All Blacks: Creating better leaders now the goal

The instant the All Blacks came up with a mantra, a one-liner to define their mission, they were an easy target. The "better people make better All Black"' slogan came back to haunt them when everything went wrong in Cardiff in 2007.

They hardly seemed better All Blacks when they had just been dumped out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals and, a few nights later, when Doug Howlett was arrested for jumping on the bonnet of a car at Heathrow Airport, there wasn't a lot of conviction around that they were better people either.

The pieces of the Graham Henry regime were lying shattered on the floor after the 2007 World Cup. Since 2004, he had been trying to do more than build a successful rugby team; he'd been trying to improve the players' professional ethics.

The team he inherited in the wake of the 2003 World Cup disaster had glaring shortcomings in terms of their preparation, off-field presentation and general awareness of what was required to uphold the values of the jersey they wore.

This was not a side that could lead itself and the All Blacks under Henry spent the time between 2004 and 2007 re-inventing themselves. The entire model was turned from being coach-led to player-driven.

The ethos of the team transformed to one of empowerment. Individuals were encouraged to take responsibility for their own development and to help others. In the background was this lurking belief that if players learned to make decisions for themselves off the field, they would become more effective leaders on it.

When everything melted down in Cardiff, the theory was exposed as bunkum. But the concept of individual improvement, of growing the person as well as the player, has not been shelved.

The thinking has evolved rather than been ditched and two years on from the World Cup disaster, there is a new culture within the team - a culture not as abstract or as removed as the "better people make better All Blacks" mantra.

What was learned from the last World Cup is that if the goal is to create better on-field leaders, then they have to be given greater on-field responsibility. The initial thinking in 2004 was looking for a transfer of off-field skills to on-field performance; now the culture is direct.

Now the culture is about delivering performance first and the lessons learned from that, the confidence that comes with winning, will be used to build the person.

The current regime has evolved to see a smaller group of senior players have a much greater input into the All Black game plan.

"I'd say the biggest difference now is that we place far greater emphasis on the role of the leaders working with the coaches on the game," says All Black manager Darren Shand.

"There is a much bigger emphasis on how the players can evolve the game, be part of the strategy and align their thoughts with the coaches' thoughts to produce the win."

The question of whether this culture is working is hard to answer. Hard, because it has delivered mixed results.

In a season where the All Blacks lost three times to the South Africans and once to the French before this weekend, there is an obvious concern that players and coaches are not as aligned as they need to be; that the on-field leadership is not as strong as anyone would like.

But, on the plus side, anecdotally at least, there are reasons to believe the All Blacks, in general, conduct themselves more professionally now than they ever have.

In 2004, when the All Blacks played their away leg of the Tri Nations, Henry was shocked by how insular some players were and how little they did in their free time. Some players struggled to present themselves well to the wider public and lacked the skills and confidence to deal with the peripheral side of their work.

That is a rarity these days. On this tour, new boys Zac Guildford, Ben Smith and Mike Delany have come on board and shown a remarkable understanding of the levels they must reach off the field.

Before the Milan test, Corey Flynn talked of how he had found the maturity and off field balance to better cope with being an All Black than in his first stint in 2003-2004.

Now that he has a handle on how to present himself and the importance of external interests and striking the right balance in his downtime, he said he was much better equipped to be an All Black.

"Now we have the likes of Zac Guildford and Richard Kahui who are coming out of the professional system and see all the things outside of playing the game as normal," says Shand.

"They see it as standard and accepted and as part of the job. They bring the same level and intensity of performance as they do to their on field job."