The Turnaround episode 2 - The night everything changed

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. Bristol's Memorial Ground. Wednesday, 26th of May, 2010. Exeter Chiefs face Bristol in the second leg of the championship final. The first leg ended 9-6 at Exeter Chiefs' home ground of Sandy Park. 80 minutes stands between Chiefs and the top flight of English rugby, a league they'd never been in in their 139-year history. Players and coaches recalled the game. I kind of remember feeling very confident going into the game. It felt like a confidence within the squad. You know, just keep building a score, because building a score will put pressure on them. About an hour before kick-off, the rain came down, came down pretty heavy.

1:30It absolutely bucketed down. It obviously makes it harder to score. You have to understand the circumstances, the conditions, the emotions of the game. And I think those kind of things, they all just kind of align. I'll be honest with you, I find it very difficult to talk about. Now even making my mind go back to it, I can feel like the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up.

2:02I'm Josh Dornbrack and this is The Turnaround, a podcast that lifts the lid on organisational change. In this series, we look to the world of sport and the remarkable story of how a team in Devon went from playing in front of a handful of spectators at a small ground to beating the odds and making it into English rugby's top flight, suffering unbearable heartbreak on the biggest stage and finally conquering all in the English and European competitions in the same season I meet with coaches, players and those who follow the journey along the way as well as organisational psychologists to analyse the moves they made to truly understand the anatomy of a turnaround and how you can apply these lessons to your organisation through visionary leadership, strategic decisions and a relentless pursuit of excellence exeter chiefs rewrote their story just as any organization can in the last episode we heard how the club had moved to a bigger stadium become more commercially savvy with the help of its chairman tony rowe and how a bold strategy from its revitalized leadership had put the team on the cusp of promotion in this episode we look at the galvanizing effect of being counted out the power of opening your eyes and believing what you see and how chiefs academy system tested the coaching team's leadership.

3:21We pick up the story at the tail end of the 2009-2010 season. Exeter Chiefs had narrowly missed out on promotion to the Premiership, finishing second in the league three of the previous five years. But this season was the first that a playoff format had been introduced, making the challenge more difficult for all teams involved. One man who was instrumental in getting Chiefs to this position, and within touching distance of English rugby's top flight was their fly half, Gareth Steenson. The Irishman had joined the club two years before from local rivals Cornish Pirates and could already see the club's potential.

3:58You could see there was an opportunity, you could see that there was an infrastructure here with a drive to move forward and there was a real passion for rugby in the area and if I'm being honest I was like right I'm going to give this a chance because I thought this was a club again and I was probably looking at another year or two's time. If this doesn't work right, I've been going home and I've been looking at something completely different. And it just seemed to snowball from there. And when I got here, you could see that everybody was going in that direction right from the top from Tony Rowe right the way down.

4:29It was in place and you could see that people were excited about it. And it's hard not to when you got here to be excited about that journey. And I was quite fortunate at the time really I came. And I look back on it now and go, what a career that I've been lucky to have based on a lot of things that other people have done prior to me even arriving. I met with Steenson at Chiefs home ground of Sandy Park. After retiring as the club's top point scorer in 2020, he transitioned to the coach's box where he spent four more years sharing his knowledge with the team's young players. In his playing days, Steenson was known for being a cool, calm, collected and reliable goal kicker, which made him Exeter's perfect asset for the playoff stages of the 2009-2010 championship season.

5:15To the outside world, he was the embodiment of the change within the team that the coaching staff were after, but a deeper look at Chiefs players reveals a common thread. Everyone was kind of told at some point you were good enough. So we had a group of lads there who had a chip on their shoulder, and you just have outside, Exeter aren't good enough. We had a load of individuals who kind of just laughed whenever we would hear these sort of things, right? Another nice little challenge, another nice little opportunity to showcase what we can and can't do. And it was always a snowball effect. And I suppose that's probably why we became a lot of people's second favourite team.

5:50You know, kind of had that back against the wall sort of mentality and people can relate to that. And the cohesion of this plucky group was paying off. A strong showing in the playoffs saw them make it through to a double-legged final and setting up a hotly anticipated West Country matchup against Bristol. With only a short 80-mile journey on the M5 separating the two cities, the narrative in the media was that promotion was all but guaranteed for Bristol leading into the first game. They had been relegated from the premiership the season before and had a squad littered with international players.

6:24But this local rivalry played perfectly into Chiefs' underdog mindset, as explained by organisational psychologist Graham Norris. So I grew up on the south coast and my local football team was Portsmouth. And of course, Portsmouth's got a local rivalry, as a lot of teams do with Southampton. And it sounds like the similar rivalries, of course, in every sport. And it reflects this human need to feel part of in-groups and to have out-groups. And of course, we're all members of many different groups. And each group gives us a sense of identity. And this is part of social identity theory. So that we have our families and our localities and our towns.

7:05And maybe we're northerners or southerners. with support this team or that team with this gender or another gender or all of these groups that we're in that give us our sense of identity. And when your team, your group is presented as an underdog, then that can be construed as a threat. And that can increase the cohesion of the group in trying to protect itself, even though it may only be a psychological attack, and bring those people together so that they can work harder to protect themselves and defend themselves against other groups. Chiefs players were able to block out the outside noise, knowing that they were good enough and prepared enough to cause an upset.

7:46While this is a tricky balance, organisational psychologist and former Exeter Chiefs player Don Armand says that this power can be harnessed by finding the right people, and sports teams are the perfect case study. for me it's about when your back is against the wall so i always link it to maybe survival why will people do incredible things when their survival is on the line it's because they want to survive but it's only when their survival is on the line that they take that action that same concept for me is when you get a group of people that have a belief that they are good but they don't shout about it they don't they're not arrogant and they get told you're not good enough that thing inside of them goes okay let's see and if you can find those people that's half the trick.

8:27Those people have to have that belief that's aligned with the organization and the team and the direction you're going. We're lucky enough in sport that if you can make it to a team like Chiefs or anywhere that takes a lot of self-sacrifice, you know that generally those people have put the self-sacrifice in because they have a self-belief that they will make it. They're just not sure when or how and they can be more resilient. And the next test of that resilience came on the evening of the 19th of May, 2010. 10 ,021 fans packed into a sold-out sandy park for the first leg of the final. They were galvanised even further just prior to kick-off, as the RFU, English rugby's governing body, confirmed that Exeter had met the minimum standards criteria to be able to get into the premiership.

9:12As the players took to the field, director of rugby Rob Baxter knew his coaching team had done everything possible to get the side ready for the game. Since taking over the team at the start of the season, this game would prove to be vindication for the changes in personnel and mindset. He reflects on the fixture. It was an incredibly tight game. Probably, I still say to people, one of the most physical games I've ever watched. Fair play to Bristol. You know, they fronted up and we fronted up. And it was an absolute dogfight for the whole 80 minutes. Gareth Steenson's boot was pivotal on the night, with the fly-half scoring all of his team's points as the game ended 9-6 in Chiefs' favour.

9:49They would take this slender three-point aggregate lead into the second leg at the Memorial Ground in Bristol seven days later. A game that Baxter, his coaching staff and players like Steenson felt more than ready for. Here's the team's former coach, Ali Heifer. I'd been up to Bristol several times through the season because I kind of knew Mike Weld come down to us two. So I had a pretty good grasp on where they were at. We kind of set the tone that week before and then going into that game, there felt like a confidence within the squad. I just remember always thinking to myself, we were going to win.

10:25There was never any doubt about it, even though there was plenty of doubt from outside. But it's funny when you're inside the environment, it just felt like we were in the right zone. It was always going to be the result that it ended up being. A 50-week long season had come down to this. The late nights, early mornings, road trips up and down the country, self-doubt, scrutiny from fans and having to back their convictions could be justified after one final hurdle. Although he kept up a solid front with his team, the emotion that Baxter felt for that moment still bubbles up today. The whole week just felt, for me, kind of eerily incredibly emotive.

11:04I remember my wife and kids chopping me off here. And honestly, I'm going next. I can remember it. And they all in tears. And I'm going, stop it. You're upsetting me. But that's what it felt like. Then obviously all the wives, girlfriends, they're all turning up at the Memorial Estate. You're seeing them before the warm-up starts. You know, I talk to my wife about it now. She said, I looked at the lads. They were just, they weren't going to lose. She said, you could just see it come together and they weren't going to lose. Despite the confidence within the squad, it didn't stop the coaches from adding a little fuel to the fire just before kick-off.

11:39We were sat on the bus, we were thinking, is there anything more we can do to motivate the guys? I mean, they looked incredibly ready to go. Fair play to be. You must have been thinking about it for a while. John Steele, who coached me at Northampton, he always used slight angles to try and motivate the guys and different angles. And he used to play on the truth a little bit, so we managed to get a little bit of a kidology into the players. Former Chiefs player Hayden Thomas. Prior to the game, Ali Heifer mentioned in a team talk, he said, look, Rob and I have seen Bristol. They've just had a load of champagne delivered into their changing rooms.

12:17They think they've done it. They think, like, one, three points is nothing. And you're like, what? They're like, yeah, they're so confident. They think, I got it. And I was raging. I was, like, absolutely raging. And, you know, we talked a lot about, don't know if anybody really respected us all the way through the process and we were going to prove a point that night and all the bits and pieces you can do. I think I delivered it pretty well because half the changing room looked like they were going to kill somebody. As the teams took to the field and the preparation was complete, Heath and the coaching staff knew that they had an edge, the same one that had already given Exeter the upper hand in the first leg of the final.

12:51I still remember the drive-in in the week thinking about, right, what are our real points of difference? Where are we streets ahead of them? And it came back to, you know, Steno and Gareth Steenson that our kicker was the best in the league. And that would prove to be the case in this fixture too. While every man in an extra shirt played their hearts out in that game, Gareth Steenson's boot proved lethal. The fly half delivered a flawless kicking masterclass, racking up 24 points and punishing Bristol for every mistake and missed opportunity. The final nail came not from the boot, but in the dying seconds, when Exeter scored the only try of the match to seal a stunning 29-10 victory on the night.

13:36Nick Warren was watching the game and planning the story he'd tell in the Exeter Express and Echo the next day. So I had a report and reaction pieces, etc., with a file for the next day's paper, so you're already thinking about what's the story going to be, how are you going to tell it, how's the game panning out, and the Chiefs are always ahead. The full performance that day was absolutely immense. and they certainly did a job on Bristol, that's for sure. There is the final whistle! Exeter Chiefs are into the Premiership for the first time in their history. Gareth Steenson probably had, and I've said this to him, probably in the conditions, on the night, in the circumstances, I actually don't think there's a flyer in the world would have done that day better.

14:20He was virtually faultless, you know, And I think those kind of things, they all just kind of aligned. And that's why it became such an emotional experience. And it doesn't take a genius to look at the aftermath of that game to see that every supporter is living it. There's a full pitch invasion. They can't award the trophy because they can't get anybody off the pitch. They didn't even assume that anything like that would happen. And all of those things, it was an incredible experience to be part of and still one of my proudest and best moments. The presentation of the trophy was done in the changing rooms.

14:52Exeter Chiefs Chairman Tony Rowe.

15:22before he's driving. Before the players took off home, they remembered the story of Bristol's champagne. A couple of them came up and said, oh, what's happening with their champagne now? My only mistake is actually telling the lads that it was a bit of a wind-up because I couldn't use it again then. I was a bit too giddy at the time. I think now, looking back, I'd hold that to myself and use it again. To be fair, it was one of the things I made sure I'd said on the first day of pre-season was, all right guys, I'm just going to tell you something now. we did the champagne thing just so you know we'll never lie to you again i mean they didn't care they didn't care afterwards obviously once you're successful you don't care if it's a lie but obviously we did after i did think it was important we said that we'll never try and trick you or lie to you again but whether it's gone now in memory like it has because they found out it was all a bit of fake i don't know because if we'd have never told them that would never no one else would have even heard about it what if you could grow your business faster just by surrounding yourself with the right people.

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16:59Spots are limited. Head to businessleader.co.uk to get started. Exeter Chiefs had made it to the top flight of English rugby, but now they had to stay there. News pages and rugby journalists said that the squad's lack of top-level experience meant that they would struggle to maintain their Premiership status as they headed into the 2010-2011 season. Suddenly, Rob Baxter's ethos and approach would be tested on a bigger stage and under a brighter spotlight. If there was a season when I was probably more concerned at the start of the year would have been when we were going into the Premiership, although I never actually said that to the players, that's when I probably had a little bit of self-doubt because I was watching pre-season games against teams that you used to watch on TV, Premiership opposition in and going, can we really get out there and we're really going to stick in there and are we going to have to be competitive for long enough to come through at the end of the Premiership season?

17:53But the groundwork was already in place. And despite the media doubting whether the players were ready for the level of performance needed to stay in the Premiership, when the pre-season rolled around, Ali Heifer had a feeling that they were ready. When we came back in, even though they were the same group of players, there was a different look to them. and you could almost see it was in the look, in the feel of what they were. It felt like these guys have worked hard and got themselves in great position, ready to kick on through that pre-season. One of the things that got Exeter to the Premiership was the same thing that would keep them there.

18:28It's the same thing that would form the foundation of what was to come. The Chiefs' way. Although he began his career at Exeter, stints at Gloucester and Bristol had given Hayden Thomas perspective when he returned to play for Chiefs. He could see that this ethos was driven by the whole coaching staff, but in particular, Rob Baxter. His work ethic and attention to detail, any person that comes in, it won't just be on someone's recommendation. He'll have to see for his own eyes and look for some characteristics that would fit him with the Chiefs way. When I talk to people and I talk to coaches and I talk on things like this, I always say, look, one of the most important things, if you want to talk about leadership or culture or anything, is you do need to open your eyes and believe what you see and you need to open your emotions a bit and you need to believe what you feel.

19:18That's probably the bit that we all confuse each other with. You can start to feel things, want things, hear things. That's what muddies the waters. This believing what you see was just one arrow in Chief's quiver when it comes to recruitment. But it was also about finding not necessarily the best people, but the right people. I think it was Andy Flower said about Test Match Cricket that at some stage during that Test Match, you will reveal your true identity. And that's where it's important to have, you know, those quality guys. And I think on a rugby field, you definitely see the characters and you see the people that are of the right mould.

19:57I think there's loads of people who go, trust me, trust me, I know what I'm doing. Trust me, I can do this job, trust me, I can do this. To me, that's just absolutely tripe. If you had a Hoover salesman phone you up and go, trust me, I've got the best Hoover in the world for you, what are you going to do? You're going to go, yeah, all right, this is dodgy, and you have nothing more to do with them. For me, I empower the people who I watch, and I believe what I see with my own eyes. I've either watched what they've done in the past or watched what they're currently doing, and I go, this guy, he works extremely hard.

20:24He's focused on the detail. I should let this guy get on with it. He's earned it. He deserves it. It's clear to me that this is the way to go. A lot of our success over the years has been around recruitment and Rob's ability to recruit characters and allow them to be themselves, not to conform to this is how you have to be. And it doesn't matter what sort of person you are, then we just want you to be yourself. Getting self-aware people is massive because then they've become very coachable. And then it's, you know, obviously we've driven a culture. Rob probably drove it from his playing days right the way through into his coaching.

20:58And there's always been a work hard, play hard culture, if you like. I'm a huge believer in making sure the lads can come in and feel part of the group that can have fun together, can enjoy their success together, but also understand how important they are to each other. So I want to say, what's your coaching mantra? It would be, once you get people to genuinely understand how important you are to each other and how you dictate each other's success, you've got the gold ticket. When you look at rugby, there's 15 guys on a relatively small field. If they're all really aligned and they're all sacrificing each other for each other and they've all spent a lot of time preparing to be important to each other, it's pretty hard not to see how very powerful that can become.

21:41The ethos and resilience of the Chiefs way would be tested in their inaugural stint in English rugby's top flight. Commentator Nick Mullins remembers the mood around the club heading into the opening rounds of the season. the year they won promotion to the premiership it wasn't a question of if they would go down it was a question of which month early in 2011 their relegation would be confirmed but I remember their first game against Gloucester back in 2010 which they won and were going its first weekend bounce that might be one of the few games they win this season Gloucester were not at their best that day first time I saw them live was at Welford Road the following weekend I think it was the Sunday match Leicester were at that time the English powerhouses this was Exeter going to Manchester City going to Barcelona going to PSG this was this was them in the deepest of deep ends and I remember there was a little bit of trepidation I went to training at Sandy Park the week before and as much as they were looking forward to the challenge everybody knew that this was going to be the test and they'd beaten Gloucester on the opening weekend but there was of positivity around the place that day that didn't make that extraordinary.

22:52This was the point when they might get found out, playing against Leicester's test-matched, hard-bitten superstars. And at half-time, Exeter were leading. I was working with Ben Kaye and Austin Healy, who were two hard-bitten former Leicester players of the time. And I looked to them, and no words were needed, because we knew at that point that they were here, and they were not going down. And whatever happened over the course of that match, and they ended up losing it narrowly, and whatever happened over the course of the season, we were going to be telling Exeter's story for a long, long time.

23:25The togetherness of the playing group led Exeter to 10 wins from 22 games at the end of their first year in the Premiership. With 12 teams in the league that year, Chiefs proved the experts wrong by finishing the season in eighth position on the lock. They also had their first taste of European rugby in the Challenge Cup, finishing second in their group to the eventual runners-up in the French League, Montpellier. Club chairman Tony Rowe recalls that off the field, the bright lights of the premiership were having a positive effect on the balance sheet. Joining the premiership, everything escalated.

23:58Turnover went up. Our attendance, which were running somewhere around about 5 ,000 or 6 ,000 in the first division, and once we got in the premiership, they went up to about 8 ,000 or 9 ,000. We had the World Cup games come here in 2015. And in preparation for that, to 2014, we floated a bond, raised£9 million from supporters and everything. And that was to expand Sandy Park itself, because our conference and banqueting business was really doing well, but we needed bigger areas. But also to build a new East Terrace, and we take the capacity up to£12 ,500, which is why I told the World Cup people, they could have everything on the Sandy Park.

24:42But an investment led by Rowe and one of the club's previous head coaches, Ian Bremner, many years before, was about to start paying dividends. In the year 2000, that's when the RFU set up their England academies around in all the premiership clubs. Ian Bremner and myself went to the RFU and we argued our case to have an academy here in the West Country. And we argued the fact, although we didn't have a premiership club down here, there's no real football to talk about in devon and cornwall i mean made that statement now i'm gonna have every footballer in the two counties

25:22i've been arms but anyway um and they did they allowed us to form an academy which we did which is a west of england academy which i oversaw and i had coaches down in cornwall in devon The harsh reality is that rugby just doesn't have the money that flows into a sport like football. So the upsides of a strong academy system aren't just financial, because, as the deputy rugby correspondent at the Times Will Callagher explains, it also gives an extra incentive for its fans to buy into the club. So if you've got a group of 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds coming through your system, they're probably going to be on less money than if you're bussing in guys to come straight into your first team.

26:05and I suppose there's lots of intangible things as well. Like it's probably quite good to have that connection to the club from an early age and in all sports we see that he's one of our own type conversations, don't we? He's a harlequin, he only lived around the corner particularly probably in rugby. Some of it is about doing it for your mates and doing it for your region or your club or your area or your town. Retaining this young talent had always been an issue for Chiefs until their promotion to the Premiership in 2010. Now, the coaches had more time to spend with these homegrown players and could focus on individual long-term development.

26:41By 2014, we ended up with these young boys that had not been pinched anywhere else. They were 20-year-old boys and they were good. Our guys had been coaching them for five or six years. We had a bunch of five lads from our academy who were in England under 20, under 21, and they won the World Cup. One of these talented players was Jack Knoll. The big thing for us is that England never won a World Cup before under-20s. That was the massive thing for us, the fact that we could, you know, we wanted to be the first team to do that. And I think for our age group, there were so many of us that had already played Premiership rugby.

27:21We felt like we were in a very good chance to lift that trophy. And obviously it was pretty mental and pretty special to be able to do that. Knoll is one of the success stories of the Axter Chiefs Academy. Before leaving in 2023, he played for the club over 150 times, but he never expected to have such a prolific sporting career. Honestly, it's weird now to say that I play rugby as a job and a living. It's still a bit surreal, even though I'm 31 and I've done it for over 10 years. But yeah, I remember as a kid going through school, going through college, not really knowing what I wanted to do, but knowing I loved to play rugby.

27:55When I was younger, I played it for fun. I was with my mates. You go to training on a Friday, we play a game on a Sunday. we have our sausage and chips and then we leave again when i got to the county stuff and like i wasn't getting picked i thought you know what this is maybe it's not for me it is what it is so that kind of brought me back down a little bit just to playing for for fun again and just playing with my mates because obviously i was playing for my local team still at pirates so then when i got to college at truco college at this kind of time then exeter was really pushing with their academy and they picked up truco college as one of their feeder academy centers and even when i joined college it was a bit like you know i might play for the second team you know I might be lucky enough to play for the first team and then we'll kind of go from there.

28:34And then maybe I'll stay in sports. I like sport. And then maybe I'll pick a job up from this and fight and stumble across something that I like doing. And then it wasn't until one of my college coaches, I remember Robin Cowlin saying to me, he was like, look, honestly, Jack, if you put your mind to it and you really knuckle down in these two years of college, you know, we spoke with the Exeter coaches, with Rob Baxter and Ali Heifer, and they see something in you, they would like you to come up to Exeter and, you know, there will be a contract at the end of it if you perform in these two years of college.

29:00That was kind of the carrot for me down game. I was a bit like, you know, even when I got my contract at Exeter, it was a three-year deal at the start. And I was still very much like, do you know what? I probably won't pay for the first team, you know, they're at this standard. It's crazy. We'll see how those three years go in my first contract and then we'll go from there. And yeah, luckily enough, I just kept kind of bumbling along. Exeter Chiefs had initial goals of cracking the Premiership's top four. At the end of the season, the four highest-placed teams go head-to-head in the semi-finals for the right to play the final at Twickenham.

29:36Exeter Chiefs became part of the conversation by finishing the 2011-2012 season in 5th on the log. The team finished the following season in 6th, but still had big ambitions. To push on to the next level and to be in the running for a title, it had never been more important to keep the team's talented young players engaged and bought in, including the promising academy players. While it was exciting to have a solid core group of young players, at the start of the 2013-2014 season, Rob Baxter started to realise that his approach to coaching needed to evolve. The way I've traditionally taken pressure off a team, especially when we first got in the Premiership, was to go, guys, the only thing that's important here is we train well, we're a better team at the end of each training day, we're a better team at the end of each training week.

30:21When we go out and play, we make the most of the 80 minutes. You know how we want you to play. You throw everything into how we want to play. If you make mistakes, you make mistakes doing what we say we're going to do. But I want you all to get the most out of every minute of this premiership game of rugby. And that can take quite a lot of pressure with you. So we never really talked about where we wanted to end up. We did after about three, four years in the premiership. That's because I looked at a young group. There's Henry Slade, your Jack Knowles, your Luke Kahn Dickies. And I remember saying to Ali, if I don't say something about winning a trophy, these lads are going to leave.

30:50And he had a specific approach to getting them to buy into the club's vision. and I actually got those five or six of our best young players in a room separate and said start the season next season I'm going to first thing I'm going to say is we're going to win a trophy I'm going to put a bit of pressure on you to perform individually and collectively we're going to shift away from the team it looks after you all and you all work hard on the team and we all go on the bus and have a beer and there's everything's fine whether we win or lose and I said because I want to make sure you guys know we're an ambitious club and I said can you guys lead that for me can you guys take charge she's gonna say we'll have some players who are very uncomfortable with it and rightly they were because I started out the style next season and said we are going to talk a bit about our individual accountability team's not just going to put its arm around you if you make a mistake because if you make a mistake that's fine but you shouldn't be making a mistake because you've been dropping the ball all day in training that's not good enough you know if you make a mistake on a Saturday it's because you've still had a good training week and it's just a mistake so if you miss a line out read because you're not been focusing through the week you should be accountable for that kind of stuff.

31:47Organizational psychologist Graham Norris, says that this approach holds a key lesson for any leader. He set that vision by saying we're going to win a trophy. And it's important to do that. And the vision, most importantly, and this is something a lot of people miss out on, the vision needs to be as vivid and as vibrant as what we can see right in front of us. To be motivating and compelling, it has to seem concrete and real. And so many things in the future seem more abstract, less tangible, you know, maybe pie in the sky kind of things. But to really make that vision hit home. It needs to be real, vibrant and vivid.

32:21So we really need to colour it in. It can't just be a single vision statement. It needs to have some colour there. This was around the time that Don Armand joined Exeter Chiefs as a player. Having now transitioned into a career as an organisational psychologist, he says that if a team can't explain what the vision is, this may be a tell for a struggling organisation. You know, some of the biggest turnarounds are when you go and you say, what's your vision? What's everyone working for? And they go, we don't really need one and I go you've got team problems and they go yes can you help us with that and I say where's your vision what you're working towards and there's just this lack of connection that at the end of the day your strategy is great but your people are what makes it so here's your goal do we all buy into it yes no okay if you say no I need to understand why you say no because maybe I didn't communicate it well enough and if you still disagree off you go I'm not keeping around and that's where that determination that courage to lead I think comes in and then after that it's understanding your people because once you understand your people you are understanding to make them more efficient not to motivate them.

33:22Getting your team to shape their role in helping to achieve a specific vision or goal can get them more invested and bought in. The best way to get buy-in and to make it compelling and motivating is if the team the followers have some element of input into that. They have to accept the fact that they're not the leaders so they're not going to be making the final decisions. But if they can have some element of input into that, and then some level of interpretation, so what that means for them specifically, how they can have that vision and what that vision means for them, then that creates that sense of ownership, because they've had a part in that.

34:01And that ownership is the kind of pressure. It's got the inbuilt pressure in there, because I made this vision, just like everybody else. And so it's part of me to make it happen. And the 2013-2014 season would prove to be the first signpost of Exeter's potential. Despite finishing an eighth in the Premiership, Chiefs got their first taste of silverware by winning the LV Cup. The Times' Will Kelleher recalls. So I remember it being quite a big deal for Exeter at that point, and where lots of clubs would not necessarily target that competition because it was used for kind of youth development or the guys that weren't really playing regular premiership and European Cup matches.

34:38Exeter really wanted it to be a big thing. They went and won. We've come from the racing track. We've come from the promotion match. And now we've won LV. So it's that little bit of self-belief that gets instilled, allows us to then use that as a springboard onto what was next, because then they go, look, you can do hard things. I think one of the things that doesn't get recognized is it's not just the players that are having to learn as the club was growing. It was everyone at the club. Tony Rowe had never been at the helm of a successful premiership club Rob Baxter Ali Heifer Rob Hunter there was no one there that had been through it before that could say by the way watch out for this by the way watch out for that a team isn't just about your high performers it's about all the support staff it's about everyone else that's involved in that journey too that's what makes a team because they all rely on each other we just we just happen to be the ones in front of the camera and and the bit that I remember which in hindsight everyone would go come on that's not really the sort of thing you need to do after winning the LV Cup, but they did a bus parade around Exeter and got half the city out celebrating it.

35:42So it was a huge deal for them. The parade through the city led to the Guildhall to see the Lord Mayor and celebrate the club's achievement. Chairman Tony Rowe knew that this was a sign that their plan was beginning to pay off. To us at the time, I think we'd like winning the Premiership because a new era, you know, moving to Sandy Park and the club really, apart from winning the Both of them in the third division trophies. They never really won any major stuff. And it was good for Rob, good for the coaches, and good for myself and the board, because we invested a lot of money in the club and worked very hard.

36:17And so it was brilliant. That, to me, was one of the markers that marked our change. Now, with the trophy to their names, those players formed the nucleus of a side that would go from strength to strength. But the next few years would prove to be anything but plain sailing. Next time on The Turnaround. The old cliche about you learn more in defeat than in victory, I think is true. It was like almost so much disappointment and heartache that it just drove boys to achieve bigger and better things. As a leader, everyone is watching you in your worst moments on your best. An incredible day, an incredible experience, and you can almost sense, this is incredible, but are we really ready for this?

36:57Are we going to be, say, have a stage zoned in? That was almost the final they were allowed to lose because they were there for the first time. We'd almost started the next season like, ah, it's all right. We got to the Prem Final. We were still in our kit, still in our changing room. A bit of the senior boys went, right, this isn't on. We all went straight into the coach's office, sat down. Still boys of blood all over them or whatever. And they said, right, how are we fixing it?

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