Wc 2015 leadership lessons by Girish Batra

1. WC 2015
Some Business & Leadership
Learning
Girish Batra

4. Captains’ strength
• Leadership
• Confident Decision making
• Experience
• Supports in failures/out of form/out of luck
• Motivating
• Powerful – Had trust, confidence of selectors
and board
• India’s most successful captain

5. Teams’ Strength
• Young Team
• Most of team in Form
• Experienced playing in Aus-NZ for 3 months
before WC 2015

6. What did Captain Cool miss ?
To lose Indias’ World Cup
Whats the learning for Leaders ?

7. 3 Areas of Post Mortem
• Poor Performance
• Experimentation in Good Times
• Complacency

8. 1.No action on poor performance
• A Leader needs to act on poor performance else
in some time he will become a non-performer
• It is good to be supportive of people going thru a
bad patch /poor performance but somewhere
action needs to be taken on people at the bottom
of bell curve
• Action on poor performance sends message
across the board that ‘ur selection in the playing
11 is earned based on current performance not
past accolades’ else ‘seat khali karo’ - let the
next deserving man in please

9. Performance fits in a Bell curve !!!!
Ravindra
Jadeja
Ajinkya
Rane
Ashwin

10. 2. No Experimentation when going
was good
• Dhoni did not change the team even against
minnows like Afghanistan & UAE
• Did not want to upset the rhythm
• Fear of failure ??

11. What a Leader should do?
• There is no such thing as Rhythm /Luck in a
Leaders’ dictionary
• If we experiment when times are good then
maybe we bypass bad times ( Semi Final
failure)
• It is easy to experiment in Good times as
– success can give u new learnings to go higher
– Failure can give u lesson with minimal cost ( India
would have not LOST against Afghanistan/UAE!!)

12. 3.Complacency/ Sycophancy
• The team is relatively young & see Dhoni as a
Godfather
• Praising him in front of Media, Staff gives u
credits in Captains books
• Sycophancy colors reviews as we all are
humans and like yes men /good speaking
people not opposers ( like Yuvraj Singh? )

13. How to overcome
• Be dis-passionate(brutal) in review ( Sack ur
favorite employee if reviews show he is a non-
performer…easier said than done )
• Take 3rd /4th party (Ravi Shastri, Sunil
Gavaskar) opinion to check if u are on the
right review track
• At time sycophants are the real enemies and
opposers the real friends  

14. Thats all from WC 2015