As a Leader, Michael Cheika Believes Passion Counts for Everything

The former Wallabies coach doesn’t believe in mincing his words and says that passion counts for everything if you’re going to win at life.

Current roles: Head coach, Argentina national rugby union team and Lebanon national rugby league team; director of rugby, Green Rockets Tokatsu rugby union team, Japan
Tenure: 10 months, two years and 16 months, respectively
Age: 55 years
Previous roles: Head coach, Wallabies, Waratahs, Leinster and Randwick rugby union teams; business manager, Collette Dinnigan.

How do you define good leadership?

It’s about having a vision and then getting everyone clear on that direction. I’m a big believer in commitment – when you show you’re fully committed, that gets it all together.

Do you mean that you’re leading from the front?

Totally. There are times when actions are important and there are times when words are important. I like to give absolute clarity about what we’re doing and where we’re going. How can I use words to get people motivated? How can I tell stories to get people motivated? I need to show them that the end game or the vision is achievable because there may be people inside my team who don’t think it is.

When you’re the coach of a national team you’re under the microscope in a way that few of us experience. Is that a good or a bad thing?

It’s a good thing in that you’re able to get your message across to a lot more people when you’re in the middle of that heat. It comes with the territory of being a national coach so there’s no point in complaining. Sometimes it’s tough.

Ian Thorpe once told me that there’s an accountability in sport that’s different to business because you’re so exposed and you can’t blame sales or marketing. Do you agree with that assessment?

I don’t necessarily agree. At the end of the day, accountability starts with the person. Top CEOs have to be accountable to themselves before they even think about being accountable to a board or their people.

Next month, you’re launching an online leadership program called Purple Leader. What key lessons can business take from sport?

Sport is about people. How do you put people in a position where they can improve quickly? That improves everyone’s performance. How do we perform under pressure? Teamwork is fundamental to making a huge business operate or to a team of 15 guys playing footy.

How do you manage the team dynamics on a day-to-day basis? They must be constantly changing.

I’m a person who trusts – you don’t have to earn it – but most people aren’t brought up that way. So what you’re trying to do is get people to trust each other. And understand everyone’s personal preference. Let’s say I’m giving a talk before a game and I want to be loud and energetic or even aggressive. Now, I know some people aren’t going to respond to that but I’ll have explained to them that getting a response out of the other people will help them get to where they want to go. Knowing people is not that simple inside a multinational corporation but just like I’ve got a small coaching team, others can broaden that out to their leadership team.

In your job you need to be very good at delivering frank, immediate feedback. Are there pros and cons to that?

Obviously the cons are emotional. It’s hard to tell someone something that’s not nice but this comes from how you build your relationships with people from the start. Once honesty becomes a true trait – and something people understand and expect from you – they’ll understand where the feedback is coming from, even though they may not like it.

In 2018, when the Wallabies were having a horror game against Argentina, you let rip at half-time. It worked because you went on to win that game but your method garnered a few headlines. How do you look back on it now?

I went down to the dressing room at half-time with a clear plan. I took my time getting there because it was a difficult situation but I wanted to try and provoke the team into a reaction. I believed they could come back from that deficit – if you’re going to try and deliver a message for an outcome that you’re not 100 per cent sure you can achieve then the message is already under the pump before you even get there… It’s about trying to respond to what you think your team needs at the time, as opposed to how you’re feeling. If I was acting how I felt I probably wouldn’t have gone down there, I was feeling that bad at half-time [laughs].

And how do you balance pushing people to do their best without pushing them over the edge?

You’ve always got to have a sense of what’s fair and what you think people can achieve. A lot of leading in coaching is about actualising people’s potential. But there’s always a foundation of preparation behind them – it’s about setting people up to succeed, not setting people up to fail.

How do you manage it when you’ve got a star performer who’s just not meeting your expectations?

The first thing is to understand why that person is not at that expectation, whether it’s mental, technical or physical. We try to understand the reasons and then cure it from the source.

You’ve had an incredible career but you’ve also been sacked, copped a suspended six-month ban and resigned as coach of the Wallabies. What have you learnt from those experiences?

The number one thing is to have belief in yourself and not compromise who you are. I feel like I’ve compromised on one or two occasions and both times they’ve finished badly. Sometimes you have to make decisions that are really, really important and you’ve got to make those decisions based on who you are. I love the song by Dr Dre, which says, “If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything.”

You’re coaching the Lebanon rugby league team and the Argentina rugby union team and you’re director of the Green Rockets in Japan. What have you learnt about multitasking and are you good at it?

You just need to be organised. I either watch training at the ground or on a video. I was able to call a player from a training session I wasn’t at and talk to him about something I’d like to see in his play. The player knows, “Right, this guy is watching and he cares, even though he’s not here.” Time management is key, too. I never cross them over – I’m not thinking about one team when I’m doing something with another.

That takes a lot of discipline, doesn’t it?

Yes. We talked about Purple Leader. The reason we call it that is there’s a philosophy that there’s the blue state – calm and controlled – and the red – emotional – state. We’re all told we’ve got to go to the blue state to make clearer decisions. I actually need the two blended and that’s where the purple comes from. The passion you have for doing something is what gets you back up. Everyone calls it resilience but for me, it’s passion.

You’ve been pretty honest in the past about wanting to return to coach the Wallabies. How will you be different next time around?

Well, when I said that I wasn’t doing what I’m doing now in Argentina. I love the experience here with these guys. It’s very different to coaching Australia and I’ve learnt a lot. So I’m getting that opportunity and doing things differently.

Like what?

The issues [at the Wallabies] didn’t really come from footy. It was more about the relationships with the CEO, the board and all those distractions that were taking place – all the things that happened more on the outside of the game, not the game itself. I needed to really keep those two things separate, no matter how much one tried to influence the other… but I wasn’t able to keep that separation well enough. I tried but I let some of the corporate side or the governance side or the administration side slip over into the footy side. You can’t do that. You’ve got to keep them totally separate – that’s the trick.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a brand-new CEO or new leader of a team?

Self-belief is really important, as is passion. And then just let people know who you are. I often feel like it’s almost a uniform – you go off to meet someone and they’re putting on a persona they think they need to put on because they’re the CEO of X or the CEO of Y. You can be who you are and you can show who you are.

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