Leadership Lessons from Rugby Champions
The 2024 Rugby Championship came to an end this past Saturday with the South African Springboks (Bokke) victorious in a complete routing of the Argentinian Los Pumas at Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit South Africa.
While there are often comparisons made with regards leadership qualities in sport that relate to business leadership, there are additionally great lessons to be acknowledged in strategy and creating a winning mind-set or philosophy.
An analysis of the statistics for the rugby championship teams is quite an eye opener as it defies many of the set beliefs about this remarkable winning team and coach.
Do winning players win Big Tournaments?
No – Not on their own!
Looking beyond just the table and points lead of the Springboks, and taking a bit of a deeper delve into the team versus individual player’s statistics, paints a picture for the reasons for much of the team’s success ratio. It is clearly a team effort that has brought them their success.
The most remarkable thing you find when you look at the final individual player statistics for the tournament, is that the Springbok players do not rank No1 in many of the individual “success rankings” such as number of individual tries scored, tackles made, successful kicks or in total points scored. New Zealand have players ranked No1 in three of these categories but scored 7% fewer points than the Springboks and had 33% less match points at the end of the tournament.
Leadership Lesson 1: While some teams have stand-out star players they cannot on their own produce constant wins. Winning Teams focus on a cohesive team effort that produces constant wins
Effort Is More Visible Than Strategy, But Strategy Wins the day
A lot of rugby supporters would expect that the SA squad, with their tough tight five forward pack and their replacement “bomb squad” of forwards would have been the key game winner by winning more scrums by simply crushing the opponent forwards with brute strength, but that is also not the reality found in the data.
The reality is that coach Rassie Erasmus used the Forward pack replacements as a smoke screen while hiding the subtle strategy that outdid the opposition.
The Bokke in fact had the lowest percentage of scrums won for the tournament at 79% compared to 91% for New Zealand and 87% for both Argentina and Australia. That is a big margin and many rugby supporters would struggle to believe. Equally in percentage tackles won, the Bokke are last in the rankings, and in tackles made they are also last with only 664 tackles made compared to over 900 for the other three teams each.
So where did the Bokke shine and what were the success factors for their historic win?
Well there is enough evidence to point towards a single success philosophy – moving forwards. Sounds a bit crazy at first but all the data would seem to indicate that this was their top winning formula.
Data does not lie so when you see that the number of meters gained for the Springboks was 13% more than their closest rival and that they kicked 20% more than the closest team and scored the most tries for the tournament and conceded the fewest points against them. It starts to paint a picture.
The Bokke players who had individual brilliance and top placings were concentrated in the line breaks and defenders beaten categories so also indicating that the philosophy of moving forward was always at play.
They had fewer tackles to make because they controlled ball possession and kept moving forwards. The large and very effective forwards pack was not there to out-scrum the opposition but were used to drive the ball forward with their rolling mauls and their backline players were effective in creating line breaks and beating defenders to score tries.
Leadership Lesson 2: Don’t make your strategy obvious to everyone and rather focus on creating a strategy that no-one sees coming and focus on having the right players in your business to implement it and keep moving forward.
Time will tell if the genius of coach Rassie Erasmus or the team leadership of Siya Kolisi will be passed on to the next generation of Springboks, but one thing is for sure that they will need to keep moving forward to keep winning.
