How do great leaders build teams to become who they’re capable of becoming, and prepare them to handle their emotions when the pressure is highest?
Eddie Jones is one of the most accomplished coaches in world rugby. He has led Australia, England, and Japan on the international stage, and guided Japan to one of the greatest upsets in rugby history at the 2015 World Cup. He has built a career on turning teams around, creating pressure, and challenging more from the people he leads. There is a fine line in that work. Too little challenge and we never understand who we can become. Too much and we create the wrong conditions to explore. That line has not always been easy to walk. Eddie’s demanding methods have drawn criticism over the years, and his exits from England in 2022 and Australia in 2023 came under intense public scrutiny… a chapter he alludes to here when he describes the mistake of letting the noise come down on top of him.
In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Eddie walks through how he builds team identity, starting with a picture in his head of how a team could play and then closing the gap between that vision and the group in front of him. He explains why he aims for training to be about 70% successful, leaving 30% for failure and learning, and why training should always be harder than the game. He makes the case that immediate, private feedback beats public humiliation every time, and that the best coaches ask far more questions than they answer.
Eddie also talks about understanding the individual, why coaching has shifted from team-based to one-on-one, and how a single moment of feeling important from a coach 30 years ago still moves him today. He opens up struggles he has faced with his own emotions, the mistakes he has made, the generation that taught him to never show vulnerability, and why he is still learning to make room for joy.
In this conversation, we explore:
- How great coaches build a team identity and close the gap between vision and reality
- Why training should be about 70% successful, so the failures become the learning
- The value in training harder than the game
- Why the best coaches ask more questions than they answer
- How understanding the individual has become central to modern leadership
- Why you should never assume, and always confirm by knowing the person
- The thinking time every leader needs
By the end of the conversation the two land on two questions every leader should ask: would you want to be coached by yourself? And would you want to be led by yourself?
“So your training’s got to be geared towards the game and harder than the game. So the game should become easy for the players.” – Eddie Jones
“One of the most important things about being a leader is giving yourself thinking time. Allow yourself, whatever it is, however you do it, whether it be at night, whether it be morning, whether you do it regularly each month, give yourself some clear thinking time.” – Eddie Jones
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