Great Place to Work has identified nine key management practice areas in which the best workplaces tend to excel - hiring; inspiring; speaking; listening; caring; developing; thanking; celebrating; and sharing. For this article, we asked Irish Rugby legend Tony Ward to evaluate the importance of each trait from a rugby context to highlight the similarities between the qualities required for succesful leadership in sport and in business.
It's All In The Game
Insights from Ireland’s Sporting Leaders on How to Build Trust, Pride & Camaraderie for Extraordinary Business Results
Reporting by BOB LEE
Tony Ward on Leadership & Teamwork
"When each player on a team plays to their absolute maximum ability, the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts, and the team can achieve things it never thought possible.” - Tony Ward
Former Irish rugby player Tony Ward is a living legend. Reading through his biography, even the most die-hard couch potato couldn’t fail to be impressed by his Herculean athletic achievements, which include representing Ireland internationally for almost a decade in rugby as well as playing soccer for both Shamrock Rovers and Limerick United. To give a flavour of his body of work, between 1978 and 1987 Ward won 19 rugby caps for Ireland, and also inspired Munster to a legendary win over New Zealand in 1978, a match famously dramatised in the play Alone It Stands, and an achievement that has never been repeated. These days he works as a rugby commentator and director of rugby at St Gerard’s School in Bray.
If anything can be gleaned from Ward’s extraordinary roll call of achievements, it’s that he knows a thing or two about achieving success within a team. For this article we took the nine key management practice areas of successful workplaces as identified by Great Place to Work and asked Ward to evaluate the importance of each trait in a rugby context in order to highlight the similarities between the qualities required for succesful leadership in sport and in business
