Leaders must rely on actions not words
Posted Sunday, April 25, 2004
By Wayne Bennett
Leadership comes in many forms from political and business to sporting teams and, in my experience, the best leaders have been the doers, not the talkers.
North Queenslands decision to take the captaincy off Paul Bowman - and lets be clear from the start about it being their decision and their business - raises the question of what makes a good captain in the sporting sense.
The first thing we have to acknowledge is that being a leader in the business world - and they dont call them captains of industry for nothing - is completely different from being the leader in a football team. The CEO of a company leads largely by words while the captain on the football field needs to lead by deeds.
The perfect sports team captain would need to lead from the front, be a good communicator, be someone who could articulate the coachs instructions to his team-mates and be a good guy off the field. But, as weve learnt down the years, we dont live in a perfect world and Im yet to find the perfect captain.
Given that were unlikely to find anyone to fill those requirements to the letter, we have to look for someone who at least gets close and that usually means choosing between the guy who leads from the front and the guy who can deliver a magnificent pre-match or halftime speech.
Ill take the first guy every time because hes the one who can lift his team-mates by example.
The only pressure Ive ever placed on my captains over the years has been that they go out and play to their own ability. Weve all heard stories about sportsmen and women giving up the captaincy of their team "because it was affecting their own game" but I reckon in those cases the wrong person was chosen as captain in the first place. A good leader doesnt concern himself with his team-mates games until his own house is in order.
One of the reasons given for Paul Bowmans demise as Cowboys captain has been that hes not a big talker on the field but that got me thinking about a little bloke named Allan Langer.
Alfie wasnt a talker, either ... well, not on the field, anyway (he did plenty of talking elsewhere) ... but he captained the Broncos for eight years, captained Queensland and Australia and won premierships, State of Origin matches and Tests. He led by example and there was never any question that his team-mates would follow him.
I understand, Bowman has also been criticised for not more confrontational with the whistleblowers but Alf was never over-aggressive with referees and I never wanted him to be.
As I said from the start, the decision to take captaincy off Paul is the Cowboys business and the rest of us arent close enough to the team to know the whole story but I will say this, replacing the captain in any team in mid-season is not a great policy, especially when hes been captain for a long time, as Bowman was.
In my experience, taking the captaincy of someone will leave a sour taste in the deposed captains mouth and any amount of PR and toe-ing the party line wont change that. The dumped captain will eventually get over it but it makes a lot more sense to make the change in the off-season when he, and the team, have time to adjust.
As a final thought on captaincy and leadership, Ill leave you with this: True leaders are similar to eagles: they dont flock - you find them one at a time. And I might add, they let their deeds do the talking.
