Leadership and Sport

Over the last few weeks I've been in Europe a lot and been exposed to a lot of sport.

The biggest event has been the Rugby World Cup. For those of you wondering what Rugby is, imagine American football, with less stoppages, less padding, more creativity and less ferocious "hitting" of each other (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/default.stm). It is a game that is both fun and mental, and can be amazing on television.

The final was played in Paris last week between England and South Africa. SA won a very tight game 6:15.

But, what was more interesting was the England team's "Lazarus" like recovery. Before the knockout games SA had destroyed England 36:0 and no-one thought England had a chance. Then they go win 4 (or 5?) on the trot, including beating more highly regarded teams Australia and France (in Paris). So what happened?

Well, we do know that the entire squad (coaches, players et al) sat down after the first SA thrashing and cleared the air.

However, on one side the story says that senior players took control and said this is what we are going to do, you the coaches will follow this and there we are. The other side is that the English coach was strong enough to ask for the player's opinions and adapted the game plan to what they said. So which version is correct?

As with all these things the truth probably lies in a mixture of the two. The coach is known as a believer in getting players to think for themselves, so perhaps this was just the coach getting buy-in and commitment from a hard core of committed, experienced veterans. Having said that, there probably is truth in the assertion that the SA hammering was because of the players not fully understanding what the coach wanted and hence the need to speak out.

For me this illustrates how leadership can be learnt from all manner of fields e.g. business, sport, politics, charity. You could move this example to any other industry/field and the lessons /issues for analysing a "leader's" actions/responses would fundamentally still be the same. For example, a question raised from this example is when does delegation of responsibly by a leader go from empowerment of subordinates to the abdication of his/her duties?

Is this what makes INSEAD so committed in its push for diversity - so that you can learn from so many unexpected experiences and transfer that learning to almost all other fields? That is certainly one of my reasons for choosing INSEAD.

So if anyone from INSEAD is reading this I look forward to a case study on the Rugby World Cup and the performances of various teams (England, Fiji, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal and South Africa) and why they were successful or unsuccessful.


The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born -- that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

Warren G. Bennis


The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Peter Drucker