Modern Wisdom - #411 - Eddie Jones - Lessons In Elite Leadership

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Eddie Jones is the Head Coach of England Rugby Union Team. Eddie has played for Australia and coached the South Africa, Australia, Japan and England national teams. And after decades at the peak of elite sport, he's picked up a tip or two about how to lead a team and deal with setbacks. Expect to learn the 5 values that every leader needs to have, Eddie's non-negotiables for making him the best leader he can be, why he bought a samurai sword to attack some fruit with, his tips on how to make a good first impression, how to deal with pressure, how he copes with media scrutiny and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Leadership - https://amzn.to/3Dx6HAo  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show, my guest today is Eddie Jones. He's a head coach of England's Rugby Union team. Eddie has played for Australia and coached the South Africa, Australia, Japan and England national teams. After decades at the peak of elite sport, he's picked up a tip or two about how to lead a team and deal with setbacks. And today we get to go through his biggest lessons for elite leadership. Expect to learn the five values that every leader needs to have. Eddie's non-negotiables for making him the best leader he can be. Why he bought a samurai sword to attack some fruit with.

His tips on how to make a good first impression, how to deal with pressure, how he copes with media scrutiny, and much more. This is a very interesting side of Eddie Jones. If you have seen him in a press conference, he can be prickly, to say the least. And yet this conversation, he's really warm. You see a side of him that's coming through now that's much more holistic, that's what more well-rounded. It's obvious that he's really assessing his own performance, his coaching staff's performance and the players with such a level of granularity. If this is what sport that only 20 years ago was, even the pros were basically amateurs,

if this is the pace at which it can develop and become sophisticated, it's going to be amazing. The next World Cup, Rugby World Cup is in 2023 and I would be very concerned if I was any team going up against a coach who is putting this much effort into covering all of the bases. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. So head to your podcast app, press the subscribe button. It is the only way that you can ensure that you will never miss an episode every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday when they go up.

And it supports the show and it makes me very happy. So go and do it. I thank you. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Eddie Jones. Any Jones? Bucket in the show. Nice to be here mate. Really glad to have you here. So why write a book on leadership at all?

Do you want the world to have better leaders in it? Or are you trying to synthesise what you learnt? What was the compulsion to do it? Well, on the back of the last book, McMillan approached me during the lockdown to do a book on leadership. And I'd always thought there was a couple of books when I was growing up as a coach, learning my trade that I really appreciated the help I got from

Pat Riley, the LA Lakers, Winner Within and the other one was Bill Wasch from the San Francisco 49ers which I think is called Winnie Edge and I I thought, well, maybe if I can put down some of the thoughts that I've had in my career, it might help some young aspiring coach coming through to help them in their difficult way of learning how to be a coach. Why do you think it is such a difficulty? Why is leadership such a fine skill to a tune? Well, I think,, coaching as as I do for a living. It appears easy, but it's such a complex, convoluted, ever demanding profession where you're dealing with, you know, young athletes who increasingly want to be more individual, which is the way the world is. And you're trying to put them together in the one team and do the same thing in the period of time.

And they extract from them effort that they don't normally want to give. Does that suggest that it's becoming a bit more difficult to be a leader or be a coach now? It sounds like people are becoming more individualistic, which is making coordination more challenging. Look, I don't think it's become more difficult. I just think there's more parts to it now. You have to take in the consideration a lot more things than previously. You have to, just for instance, you know, within catching a team, you have to take a lot of consideration into the learning environment which you create for the players. Yeah, whereas previously, you know, if you look back 20 or 30 years ago, you can stand at the front of the room and

say, this is what we're going to do and everyone will say, well, how much, how hard do you want us to do it, coach? And now you have to explain why you have to do it. You have to make sure you have the right number of messages, you have to have the messages in the right way, you have to have the right visual presentation for the players. So all of that has become more challenging to extract the maximum effort from the players. How do you balance that need for team members to listen

to your instructions, but them to also come up with their own solutions? I think you've got a story in the book about when you presented one of the players with sort of a, here's a problem, you need to fix it, but also the players still need to listen to your words. How do you find that balance? Yeah, well, increasingly Chris,

it's more about the players finding their own solutions. I think coaches are more facilitators now and what we need to be really good at those is setting the standards of performance and making those performance standards very clear for everyone, but then guiding the player to where they need to go to achieve those standards rather than commanding the players to where they need to go to achieve those standards rather than commanding the players to do it. That's interesting. What, or when do you think that you're at your best? Are you at your absolute best now as a leader? Well, I think you never get there, mate. I think you're always chasing us like that elusive dream of that. That pie in the sky type thing. We're always trying to become a better

A bit a better coach and a better leader. You know, we had Roy Hodson come and visit us During the last six nations and you know Roy's 72s coach. I think four different countries Most of top football clubs in the world and you know his opening statement was so boys I'm still trying to work out how to be a good catch. And I think that's so true that you're always chasing to be a little bit better because there is no finite state in sport and there is no finite state in any high performance organisation. There's always what's coming next, who's chasing you, who is trying to do a little bit better than you. What are the values of a good leader to you?

You break that down into a sort of a big five. How do you go through courage, hard work, discipline, I and willing curiosity? Well, I think all of those things are important and they're all important at various times. I think as I spoke about in the book, there's a cycle of performance that you need to go through where you need

to build up the team. And particularly at the start when you take every team, I think you need a lot of courage to come up with a vision that's probably higher than the players have ever wanted to achieve. And then you've got to sell that vision to the players. You've got to make sure that they're prepared to work hard to achieve that vision and that message has got to be

fresh all the time because you know the more you can you can repeat the message the more change you got people are believing it you know that's the one thing that's that's very consistent we're lucky enough recently to get Doug Lemoff in, who's a school teacher in the USA. And he started a number of schools called Common Schools and he's basically set up schools in the most underprivileged areas in the cities of America and created this fantastic learning environment where kids are doing a significantly better than the norms for their areas. So we got him in to create to get our coaches to learn more about being better teachers rather than just being cautious because that's what it is now. It's teaching the players, you know, guiding them, sometimes telling them a most of the time trying to create the environment

for them to learn by themselves. Is there an insight that was surprising to you when learning what he does? I was there something that you realised that you were doing incorrectly? incorrectly. It's not as severe as that, but what it is, it's the new answers are getting message through like he did this presentation on rugby and he doesn't know anything about rugby, but it is this presentation and our coaching team sat there in all about his ability to capture the information, succinctly, put it into a way that most people can remember it. So it's that understanding of how the brain operates, understanding then how you create that right message for the players so they're able to remember what you're doing.

And just some of the things, you know, like if you want the team to do a tactical if you want a team to follow a tactical area of the game that need to practice at least four times during the week the brain the brain won't take that in unless you do it four times and if it's more of a message if you haven't repeated that message at least seven times during the week, the chances again are the players being out to remember that message is not great. So the value, those little things are really important. Yeah, the value of repetition from someone who doesn't have a clue about rugby, but was able to come over and give people who've spent their entire lives doing rugby some new

news. Yeah, and a survey of repetition without having repetition. Yeah, that's the important thing because if we keep repeating the same message and you keep saying the same way, people get bored of, you know, and particularly in the day society where, yeah, if you haven't got something new on your podcast, people don't come back to it, do they? Yeah, because there's always something new that I can go to. You look at, you know, soft drinks or drinks in the shops now. Like 30 years ago, you had fan, a Coke, lemonade and water probably. And now you've got, you know, each week there's a new flavor and you sparkling, you know sparkling lemon, Yuzu, whatever it is, juice coming out because people want new things

and it's the same when you're giving messages to players. Now, if you keep saying the same thing, they won't listen to you. So you've got to present the same message in a number of different ways. So it's that idea of having repetition without repetition. Same as coaching on the field. The importance of fundamentals in any of the games we play, whether it be football, whether it be American football, whether it be rugby union, the fundamentals are the bit that gives you the beauty of the game. But young players don't want to do the endless drills of passing the ball without thinking.

So you've got to be able to create those drills that are repetition, but at the same time the players think they're doing something new all the time. So there's an element of novelty that delivers the same message that you've wanted to get across to them. And you're saying, mate, it's done to that beautifully. And I'm a writing saying that you said for physical activities, you're looking at four times a week. And for what does messages mean? Is that more kind of like philosophies and theories? Seven times within a week?

All the message about, about how we're going to play, just that, that key tactical message that you want to stick in their head, if you're not repeating that seven times during the week, the chances of the players remembering that is not great. That's interesting. I wonder whether the immersive element that you get when players turn professional or when they go to an international stage, I'm wondering how much more of a benefit those players are seeing because they're living and breathing it.

Think about the step change between a club level player who maybe is only with his team I'm wondering how much more of a benefit those players are seeing because they're living and breathing it. Think about the step change between a club level player who maybe is only with his team what once or twice during the week and then again on game day. And then as this perhaps young player works up and up, not only does he get better, but his ability to get better increases so much more because he's starting to hit this critical mass of messaging opportunities with the coaching staff that he works with. Yeah, I also think it's the ability to learn and you see that players who go from one level to the to the next, they're building the learn quickly is one of the most distinguishing

factors. Like I know in English cricket, they had a theory that if a player went from county to test cricket and within the first three innings and test cricket, he wasn't able to get 50. The chance to be adapting and being a really good player is quite low. And I think that's said true in most sports. You see when a young player goes up to the next level, if they adapt really quickly and that's their ability to learn, if they have the due, that their chance

of being successful players far higher than the player who's slated or adapt. That's interesting. So it's like a stress test at very, very high levels of pressure, this person's put into a new environment, new stresses put upon them, how do they adapt and grow and learn, and that adaptability is a scalable insight that works out how effective they're going to be over time. Yeah, and the other part of that is that they've got to have an open mindset, they've got

to be open to learning, and they've got to have an element of curiosity is that they've got to have an open mindset. You know, they've got to be open to learning. And they've got to have an element of curiosity. And they've also got to be humble, mate, because, you know, the hard thing for players, particularly, is to understand. Sometimes they think they've made it. They've got to the next level. So why do I have to improve now? And if you're humble, you always want to improve.

And you see with the really great players, you know, you look at Federer, you know Federer, what he's 40 odd now, and he's still got a tennis catch, because he wants to improve. And every time he comes back for a new season, he's got a new stroke or a variation of his strength. Imagine if every team sport player had that approach to their game,

that every offseason they'd develop a new part of their game by themselves and come they develop a new part of their game by themselves and come back with a new string of their bow and the really good players do that and not so good players think they've made it and they don't think they've got to keep improving. Is the attention between the hard work and the iron well and the discipline and the curiosity that those first three are to do with kind of drilling and iterating on what you already do and the curiosity is on growing. So you kind of have this exploit and then this explore element that there's two things going on. Is there a is there a tension that you find between those?

Yeah, it's a constant battle made the way you're set it is right and there's this constant battle in terms of catching whether you're supporting or challenging the player. So you've always got this and with your environment you've got the constant battle or tension between being comfortable because you need them to be comfortable sometimes. Yeah, if you keep pushing all the time, they get too uncomfortable. But then when they start sitting comfortably on their chair, then you've got to make sure you make them a bit more uncomfortable. So, you know, in terms of high performance environments, that's one of the things you're constantly appraising. That support challenge, that comfortable, uncomfortable setting and and moving you're always amazing where you need to be and trying to find the right way to keep moving forward. How do you avoid burnout both for yourself and for the players? I know that

you're someone who in the past has how do you say push the limits of this to it's to up towards it's absolute peak. Yeah, well, I think the first thing is you've got to keep loving it. Yeah, if you really love something, it means a lot to you, don't get burned out because the passions there, the desires there, the enthusiasm there. And you know, I never feel like I'm doing a job. I always feel like I'm doing something I love doing. And that's why I'm still able job, I always feel like I'm doing something I love doing.

That's why I'm still able to catch at 61 because it's not a job to me. It's something I love doing. I think the mistake I made when I was a younger coach was that I expected everyone else players and assistant coaches to have that same desire to want to be like that all the time. But as I've got older and got more experience, I've understood that everyone's got their own way of doing it. And sometimes the mind and manifest itself in this strong desire, but they've still got the desire there. So it's being more having more empathy about the way other people do their job. It wouldn't work for everyone to have your approach either, right?

Let's say that you are the bazooka or you're the hammer that sees everything as a nail. You don't need that. Sometimes you need other people that are more creative, that are more relaxed. I know that you've got a lot of women that are contributing as parts of your coaching staff now that also add a total different perspective into this too.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, the recent period of time has shown how important diversity is in life. Yeah, not that anyone thought it wasn't, but I think that's really reinforced. And I think in the sporting environment, it's become even more important to understand how important diversity is

and that respect is almost more important than harmony in a team organisation. I think having the respect of diversity, respect of different opinions, respect of people's backgrounds, respect of gender, all of that is just so important to an environment now. Well, the bottom line is it's not diversity for diversity's sake either. The reason that it works is that you get an effective outcome that you have a team that performs better that's more effective. Oh, 100% because everyone thinks the same way, everyone behaves the same way. You don't get any

new thoughts, you don't get any creative conflicts, you need to have that diversity to keep the ball moving. Talk to me about when you arrived at England in 2015 then, how do you begin changing the direction of a team when you're a brand new leader? You're this fresh behind the face, sort of guy that no one has an existing relationship with, but many people may have preconceived ideas about where do you go? Well, I probably learnt the most. I just tell a little story about how I approached it, being a casual teacher or being a supply teacher, as I call it in England. I did that for the first couple of years when I became a teacher because there wasn't any full-time jobs. So I'd go to a school and I used to get a mild school and and the classes you've got were always the tough class because teachers don't take days off when

they've got the top students. They take days off with the the rat bag. So I'd have the bottom bottom classes of year and I'm always you know when hallmates are pumping through their bodies, they know everything that I wanted to tell them, anything by a teacher. And I quickly learn out, you know, when you have those guys maybe four or five times a day, you've got to quickly work out right, who's going to be difficult for you and you have to find some way to establish your relationship, who's going to help you. And again, you have to find a relationship with them. And then you have to find some way to establish your relationship. Who's going to help you? And again, you have to find a relationship with them. And then you have to make the content of your lesson interesting

that makes them want to be part of the lesson. So when you go to a new team, it's no different. You know, you've got to try to find the players that you think you need, but maybe you're going to be difficult and find a way to establish your relationship quickly with them. Work out the players who are going to be with you from the start because they're driven. Make sure they understand your philosophy and where you want to go. And then create a training program that's interesting, that makes the players want to be there. And so you do that process, you know, and when you're with England side, you've got five days to do that before you play a game.

So you've got to get on your horse and you've got to do it quickly. Talk to me about how you bridge the gap between the difficult ones and how you encourage and utilize the motivation of the driven ones. Have you got any strategies around how you approach that? Yeah, well, you've got to, you've got to fill the difficult ones. The difficult ones are difficult usually for a recent. They're either, they're either really high performing players, which most of them are, or their players, you've got to get rid of. So you quickly got to make a, you know, if they're high performing players, they're difficult for a reason, so you've got to try to find out what they really value, what drives them. Like, yeah, I think I was talking before about James Haskell.

There has always been this muscular player, but it never really performed for England, but I've met him a few times socially before that in Japan. And I knew that he wanted to be loved. So, some of the most overtly ostentatious out there type players of the players of the most insecure. So I immediately had a conversation with him and said, mate, you're going to be so important for this team. You're likely to be our starting 7 for the 6 nations. So you do these one or two things for me, you're going to be there. And that immediately made him feel good. So he wanted to be part of the team. Then for the other guys, it's giving them roles,

I think, is going to improve their rugby. So you're looking to each player quickly to establish a personal relationship, trying to understand what's the important value for them in terms of their sport and in terms of their endeavor, and then create that link with them. So with the difficult ones you're looking to either bridge that gap or get rid, and with the guys who are driven, you're trying to give them responsibility that allows them to take ownership and move forward.

Yeah, and also show them how much you care about them. The big thing about about any team is that the players want to know two things from the coach. Firstly, that they can improve them and secondly, that they care about them. So you've got to have the knowledge of rugby, particularly for those driven guys, they want to know that you've got the knowledge to take the team going forward

because they want to be part of the successful team. So you've got to quickly assess in the team, and I think you see this in football all the time where coaches are able to come in or manage it, they're able to come in and show up here to time and turn the team around. They're able to work out quickly manage it, they're able to come in a short period of time and turn the team around. They're able to work out quickly how they can improve the team and therefore how they can improve the individual players,

chances of being successful. So you've got to work out what that is, very, very quickly. And for England, it was quite easy because they've always been a strong, defensive and said peace team. So I just focused on what they were good at previously and then gave them a picture where we could go potentially.

It's interesting as a non-professional athlete looking at these pros, because from our perspective, these guys just look like athletic titans, right, just these immovable objects that go on the pitch and completely work to what the tactics say that they're supposed to do. But you're right, the only reason that a manager or a coach is able to step into a team, whether it be football or rugby, and make a quick change, they're not changing the skills of the players. The players haven't acquired some new move or something within the space of one day or one week that this coach has been there.

It's about the communication. It's about how they're framing that player's role. It's about how they're talking to them. It's about making them feel comfortable, confident, secure within their position, within the team and giving them responsibility to drive them forward. I never thought of it like that before, but it makes so much sense. That's the only way you could turn something around that quickly. Yeah, and 100% we look at, as one of the most interesting things for me is watching how other coaches operate and having seen Rannick come in the Manchester United. Yeah, every time he talks he's very clear about what he wants

Like this is how the team's gonna play We might in play like that now, but this is where we're going He wants players with a strong mentality. It doesn't matter how talented they are, they've got a strong mentality. And you can see, you know, every time he talks to a media conference, he's talking to his players. So he's reinforcing, you know, we've said about reinforcing the messages. He's constantly reinforcing the messages. He'd be telling him within the in the team room. He's saying that to the media. So they're hearing that. Right. So we know what this bloke wants. For us to be successful, if we're going to do this, we've got to do these things. And at the same time, I'm

sure he gives him enough freedom to to impose around personality on the team. I reckon that's another important point that, yeah, a team generally wants to be like the personality of the coach, but at the same time, the coach's skill is being able to not delete the players' personality from that. So you want the players to be themselves, but you want them to be part of a group that plays like the K-12 players, so they get on the same page, but at the same time for the players to be able to have be their own personality. You see this in businesses as well,

right? The owner or the director or the CEO or whatever. The culture is just to trickle down little microcosm of whatever it is that they do in any case you see elements of their personality born out in the company culture. It is just like a little projection of how that person operates Yeah, and 100% and then the individuals are able to add to that so they're continuing adding but we had a sports site come in Between 2018 and 2020 for being on site. And one of her great quotes was that, remember, every conversation you have with a player or with a staff member, you're either adding to the business or you're taking away from the business. You never know conversation is neutral.

And it's so, so right that every conversation you have whether it be passing a guy in the hallway, you can either add to the team business set that day or take away from the team business and your ability to keep adding to the business is the key thing. Talking about James Haskell, you said that he was an important part of like lightning the dressing room up being kind of the life of the party so to speak. Are there some other support systems that a leader needs that might not be so obvious at first? You know, you wouldn't think that in a high performing sports team that having a life of the party or someone that lightens the load would be in there, but it seems like it was quite an important role. I made it really important. and again it's that diversity of character that you need.

So you not only need that in the players but you also need a staff member that's able to do that. So we had a guy called Scott Wiseman or a catch with me in Japan. I brought him over to England for the last two years. He was a sort of like honestly he's 15 now and he's still got the same pair of board shorts he had when he was 21. They tell the story about us how vows are driving the training and they see this kind of board shorts on the skateboard with his cat backwards pushing along on his skateboard going to training. This is one of the most important assistant coaches.

Having a guy like that who's good at these coaching, but also can add a bit of frivolity, bit of humour. The humour is such an important thing in the sports environment or any competitive environment that you have that balance between seriousness of the job and that humour to get people to feel good about themselves. to get people to feel good about themselves. It's funny to think that a lot of bad leaders that I've spent time with, they want other members of the team to be exactly like them, but as you've said, we're not going to get that diversity through that way. And especially whatever it is that you have, having more of that isn't what you need, it's more of the things that you don't have that are then going to spread out that creativity. Yeah, yeah, no, that's right Chris.

And I think the really important thing there is as a leader or as a head coach, you need to know yourself, yeah, because when we're when we're young, catch coming through, yeah, we think we know everything and we think we can do everything. And the longer you catch the more you realize, know your strengths, catch your strengths and then bring other people in that complement, supplement, and add to the team environment. I'm fascinated by the idea that the coach can use

opportunities with the press as a chance to communicate to the players. I think that that, I mean, you've had some pretty advanced media strategies over the last few years, the way that you went out and attacked the all blacks in advance of your game with them. And then there was the sort of the V formation that you guys formed around the Hacker. Can you explain sort of the plan behind that, that whole week? Yeah, well, you're doing, you're doing other dialings of World Ragnar Big, you explain sort of the plan behind that whole week? Yeah, well, Yuzo and other darlings of World Rugby, you know, everyone loves them.

And they should because they're the most successful team in the world, so they've got, and they've got this mistake about them with the black jersey doing the hacker. And having lived in Japan, I know how much the Japanese love them. So with a guy that's worked with me for 20 years now, David Prembreak, who's one of the brightest people I know, he always at the start of the week or seeing me some lines about where we think we should go. So firstly, we wanted to put the New Zealand media on call that we wanted them to stir them up a bit. So they'd ask Steve Hansen who was a head catch some questions.

So we came up with that line of, they're just fans with keyboards to stir that up a bit. And then we wanted to make sure that New Zealand understood we were coming after them. So we used some language at the start of the week about how New Zealand understood we were coming after them, so we used some language of the start of the week about how we're gonna chase and down the street and all these sort of things and the busiest person in the New Zealand camp be their sports psychologist who was well renowned and I want them to be successful.

And then we had this idea, right? That's all well and good, but once we get to the ground and they start the hacker, the whole crowd gets in charge by them. And then they become the crowd supports them. So what we wanted to try to do was get the crowd to think about something else. So came up with this idea that we'd encircle the hacker. So we'd make a circle around it. But that was the

cage's idea. So I gave it to Owen Farrell, the captain, and I said, this is my idea or our idea. But then you talk to the team and you do what you think's right. So they came up with the idea that they'd make a V and stay within the distance space to stay with you. I think you're not allowed over half of the way like. But unfortunately we've got a blog called J. Mali. It doesn't tend to listen to most people and he kept going. So we ended up with this quite confrontational V And you could hear the buzz in the crowd, you know, all of a sudden, well, this is not the, we're not here to just watch the all Blacks. This is a, this is a proper game and it's on. So we got that right approach, but, yeah, you do that in other games

and it doesn't work and you look like an idiot mate. The video, if anyone wants to go and watch it on YouTube, you can see the referee or the lineman sort of trying to pull Joe Marla back and saying, no, no, you're on this half of the pitch. You need to be in your half the game hasn't even begun yet. But again, you know, that's that's a good example of diversity because Joe Marla like he's completely his own man. Is he one of the most unique players that you've coached? 100% mate, but one of the best players I've coached to, like great team man, really respected within the team, but yeah, he's got his own way, he wants to be portrayed and we give him the

freedom to do that. And as a result, he keeps wanting to play for him. The log is retired two or three times. He's got five kids under 10 at home. So he's got plenty to do at home. But he's a great show, a great show. He's so entertaining to watch. You know, he doesn't, it doesn't surprise me that he's a fan favorite. And then when you find out that he's like a player favorite too, I guess Haskell's probably something similar, right? Like just that pure character, it's, it sets the, it gets, you have to forget, or people sometimes forget when we talk about high performance, that although sport is about winning and about performing effectively, it is an entertainment. I know that you've got some problems at the moment to do with the ball in, ball out of play time, which although partly that's to do with how the game ball out of play time, which, although partly that's to do with how the

game's played in the dynamic, it's also to do with how enjoyable it is to watch. So if you've got a character on the pitch with his crazy hair and his like mad after match interviews and there's things that the referees Mike picks up as he's like Joe Marlott has given the referee a slap on the arse or whatever it might be like that's that kind of makes for a spectacle that people want to watch. And it goes back again, you know, you don't want to be annulling the players' personality. You want them to have their personality and the crowds want to see that they want to see players with personality. And yeah, as professional sports got tighter and tighter, particularly I think it's been harder for players to be their own person because the academies want players who behave themselves. They don't want players

who are difficult to want to do their own things. So those players have to work really hard now to come through. Is there almost a sense of deep programming that when they get to the top level that you go from being a wild young kid, you need to show to the academy usually, you know, if you've got some academy coach, my housemates, the ex-physio of the junior academy at Falcons and now the junior first team, and I think that, you know, they want kids that show that they can listen to discipline. They want kids that can do the thing, but then you get to the top flight and actually you're

now trying to bring, you're almost trying to deep program that, you're trying to bring some of that individuality back out again. Yeah, well, I think it's a constant battle that we've got, that we want players, particularly I think in the media to be there, their own cells. Yeah, obviously there's a team line we want them to follow but we want them to be able to tell stories. We want them to be able to entertain the people who pay, you know, ultimately the crowd's pay for the players to play the game. And they need to be able to entertain. Yeah, I think that's just such an important part of sport going forward. And you see the American teams are probably best at doing it, aren't they?

I remember seeing that Cam Newton for the play for Carolina, Pantas, you know, real character, the way he used to dress coming to press conferences. And people remember that. Did you watch The Last Dance, Save Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary on Netflix. What were you thought about that? Well, again, I reckon that's a great example of a coach knowing what the team needed. Like when Rodman, having Rodman there with Pippen and Jordan, he had the right bouncing the team. When Jordan was out and there was just Pippen and Rodman. Rodman's force within the team was probably too strong and there wasn't enough ballast in the senior player group to manage his area of sequences because if they were out of the management,

he was a force for the team. But if they weren't out of the management, then they became a negative force for the team. So I thought that the way Jackson was able to manage that, and you didn't hear much from Jackson in the series, but you could see he's influenced on the team. And the way the other bit I really liked was that, yeah, in NBA, it looks like in the lead up to the finals,

it's all about attack, but as soon as you get to the finals, it's all about defense, which is the same in most sports, you know, you've got a good attacking team to get to the finals, but to win the finals, you've got to be a good defensive team. That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that that would be the case. Yeah, well, that the thing that stood out to me, how hard they played in the offense in the finals,

like, Jordan in the finals that stood out to me how hard they played in the fence in the finals like Jordan in the finals is the fence was incredible. And you think that you're going to see the same or you do see the same pattern come across into rugby as well? I 100% made so quickly because they're tight games you know and they're 50-50 games so the team that generally makes the less air is wins. Yeah that's an interesting one. So what about your habits for leadership? What about your routines and the non-negotiables that you have in your daily existence that make sure that you're performing as well as you can as a leader? Yeah, I think you've got to have a routine as a leader.

I certainly have developed that over the years. I've always had quite a strong work ethic So I've always worked long hours, but I've become much more effective in working more effective hours the book that I I read and got a lot out of was a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport Which is about understanding when you most profitable periods of the day are, make sure you do your hardest work there, make sure you cut off all the distractions you have and do your best work then then the other periods are more lighter periods of work. So that's really helped me a lot that book.

And I was lucky enough to have a Zoom with him over any aspiring catering, aspiring leaders should read that book. Yeah, he's been on the show about a world without email, which is his new book that he is trying to turn people's worlds upside down with. There's one thing actually I wanted to suggest that you might really enjoy. It's a book by Stephen Kotler called The Art of Impossible.

So you think about how someone like me high, chick, segment high, or a cow, new port. They come at flow from quite a psychological perspective. Steve, Stephen comes at it from a biological perspective. So he looks at the biological prerequisites that cause a human to be in a flow state. And that book, that book's really, really impressive. There's something nice about having someone that's like,

spit and soar dust around what you need to do in order to prime your body, so to primer on peak performance. But given your daily routine, which I know you tend to work on a morning, right, you get up sort of relatively early and then you crack it out. That aligns, interestingly, that aligns really, really closely with what Stephen talks about. And he's done some of the most advanced flow research on the planet. He owns the flow research collective, which is this big group and blah, blah, blah. And it's funny how people that maybe don't know the neurology of why it's happening.

They just arrive at an effective strategy simply by trial and error. Yeah, now I'll rate that book, right? That's a good team. Good man, good man. So talk to me about some of the new additions to your team. We've spoken about the fact that we've got women on board and you've touched on this, there's a media person. You've got a guy that you used to speak to, uh,

psychopaths and stuff and you've got've got all manner of different team members. Who are some of the interesting new ones? We've put on the, we use a forensic psychologist now. And she used to, she used to set psychopaths in, in one of the jails in, in England. And basically to see whether they were going to kill again. And if they were going to kill, they had to stay in the high security jail,

obviously. And if they felt, if she felt they could move to a more less secure or such as a story about how she'd sit in this, the room, the jail room with these psychopaths having to try to analyse them. So we've got her on to work with the coaches. So it's the first time we've had a psychologist for the coaches. So she's not just working, sorry, she's not just working with the players. You've got her working with the coaches to assess their mental state as well. She's working with the coaches to improve our collaborative, improve our collaboration as a team and also to improve our language and our communication just as we spoke about before, just the power of language now. It's always been important but I think it's even more important now. So she has her name is Nasida, the soul

him, and she's written a book called Pcared and basically she's got the approach of how you should prepare for every conversation, your advanced preparation, the way you use your body and the way you approach your conversation is so important. So she's been fantastic for us. That's interesting. I'm going to steal that and I might ask you for an intro to her once we've finished as well. Yeah that sounds really interesting. It's still fascinating me the level of intricacy that you're seeing with rugby. I don't know how this compares with other sports but like I say I've watched my housemate from a front row seat, move through the layers of a top level club. And one thing that struck me from that is that there are different groups. And I imagine this must be the same in most elite sports, but specifically within rugby,

he's part of the physio team, but the physio team needs to coordinate with SNC, but SNC also needs to coordinate with coaches and everybody has their own priorities. So it feels to me like the physio team are kind of earring on the side of what look. We know how long this injury may take to come back. The coach wants the guy to be on the pitch. The SNC person wants to deliver the player to come back on the pitch. So it makes sense that coordination and communication between you guys and really, really getting that right and not causing rifts and politics within that coaching community, even before you even get to the players. It makes a lot of sense that getting that right is pretty crucial.

It's absolutely crucial, mate. It's having that holistic approach to the player, that you can't treat the player for just one thing, that everything's connected. So their physical state is connected to their fitness level, which is connected to their ability to play the game. So we do a lot of case studies, some players, and get all the particular people involved, making sure that the approach we take to the player is the right

approach. And again, then it comes back to the language of how you approach that. So the language involved in that's just so important. And because rugby is a really big, complex game, that's not one by individuals, it's one by a team. And that's why in rugby you don't tend to get huge superstars because it is it's the ultimate team game. But a missing rugby would be hard to have because because he can't do that without everyone else doing their job because it takes at least the outplayers to win the ball before it gets delivered to him. There's no Ben Stokes on the rugby pitch. win the ball before it gets delivered to him.

There's no Ben Stokes on the rugby pitch. No, no, there's not. And it's difficult, difficult for those players to actually survive in the gaming because it's such a complicated game. And our job as a staff is to make it simple. Yeah, we've got to make this complicated game simple for the players, because we know the neurology of the brain, it's a player's thinking all about this, they can't perform on the field. So our job is to make sure we keep that simple

and the communication between all those departments has got to be so concise and so much on the same page. Because you imagine now a player comes into, a new player comes into a team. Yeah, we've got 22 staff members. So they've got now established 22 relationships with 22 staff members. Yeah, that's a hell of a lot of work to do.

So if each of the staff members telling them a slightly different thing, then you can imagine how confusion can come into a young player's head. So our ability to make sure that the message is a clear and concise and simple and driving the player to the one goal is just massively important for us. Do you try and restrict the number of people that communicate strategies and tactics to the players in order to reduce that degrees of freedom as well? 100% mate. So we're breaking the down, breaking the team down a little bit like NFL that there's four groups of players each have a head coach, so to speak, for that group.

And we want mostly communication to go through that person. Yeah, particularly when the player is going through a difficult stage, we'll try to channel all that information through the wrong person. What about during half time, or you could imagine that this would be any high pressure, time sensitive communication opportunity? Have you got some principles that you go into that with, or that you tell the coach used to go into that with, that they try and have one thing that they'd speak about are there some underlying rules? Yeah, most two things at the most, absolute most. So as old, you know, on any given Sunday type speech, you don't happen any more late.

It's one or two points. And we know that the more stress the player is, which they use the art half time, they got physical stress, they might have tactical stress, that their ability to absorb information is less, so we need to keep that information so concise. So one or two messages we're trying to get through at the very most. Nice. What about when you notice in yourself, is there something that you detect if your balance starts to go off, if you find yourself becoming less effective

or just that you're getting your, you're straying away from the principles, is there any warning signs that you find in yourself when that's happening? Well, I've deliberately put another guy on, a guy Neil Craig, who's who's an AFL coach. Prove seeing another life of sports scientists. So he's basically he's a bit older than me and he sits there next to me all the time in everything we do and and keeps giving me feedback about about what I'm doing. So that if I'm doing straight away, if I'm doing too hard or too soft or not talking enough or talking too much,

he's giving me that feedback. So every morning we'll have a coffee at Hub R7 and go through it. And I heard another story from a Australian friend in the minor case, the boomers at the last Olympics and they won their first medal ever. And he went and visited the Milwaukee Bucks and he said, you know, he had a good relationship with the head case, so he'd see that he was there for 10 or 12 days. He said, there's this little bloke

every day running around with his knee pad. And he didn't know what he did because no one spoke to him. and he didn't know what he did because no one spoke to him. He didn't have, no one introduced him that he had a role. Anyway, about the ninth day he said, who is that little bloke that's writing these things down? And the head cat says, they need the most important bloke in this organization. He says, he writes down everything I do well. He writes down everything I don't do well and at the end of the day he gives

it to me, straight. And you need someone in the organization to be doing that all the time. Like it's like having a truth teller there, but someone who's not afraid of being absolutely honest to make sure that they're picking up things when you're moving away from what you should be doing. It's like an external impartial conscience. Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying. Why me? That's exactly right.

The situations are so highly charged and emotional, especially when you're getting toward game time, right? We've got the World Cup coming up in less than two years now. Your ability to judge your own performance and remember what you said and what you did is basically zero. You're the worst witness to your own mind, but to have someone there who's on your shoulder, what do you call that person? Is he the coach? Is coach? What is he? Well, we're just calling Craig. He doesn't have a, he doesn't have a role mate.

But everyone knows what he does. Okay. Keeps you in check. Because he's, because he's seen as being neutral. He's also access a source of, uh, that any of the players or the coaches can talk to because he knows nothing about rugby. No, it's absolutely zero. The best way, you know.

So they have very honest conversation. So he and he not only access that for me, but he exit for the coaches and some of the senior players as well. What's this story about a samurai sword and a Kiwi? Oh, that was just like, yeah, because the players have so many meetings, we're always trying to come up with novel ways of reinforcing the theme as we were talking about. So we had, as we said with the New Zealanders, we had that, we had that thing we're chasing,

we're after them, we're after them this week, they're not coming after us, we're going after them. Anyway, I'm a half Japanese. I always wanted to have a samurai sword. I always thought of myself as a samurai. If I was born 700 years ago, it would have been a samurai. I don't know how many fights I would have lasted. But anyway, we're down in Miyazaki, this tiny little coastal town for a week. And I asked the interpreter who'd work with me for a period of time to go gallon tried to buy me a samurai sword. So she traced me around Miyazaki and found this tiny little shop and only one person could go in the shop

was that small and there was this man in there about age 80 and he'd been collecting these samurai swords. So I had these collection of samurai swords and the one that we bought was about 300 years old. We had the papers that said it was a legitimate samurai school. So that was fun. Like, that was like a child who dreamed to have that. So I thought, now, how am I going to use this? And I thought, well, we can't use it on any of the players, because it might be a nasty cut.

So I thought, I will kiwi fruit. So the night before I got some kiwi fruit up the arena I was practicing chopping this kiwi fruit up. You know, we had the team meeting gone through all the tactical stuff and I said boys this is what's going to take. We're going to we're going to chase them down the stream. We've got to chop them in half and just cut up some kiwi fruit and there's a bit of fun. You know, everyone's laughing. And you know, everyone wants to see the samurai sword afterwards. So it's just a way of reinforcing the message.

I want to see the room service assistant that arrives at your room with dinner that night. As you've got a samurai sword, this half Japanese man's got a samurai sword in his shorts and vest, whacking seven shades of shit out of a kiwi on his desk. Yeah, I probably get arrested, mate. I wanted to bring the samurai sword back to England, but I think I'd get arrested if I brought it back. Dangerous dangerous weapon. Yeah, I heard you say, um, I was watching one of the many, uh, Eddie Jones press interviews, compilations that exist on YouTube. And you said, I never worry about things I can't control. How do you avoid being swept away in those uncontrollable concerns and stuff like that? How do you notice when you're getting outside of your domain of competence and control? Again, our reflections are a big. I think the end of every day, and I'm not as

deliberate as I should be, and I go through phases, but I'll try to reflect very clearly on the day. What I did well, what I didn't do well, I've used like a high performance journal, there's those about, or I use just a little book like this sometimes and I'll just write things down and I try to be as deliberate as I can about reflection each day. I think yeah that's one of the most important skills as a case you need to have is that ability to reflect, record, write it down if you haven't done it well, write it down if you have done it well. Again that reinforces the message that of what you're not doing well or what you are doing well. So reflections are most important thing and they have our seven coffee with Neil Craig, the other one.

Talk to me about dealing with public criticism. Yeah, when he young a tar, when I was a young cage coming through, I felt all the criticism that was directed towards you when you weren't doing well and I enjoyed the praise when I was doing well. Probably coming to England really helped me. I remember one of the first lunches I had was with Alex Ferguson, I was lucky enough to meet him. And he said, mate, don't read any of it. Stop reading it.

And from that day onwards, I haven't read it. So I really don't know, I don't take, I don't read it at all. My wife might mention something or my mum, my mum's 96 lives in Australia and she reads every newspaper. So she said, they said, this is about your mum, I don't care. I don't want to know.

So I just don't take any other at heart at all. So I don't even read it. So I don't even know. So that's the question. Ignorance is your solution? Yeah, I think otherwise it's I think it's so hard that I heard I heard a play the other day. I was watching a documentary actually on the straight and swimming and the the guy was saying he was a hundred meters sprinter and he said you know he reads social media. He says there's 700 good comments and then there's one bad comment And he says that one bad comment sticks with him and he wants to ring that person up and ask him why does he say that and and I think in in

In sport if you have that sort of attitude It's it's very difficult because you're wasting time You're wasting time on that one negative comment. They used to be written on the toilet wall. You know, you walk in the toilet and someone said, someone had written on the wall, Sanso is the Sanso and all this sort of thing. And you know, because you'd only be in there

for the toilet, you'd see it and you'd go out. But now, you know, players have players and cages have to live with us. And then it becomes a storm. And if you try to try to at all rationalize why people try to do that, all you're doing is wasting time. How do you help the boys deal with pressure? You know, we've got this big world cup coming up.

There is some expectation after a run of good form recently. How are the, especially the younger lads that maybe don't have Joe Marla's five attempted retirements and all of his experience. How do you help them deal with that pressure? We want them to see it as a privilege. Like it's a privilege of being part of a good team that you're, that you, that the pressure's there and the external pressure's no greater than the expectation

that's within the team and the expectation that's within the individual. And one of the things we're started doing with the players is coming up with a concept of a trademark game that we believe that a trademark game is a game where you play at the absolute minimum, you have to play, but you play with absolute effort and absolute control. Now, we reckon if we have 75% of our players playing at that, because that's hard to do. If we have 75% of our players playing at that, then we'll win most games. So, we want the players to concentrate on their effort and what they can control rather than things they can't control. So it's again getting back to what can you control in your

performance? Control that, you can control your effort, you can control, if you can control your emotion, you have to work on that. So they're practicing that trademark game each week, trying to trying to get Brianna that trademark game. And if they can do that, then the better games will automatically come for them. So they don't have to aspire to be Bri and every week, because that's where I think the pressure comes from. Oh, so you are allowing a release file. If you've got a realistic view of their performance, that it is going to fluctuate from the absolute perfect to sometimes below that, and to say, look, it's okay.

It's okay as long as you're playing with effort and control. There's a young player that we're we just brought in, I won't mention his name, but he came in on the back of some brilliance at club level, came in and played for England, had a couple of games and he was brilliant, did some brilliant things. And now he keeps chasing that brilliance. And rather than just chasing, play, play, play hard, play, control your emotions, and that will come sometimes, other times it won't come. That you can play really well and you can maybe not score goals, but you can play really well for your team and help your team win. But because there's an expectation of you scoring goals and then if you try to score goals,

you're creating further pressure on yourself rather than just play hard for the team. Like be the best player, you can do the team, control your emotions, control what you can control and ultimately those of performances will come. That's such a really interesting way to look at things, to avoid aiming for brilliance every single time, especially when it's not just you, you know, you could maybe argue in a sport like powerlifting where your opponent is the bar and its gravity, the, how would you say, the degrees of freedom have been constrained, right? There's no opponent trying to punch you, the, how would you say, the degrees of freedom have been constrained, right? There's no, there's no opponent trying to punch you in the

face, let's say, in boxing or in sometimes in rugby. And with that, having a, having an approach of look, your best ever game isn't the standard that you now need to try and beat. That's just where you can get to and what did you do that got you there and we continue to try and iterate on that. Yeah, yeah, and the best example in rugby recently has been Dan Carter, who most of his games he was very solid and then occasionally do one or two brilliant things but people that harp on about brilliant things but it was actually his brilliance was his solidarity and that's you look at most teams sports. That's what it's about.

It's about being solid, working hard. Then all of a sudden you get the one opportunity and if you're in the right place and at the right time, you get that opportunity to do something brilliant. In England, it seems like rugby is still a private school dominated sport. How important do you think it is to have players like Alice Gensua sort of showing that whatever normal guys can make it to the international level? Oh, very important, mate.

Because again, the diversity is important going forward. And so we're so pleased with guys like Gens, guys like Sinclair have come through. They're not out of, not out of the pathway. So to speak, they've, they've fought their way through. Got, you know, I've had proof that guys like Mark Wilson, who went back to the university, the study, yeah, those sort of players are really important for us. Amazing. Eddie Jones, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to find out more about the book? Well, make me like me, I'm publishes and then I'm sure they'll be at my bookstores.

There'll be LinkedIn to show notes below. Eddie, everyone will be behind you over the next couple of years. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the outcomes of all of this. These new psychologists and the person that's looked at psychopaths and the guy that's on your shoulder telling you when you're getting it wrong. I really love to see people take the minutiae and the fine tune, fine grain stuff right up to 11. We saw this with Team Sky in the racing, right? You know, we saw what happens when you really take a granular view. And then you deploy that to a team in a way that makes sense. So yeah, man, I'm confident going into 2023.

All the best, look. Good on you, mate. I really enjoyed chatting to you. I enjoyed your questions, so all the best, mate. you