Dr Rudi Webster, the renowned sports psychologist and former West Indies cricket team manager, has, in a recent article, ‘The WICB: over-managed and under-led’, provided some telling comments on the afflictions of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) amidst some illuminating insights into the difference between management and leadership.
Dr Webster explains that “to manage is to control, manipulate and seek obedience” whereas “to lead is to guide, influence, inspire and motivate.” He further states, “Successful sports organisations balance these two entities,” leading him to his summation of the WICB as having been “badly over-managed and dangerously under-led.”
Dr Webster could well have applied this thesis on the lack of equilibrium at the WICB to all spheres of activity in the region, including other regional institutions and governments in the Caribbean Community. But his focus was on the WICB in the context of the report and recommendations that the Caricom Prime Ministerial Sub-committee on Cricket is soon to receive from a committee appointed to review the structure and governance of the WICB.
Dr Webster does not resort to calling names or pointing fingers at individuals but his assessment could include not just the current Dave Cameron-led WICB but also previous boards under Julian Hunte and Pat Rousseau, and would, moreover, strike close observers of the regional game as spot-on.
Dr Webster correctly points out that the WICB has been resistant to real and meaningful change over the years, failing to act on the more substantive recommendations for broader governance and greater transparency of the reports led by PJ Patterson and Charles Wilkin, because of a self-serving unwillingness to embrace change. This is, fundamentally, a failure of leadership.
Dr Webster argues that “it is very difficult for an organisation to rise above the level of its leadership” and that the key to good leadership is “self-leadership”, that is, improving oneself, for “too many people who aspire to lead and develop others have not learned how to lead and develop themselves.”
The resistance to change, the failure to act to restructure the board, the primacy of management over leadership resulting in the board’s poor performance and its adversarial relationship with its players – and, ultimately, the decline of West Indies cricket – can all be attributed to the all-too-human failings of self-interest and the craving of “status, recognition and power”. In this regard, Dr Webster believes that there are two bad habits that the WICB needs to correct immediately: “its tendency to blame other people and other things for its performance problems”; and its “sensitivity to criticism and its inclination to have it in for anyone who dares to give negative feedback.”
Dr Webster is, however, pessimistic. He does not think that the odds of the WICB making significant changes are very high because, statistically, “73 per cent of organisational change efforts usually fail.” And this often happens because some leaders do not lead change by “first changing themselves” and “without eliminating bad habits, corrupt practices, and outmoded beliefs and traditions.”
Here in Guyana, given the controversy engulfing our cricket administration and our own experience of political governance, the goodly doctor’s diagnosis and conclusions, especially the latter one, would find some resonance. It will have escaped the attention of few readers, furthermore, that Dr Webster might as well have been speaking about the political culture of the region and not just the WICB. For one of the ironies of Dr Webster’s article is that, whilst the governance of the WICB is in the spotlight, there is a widely held view that Caricom as a whole is facing a crisis of governance, with dubious practices and questionable leadership in domestic jurisdictions translating into failure at the regional level, with the regional integration project at a virtual standstill.
This all rather begs the question, what gives Caricom the moral authority to pronounce on the WICB? But Caricom is perhaps the last hope for bringing pressure to bear on an institution that is accountable to no one and pretty much a law unto itself. Perhaps, too, in considering the challenge of pushing the WICB to undertake reform, Caricom leaders and policy makers might be moved to take a closer look at themselves and their own attitudes and practices with regard to management and leadership.
Dr Webster’s article and observations should be recommended reading not only for the WICB and other sports administrators but also for all who find themselves in leadership positions in the private and public sectors, from junior management to the very top.
