Round #04 - This is what it asks of us
Patrick Cripps
The great thing for Carlton and their on-field leaders, outstanding football men, proud and fierce competitors, skipper Patrick Cripps (my drawing above) and Senior Coach Michael Voss, is they ‘get to’ lead this club at this challenging time.
The siren has rung.
The game is lost.
The scoreboard speaks its own 'truth'. Judgement starts and restarts for the Carlton Football Club. The loss to Collingwood, their age-old rival, in front of over 80,000 people at the MCG makes it four in a row. The first four games of the season, having led all of them at halftime.
The losses are felt deeply and broadly. Our team demands our love. It is what this relationship is built on, generational and foundational, and love is the most vexing emotion and the very reason we are so drawn to it and keep coming back for more. It is who we are.
For the Blues supporters, it is decades of disappointment, a weight the current group cannot allow itself to carry but vicariously will have to, or at least have empathy for.
While the scoreboard will always speak its simple 'truth', leadership lives in a more complex space.
The siren sounding and the game now over simply reveals the next game, another challenge, another moment that demands we find more in and of ourselves.
In these moments, it is best to remind yourself that leadership isn't a 'got to' thing; it is a 'get to' thing.
And the great thing for Carlton and their on-field leaders, outstanding football men, proud and fierce competitors, skipper Patrick Cripps (pictured) and Senior Coach Michael Voss, is they ‘get to’ lead this club at this challenging time.
Both fully understand that whilst the game is played against other teams, an opponent likely to be working as hard as they are, it is mostly against their own standards and expectations, against what's important (define reality) and what’s possible (give hope).
Leadership lives in these moments - defining the ‘what happened’, the brutal feedback the football world is giving them in all its unforgiving yet not unfamiliar reality. But they get to respond, deciding 'what now' and 'what next'. They get to give hope, the conversations only they get to have, the decisions only they get to make. They get to be with their teammates and coaches in the meeting rooms, then onto the training track, and very soon, they get to be back 'in the arena' playing the next game and honour the wonderful opportunities this game is giving them.
The scoreboard might speak one 'truth', but leadership demands we speak two: together, this is where we are, and together, this is where we can go.
Strong cultures result from shared struggle and learning, most often over lengthy periods, building cohesion and trust as individuals develop the confidence and capability to ask more challenging questions of themselves and each other, all in the context of the team. They reflect on their failings, try new approaches and experiment.
When the losses start to add up, everything can seem wrong. Australian cricket Captain Pat Cummins describes them wonderfully as the "four horsemen of poor performance - stress, anger, clutter and chaos."
Stress tightens our thinking. Anger narrows our vision. Clutter clouds our judgment. Chaos fragments our focus. These four horsemen don't arrive alone - they bring an entourage of voices all too ready to insert themselves into the conversation.
Leadership asks a lot of you in these moments, including the need to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously and be okay with that.
The role demands we hold steady while navigating uncertainty, even when that uncertainty demands personal reflection to self-assess what we are bringing as leader, which mostly sits hidden inside you and will require you to build an internal game strong enough to hold these contradictions, knowing we're only ever experienced, and therefore measured, by how we show up, amplified in times like these.
Rational and informed questioning of self isn't weakness, but a natural and essential response to leadership's inherent ambiguity, the reason we need leadership in the first place.
However, it is also important to recognise that leadership isn't indecision dressed up as wisdom. Some may mistake your openness to possibility as a lack of conviction. There will be pressure to simplify, to reduce complexity to soundbites and certainties.
The difference lives in understanding that this role, these challenges, even moments of doubt - they're not burdens to bear but opportunities to grow both yourself and your team, by meeting them where they are, and not expecting them to meet you where you are.
In those quiet moments, when the stadiums have emptied and when the decisions are made, leadership asks one final thing of you - to acknowledge that this work changes you. Not in the way that success or failure changes you, but in the way that embracing complexity changes you.
You'll develop what I came to understand as your leadership consciousness - not just what you know, but how you come to know it. Not just what you do, but how you come to do it. This isn't about perfection. It's about presence. About being willing to stay in the difficult moments long enough to find what they're trying to teach you.
Leadership will keep asking more of you. Each new level brings new contradictions to hold, new tensions to navigate. But you'll find, as Jurgen Klopp, the great Liverpool Manager, says, "The real joy isn't in having all the answers; it's in staying in love with the questions."
This is the real work of leadership. Not choosing between competing truths, but learning to hold them both. Not resolving every tension, but finding the wisdom within them. Not being certain, but being present.
It expects nothing less.
And everything more.
This is what it asks of us.
Play on.
My work builds on the belief that leadership is the defining characteristic of every great organisation or team.
You cannot outperform your leadership.
Our offering is designed for leaders who know that personal leadership effectiveness drives team and organisational performance and that there must be a better, more efficient and effective way to learn leadership.
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