficiency. This approach has resulted in Toyota factories facing fewer costly mistakes and being able to continuously improve their production.

In the production line, every job is the most important job. In other words, every job must be taken seriously and the efficiency and effectiveness of that job must be considered.

If you follow the Kaizen principle, then you need to repeatedly ask yourself how you could be better at your job, what would make your job easier, and what would make it more efficient.

At the end of the day, all the little things add up to the big and important things. Adding the steering wheel to the car combines with adding the windshield and the doors and the windows and the internal workings of the vehicle to create a finished product. And the more efficiently you attach steering wheels, the faster the process of building the car goes.

Conversely, while the Kaizen principle hones in on the minutiae, another important way to make your business successful is by zooming out – looking at the bigger picture.

Rugby is a team sport. For the most part, you cannot win the game with one star player. The same is true of business. To get your team to work well with each other, you need to make sure that they can all see the bigger picture and that everyone has a shared goal.

You want the people in your company to be competent and confident in their abilities, but there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Within a team, there needs to be cohesion and a sense of shared vision. If one person has a big ego and wants to go their own way, that can put the entire project in jeopardy.

But how do you get them to see the bigger picture? (The next tips help here.)

In rugby, this might mean asking the backline coach to switch places with the frontline coach for a day. In business, this might mean the Marketing team asking for the Sales team's perspective on a project of theirs and vice versa.

The point is to find a new perspective, learn from that, and acknowledge how this is also aimed at the same goal. The goal is a uniting force, the glue that binds the company together.

The goal in rugby is simple: win the match. In a business, your goals may be more complex. It's important to know which direction you are going in, but your main focus should always be on how you are going to get there. You need to have a practical plan involving the whole company. Don't get so caught up thinking about the goal that you forget about how to get there.

People can make or break your company. You want your team to consist of skilled and dedicated employees who have all bought into what you stand for and what you are working towards. The difference between a good team and a bad team really is just the people that make up the team.

If you want to motivate your employees to work hard and achieve great things then you need to make their experience fun. Obviously, not everything you work on is going to be the most enjoyable activity, but employees who work in a supportive environment are more likely to enjoy themselves – and be more productive.

To this end, it's important to let your employees know when they have done a good job. And it can be helpful to make the environment that you work in more appealing. For instance, Jake was quite impressed with Syft's selection of office snacks – a highly motivating addition to the office space.

This one is especially true in the context of rugby. During the week leading up to a test match, you train brutally hard. You want to be sure that this is the case so that when the weekend comes, you'll be able to handle any surprises thrown your way.

In a work context, the key to success is to ensure that employees are always working hard, always feeling like they're preparing for a test, that there's always a bit of pressure on them for extra motivation.

While the idea of training hard makes sense for rugby players, many working people don't have the luxury of training time. Sometimes, every day is a test match.

In this case, it's equally important to apply the rugby players' Wednesday policy – making sure you get enough rest. (Rugby players do not train on a Wednesday.) With sufficient rest, you will perform better and be less likely to suffer burnout.

Innovation is a handy catch-phrase, but what does it actually entail? According to Jake, innovation is about finding a way to do things differently. According to an article by McKinsey, innovation involves:

Innovation can indeed give you the edge over your competition. But this only works if you stick to one direction.

Jake gave the example of a coach who spent the entirety of training telling his team to run with the ball at every opportunity and never kick it. This is a kind of innovation – a way of doing things differently — but it ultimately failed because in the last few minutes of the game, the coach lost his nerve and told his team to start kicking... This sudden 360 degree change undermined everything that the team had been practicing beforehand.

If you really have to change your direction, Jake advises doing so in a small way. If you make such a massive change to the direction of your company, it'll only lead to confusion and even distrust.

To get your employees and colleagues to work with you towards the same goal, you need to be honest with them. If there's something they did wrong in their work, let them know what it is and how it could have been better.

Don't lie to them about why you found their work lacking, and don't blame your difficult decisions on other people. Honesty can be tough but it's crucial when it comes to building trust and to improving your colleagues' and employees' work.

The kind of people you want to employ are those who set their own standards for behavior. You don't want to have to give the team a thick manual on appropriate behavior to protect your company from falling into disrepute... This should be self-evident.

And if employees set the standards, rather than management enforcing them, the environment will feel less like a school and more like a fair place of employment.

"Is it possible to change your strategy mid-way through a test match?" Jake asked us. I don't know much about rugby. I wasn't sure. I'd heard my dad talk about teams having the wrong strategy before and wishing that they would stop doing what they were doing and realize...

"No," Jake said. It's not possible to change your strategy mid-game. You've been training like this all week. It's too late to change it on Saturday. All you can do is re-group after the game and figure out a better strategy for next time. This is why planning is so crucial – as much in rugby as in business.

Having a good strategy in place means having a plan of how you are going to achieve your objectives. And if you have a good strategy that you executive well, you are far more likely to succeed than if your strategy – or execution of it – is poor.

Just because there's a disagreement doesn't mean there has to be a compromise. If this is your company and your vision, there are certain non-negotiables. When someone joins your organization, they've bought into its mission and values.

The best you can do in this situation is to explain why you approach things the way that you do. Once this is clear, you need to know that they will commit fully to your idea and that there will be no "I told you so" later. If someone is saying "I told you", then they were never really on your team. The whole team needs to be on the same page, working together.

Jake White's speech was interesting, entertaining, and educational. I hope you found these 13 tips as useful as I did. Who knew businesses could learn so much from rugby?