It is said that you are never defeated until you count yourself out. This aphorism played out as the Springboks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat from one game to the next during the recent Rugby World Cup. Having not allowed their champion spirit to be dampened by an early loss to Ireland, they fought gallantly to win the final on October 28.
The Boks’ courageous performance resulted in them winning two consecutive World Cups, in 2019 and 2023, taking them to a record score of four. Their journey has many leadership lessons that South Africa would be remiss to ignore, given the multiple challenges it faces. From watching the games, I extracted eight.
Lesson 1: The primacy of leadership. The Springbok leadership team, principally made up of Rassie Erasmus, Jacques Nienaber and Siya Kolisi, led with determination and courage, with every decision carefully made to ensure team and goal alignment.
Reuel Khoza would refer to this as attuned leadership. The Thuma Foundation calls it EPIC leadership: the art of influencing and inspiring others to achieve goals in a manner that is ethical, purpose driven, impact conscious and committed to serve.
Kolisi’s EPIC leadership shone through when, before celebrating the 12-11 victory over New Zealand in the final, he rushed over to Cheslin Kolbe to comfort him. (Kolbe had been inconsolable after being yellow-carded before the game ended, leaving his teammates vulnerable.) It was a move that showed both empathy and emotional intelligence on Kolisi’s part.
Lesson 2: The anchoring effect of vision. The team had a clear and resolute vision, which was to inspire hope by showing up at their best and winning for the nation. Kolisi and his colleagues understood that and embraced the idea of being cultivators of hope. This vision provided a powering identity. But just as it is said that you cannot light another’s path without brightening your own, they, too, were inspired.
Lesson 3: The magic of teamwork. A fatal flaw in sports teams is that they can end up being a galaxy of stars instead of a single unit. The Springboks understood that each person’s shine reflected the team’s energy. As a result, though Handré Pollard scored all the penalties that led to the Boks being crowned champions, everyone acted synergistically to make that happen. This shows championship can be a group identity as much as it can be an individual one.
Lesson 4: The importance of grit. In addition to personifying the saying that you are not defeated until you count yourself out, the Springboks seemed to have heeded Nelson Mandela’s belief that “it always seems impossible until it is done”. Their extraordinary resilience also gave us a textbook case of Angela Duckworth’s theory of success in her book, Grit: Why Passion and Resilience Are the Secrets to Success. While the final minutes left many South Africans at “quarter to heart attack”, a key character on display was a growth mindset.
Lesson 5: The power of harnessing diversity. In the post-match interview, Kolisi said: “This team shows what diversity can do for our country as well.” He went on to talk about what can be achieved through working together. Indeed, how the Springboks have leveraged the power of diversity is a case study on its own. Harnessing diversity requires emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual intelligence, all abundant in Kolisi.
Politicians could learn a lot about winning by being better players rather than denigrating opponents
Lesson 6: The centrality of agility. The Springboks showed an uncanny capacity to dance with change and mitigate fragility. We saw this as they transcended the loss of Makazole Mapimpi and adapted swiftly when hooker Bongi Mbonambi was injured a few minutes into the final game.
Lesson 7: The hallmark of sportsmanship — not taking things personally. One of the extraordinary displays of sport camaraderie was when Kolisi consoled New Zealand on their loss while acknowledging their valour. In a post-game interview, he said: “I want to give credit to the All Blacks, they took us to the end, they took us to a dark place.” Politicians could learn a lot about winning by being better players rather than denigrating opponents (especially given the possibility of coalitions).
Lesson 8: The uniting power of sport and magical interplay between hope, winning and positivity. Mandela understood and leveraged the uniting power of sport when he used the 1995 World Cup to bind together a nation whose wounds from past injustices had been cut open when SACP leader Chris Hani was assassinated a year before the first democratic elections. In her book Confidence, Rosabeth Moss Kanter presents this Mandela moment as an example of confident leadership.
Confident leaders inspire hope. It’s something Kolisi understands — but he knows hope isn’t inspired simply through words. As we watched the Springboks’ audacious journey to victory, we got to realise the power of the interplay between hope, winning and positivity. It also became clear that one win inspires more hope and positivity, which inspires more winning and more hope.
You must agree that as our country and organisations go through overlapping successive storms, such as disruptive technologies, global wars and pandemics — an era referred to by some as a polycrisis-permacrisis — a dose of EPIC and confident leadership like Kolisi’s in every corner and endeavour could help turn our situation around. Shall we go for it?
* Prof Madonsela is the Law Trust Research Chair in Social Justice at Stellenbosch University and Thuma Foundation founder
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