James Slipper didn’t tell anyone to show up.
Every Wednesday at the Brumbies, when the schedule was blank and players were free to do whatever they liked, Slipper would come in anyway. Light session. Then recovery. Sauna, ice bath, the works. No coach watching. No performance metric being recorded. Nobody asked him to be there.
Within a season, three-quarters of the squad were doing it with him.
I sat down recently with Nic White and James Slipper on the Performance Intelligence Podcast – two of Australia’s most capped rugby players, and close friends – to talk about careers, reinvention, and what leadership actually looks like in elite environments. What surprised me was a concept they kept returning to without ever calling it leadership. Slipper didn’t describe an initiative. He described a habit. And the Brumbies had a name for it.
They called it the grey area.
What the Grey Area Actually Is
On a professional rugby schedule, sessions are colour-coded. Green for field sessions. Blue for team meetings. Purple for recovery. And then there are blocks of time left blank. No colour. Just grey.
The philosophy was simple. What you do in the grey area matters.
Not because someone is watching. Not because it feeds into a performance metric. But because habits formed in unstructured time are the most honest signal of what a person actually values. You can perform under observation. You can turn it on for the weekly review. What you do at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday when no one is marking the roll is something else entirely.
Slipper talked about this without calling it leadership. He just showed up. But Nic White, his teammate and one of his closest friends, watched it carefully. He knew what it meant. When you see someone you respect choose to do the hard thing when they don’t have to, it doesn’t just impress you. It recalibrates your own sense of what’s acceptable.
That’s how culture actually moves. Not through policies. Through visible behaviour in unstructured moments.
The Corporate Version of the Grey Area
Most organisations I work with don’t have a grey area philosophy. They have a formal programme. They have scheduled workshops, quarterly reviews, KPI conversations, and structured development plans. These things matter. But they are not where character is built or where culture is set.
The grey area in an organisational context is the Tuesday afternoon when no one’s in back-to-back meetings and the team is scattered. It’s the Friday at 4:30 when a project has just closed and no one would question going home. It’s the moment a leader gets a piece of feedback that stings, and decides, privately, whether they are going to do something with it or file it away.
It’s the unscheduled space. And most leaders are not thinking about it.
Here’s what I’ve noticed working with senior teams over two decades. The culture of a group almost always tracks what the leader does in those unstructured moments. If the leader goes quiet when the pressure is off, the team goes quiet. If the leader invests in their own development on the margins, the team sees it and they invest too. If the leader takes shortcuts when the scrutiny is low, the people around them notice. They always notice.
The formal programme tells people what is expected. The grey area tells them what is real.
Why High Performers Instinctively Understand This
Slipper is not unique in having this habit. What is unusual is how consciously he held it and how long he sustained it. Over years, across different teams, in different environments. That takes something more than discipline. It takes a clear sense of what you’re building and why.
White spoke about a similar thing, though he framed it differently. For most of his career he was running on external defiance. The “fuck you” energy of someone who had been told repeatedly he wasn’t wanted, wasn’t big enough, didn’t come from the right pathway. It worked. He played 77 test caps on the back of it. But at some point, somewhere around his second stint with the Wallabies, something shifted. His decisions became less about proving a point and more about what the team needed. He described it as becoming less selfish. A better description might be: he found something more durable to run on.
The grey area only works when you have that. When the motivation is internal, showing up voluntarily on a Wednesday feels natural. When you’re performing for an audience, even your own internal critic, the grey area is just extra work you resent doing.
What This Means for How You Lead
The grey area only works when it is voluntary. So the first thing to recognise is that you cannot policy your way to a strong culture. You can only model it. Here are the moves that translate.
Audit your own behaviour first. What do you actually do in unstructured time? Most leaders are surprised by the gap between how they spend their reported hours and how they spend their actual ones.
Choose one habit you can perform visibly without announcing it. Reading. Training. Mentoring. Reflection time. The habit must matter to you for its own sake, otherwise your team will read it as theatre.
Resist the urge to institutionalise. The moment you make the grey area a rule, the signal disappears. The whole point is that nobody is mandated to show up.
Watch what your team chooses, not what they comply with. What does your team do in the first ten minutes before a meeting starts properly? What do people choose to work on when no deadline is pressing? Who stays late, not because of a crisis, but because they are absorbed in the work? Who checks in on colleagues when there’s no requirement to? These are not peripheral signals. They are the culture.
Have the honest conversation with yourself first. Where in your organisation does what is said diverge most from what is done? Start there.
These habits follow from the leader. Not because leaders instruct people to behave well in unstructured time. But because people watch leaders more carefully than leaders realise. They particularly watch what leaders do when no one appears to be watching. That gap between the formal performance and the private habit is where trust is built or eroded.
Slipper didn’t give a speech. He didn’t write a culture statement. He came in on Wednesday.
What do you do on Wednesday?
If building leadership culture from the inside out is on your agenda, Performance Intelligence works with senior teams across Australia to develop the habits, standards, and accountability that make it sustainable.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew May is a mental skills coach, leadership advisor, keynote speaker, and author. As founder and CEO of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior executives and high-performing teams across Australian business, elite sport, and the Australian Defence Force to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Exercise Physiology and a Master’s in Coaching Psychology, and has served as mental skills coach to the Wallabies, NSW Waratahs, Manly Warringah Sea Eagles, and World Champion boxer Tim Tszyu. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
