Rassie Erasmus, the South Africa director of rugby. (Photo: David Rogers / Getty Images) I have a question about leadership, and it’s not the one you might expect. What I want to know is this: How much bunk has been written on the topic over the years? And yet it persists; each and every year, more and more is written about leaders and leadership, and techniques of leadership. And most importantly, how to become one.
One of the reasons the topic comes up now is the success of the Springbok rugby team and the slightly surprising emergence of Rassie Erasmus as an example of having the qualities of a great leader.
Tony Norton, a lawyer and no mean leader himself, has written beautifully in Daily Maverick about “Rassie”. In a country beset by corruption, incompetence and widespread maladministration in virtually every aspect of the public sector, rugby is a beacon of hope that gives a neglected citizenry much-needed inspiration and optimism, he wrote.
There is now a “folklore quality” about Erasmus, Norton wrote. “He has not only transformed South African rugby from the perspective of the merit-based racial demographics of the team and propelled Siya Kolisi’s career as the inspirational captain of the Springboks, but more fundamentally he has broken the mould irretrievably of the legacy of dyed-in-the-wool Springbok rugby coaches.”
As a hopeful fan, I can appreciate that point, widely shared, I suspect, among the rugby cognoscenti. But I also have a caveat. There is a kind of paradox of leadership, in which success and leadership get intermingled, and sometimes it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.
To put it another way, successful entities grant their leaders latitude to experiment and gather talent, which enhances their performance, which provides leaders with even more latitude, financial and otherwise, which allows them to gather talent. And so on.
At some point, leaders are getting credit for things that their team is actually delivering, and they are floating on a kind of success cloud, which is — if we are being honest — partly rooted in luck, fortuitous timing and other people’s efforts.
The other curiosity about leadership is that calibrations of success are fickle. Leaders who manage to make the best of a very difficult situation are seldom the subjects of books with flattering, black and white photographs on the cover. Nobody gets a prize for keeping the train on the tracks. There is an arbitrariness to the designation of leadership success which often gets obscured by circumstances totally outside the control of the people involved.
And yet, in years of reporting, I often see the outlines of what I think of as great leadership, which only occasionally overlaps with actual, acknowledged success.
It’s often said that there is a crucial difference between managerial leaders who are good at building skilled teams that execute well, and inspirational leaders who motivate their teams by example. There is a whole transactional system of leadership too, which is based on rewards and punishments, essentially designed to motivate through incentive.
I think this is all a bit wrong. Leadership is not so easily systematised. I suspect great leaders actually have these qualities: they have to be a bit odd, a bit calculating and visibly motivated by higher ideals, both moral and transactional.
You could see it in Nelson Mandela; his embrace of SA’s rugby team way back when was regarded as a pivotal political moment, and of course it was. But it was also out of the mainstream thinking in his own party, and broadly unpopular. Yet his higher voice was about creating nationhood, not about winning the support of his “base”, and that made it unimpeachable. He was also odd in other ways too; standing down after a single term as President, and so on.
The thing that really impressed me about Erasmus in the current World Cup wasn’t the 7-1 issue so much; it was his sudden decision to come out in support of referees after a history of being critical of them for so long. Nice switch. You can see my three aspects of leadership at work: a bit odd, a bit calculating, and a bit about the higher ideal; it’s about the game, not about our game.
“Rassie” may be viewed very differently after this weekend. Frankly, the odds are against him. But he will still rate in my book. I might be wrong about this, but I believe transformation is not possible if it’s done in a doctrinaire way by doctrinaire people. Change requires mavericks. It just does. DM