"I've made a huge mistake here"

One of the things I appreciate most about autobiographies is that coaches will often detail mistakes they made along the way.

This is particularly important nowadays in the brief-snapshot, heavily-edited, entirely out-of-context world in which we live. Highlight reels are not how you learn a craft.

Even better, perhaps, is that in most instances these coaches will explore their thinking before their error, and tell you what happened in the aftermath. And it’s not just the amateur mistakes made early in their careers, either.

Warren Gatland had coached rugby for nearly 20 years when he took over as head coach of Wales, yet he walked head-first into a locker room mistake of his own making.

After speaking to people around the team about the captaincy, Gatland took it upon himself to select Ryan Jones as his first captain. “One or two names cropped up, but I wasn’t completely sure they were nailed-on starters,” he writes, “so Ryan seemed a better choice.”

After the captaincy news was announced, Gatland brought the team together for an exercise aimed at rounding out the leadership group around Jones. It’s here where things started to go awry.

Gathered in a meeting room with whiteboards and markers, the Welsh team debated two questions:

1) What are the ingredients that make up a champion team?
2) What are the virtues that make up a champion player?

If you’ve participated in a session like this, you’ll probably be able to predict the types of traits that were documented about a champion player — unselfish, hard-working, never-say-die attitude.

Gatland writes: “I asked the players to pick out five key qualities before writing down their own views on which five people among those in the room best represented those qualities. My theory was that the captain was certain to be among them. So much for theory!”

After collating the results, Jones was well down the list.

Gatland thought to himself: ‘Shit, I’ve made a huge mistake here…I’ve picked the wrong captain’.

In my mind, he made another obvious mistake: he asked the team to debate the qualities of a champion player, not the qualities of a champion captain.

(These are not necessarily the same. An easy example is Lionel Messi, who may be the greatest champion ever in world football, but only became Barcelona captain in 2018 after Carles Puyol, Xavi, and Andres Iniesta had departed the club).

Gatland knew that Jones’ captaincy needed to be addressed with the group, as the players would figure out that no-one had voted for him and begin to question not only the new captain, but the new coach as well. “That would have been disastrous,” Gatland says. “They’d feel I hadn’t been straight with them, that I’d manipulated the process and rigged the vote.”

Jones took his unimpressive results in the vote as a leader would. He stood up in front of the squad and told them he’d make sure he’s in the top five the next time they did the exercise.

“It was a powerful moment and a significant one, because it underlined the value of honesty and humility in the group,” Gatland notes.

It was the start of a special period for Wales, and Jones went on to claim the record for most caps as captain, including skippering the team to two Grand Slams (defeating England, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Italy in the same season).

Despite his initial concern, it turns out Gatland had chosen the right captain after all.

Cody’s Notes

• Choosing a captain (or a leadership group) is never a perfect science. I spend a lot of time working on unique processes with the coaches I support, and I’m yet to find a one-size-fits-all approach.

• That said, any activity to choose leaders must have two timescales: immediate and future.

• You need a voting procedure to capture the leaders for this team, right now. This is the ‘easy’ bit.

• But you also need a voting procedure that helps you identify who’s emerging. These are often hidden, and aren’t necessarily just young players. If your vote counting system is too narrow, you miss a crucial identifier of who the players and staff think is coming through.

• Leadership group formation tends to be well-considered, but ongoing development is extraordinarily poor. Make sure you give deep thought to how you’re going to continue to teach your leaders how to lead, and how to lead different people. Remember: (in pro sports) they’re 18-30 year olds…they’re still figuring out the world and their place in it.