BOK FEATURE: The Siya quotes and lessons that sum up his successful leadership

Siya Kolisi will celebrate his landmark 100th Springbok cap in South Africa’s seismic battle with France in Paris on Saturday and everyone knows he is not done yet.

As he said in an interview with supersport.com last year, and nothing would have changed since then, he feels he has another World Cup in him - and would love to complete the three-peat by leading his team to victory in Australia in 2027.

There are several aspects of Kolisi that contribute to his outstanding record as captain and they are listed below through his own explanations and quotes to make up a useful pointer for people interested in leading or in the subject of leadership.

HUMILITY AND WILLINGNESS TO LET OTHERS SHARE LEADERSHIP

His humility and his willingness to delegate and let others lead has always been one of Kolisi’s biggest strengths. It was something that was writ large in his very first game as Bok captain, when England scored early tries at Ellis Park to race to a 20 point lead in even fewer minutes.

It was also Erasmus’ first big game as coach, and it looked like the Boks were going to make a disastrous start to the new era, remembering too that they had narrowly lost what was essentially an exhibition test match to Wales in Washington the week before.

“I had no idea what to do. So I had to look to Duane (Vermeulen) and all the other guys who were on the field at that time,” said Kolisi in a podcast with the then WP high performance coach and former Blitzbok captain Kyle Brown (The Leading Conversation) a few years ago.

“I don’t speak much. I am not the type of guy that will do those Any Given Sunday speeches before a match. I have started reading the Bible because it is something that means a lot to me. Each team has a theme of the week and I will try and find a verse that works for me in that regard. I started doing it with the Springboks that day we beat the All Blacks for the first time (in 2018).

“The guys know what type of player I am and what type of leader I am. I have always been asked to just go ‘beast mode’ because they feel that that is the way they prefer to follow me. They know that I don’t like speaking a lot. I use the guys around me in the team as well. There are a lot of guys who have leadership skills as well in the teams that I play in.

“Some guys just want to take everything onto themselves and if it doesn’t work, then who do they look to? I preferred shared leadership. To be honest, not everybody responds in the same way to the leader. There are some times that they respond to a different style of leadership.

For example, Dillyn Leyds might respond better to Steven Kitshoff than me. I don’t mind that, it doesn’t scare me because I know what I am about and what I want to do.

“If I am feeling early in a game that I am not myself, I will go to tell somebody that I trust and that I know will be able to help me out. They will tell me to take the pressure off my plate and just to make a few tackles because they know that’s what gets me back to where I need to be.

"Then I will take back the leadership. I am not scared to say when I am struggling. I see that as one of my strong points.”


CALMNESS UNDER PRESSURE

“MostIy I will always tell guys to calm down and look at what is working and what is not working. Luckily we have different leaders for different parts of the field – breakdown, lineouts and all that kind of stuff – if something is not working, I will look to the other leaders to tell us what the solution is.”

HUNGER

His hunger to lead the Boks, which was whetted in 2018, remains strong, and that determination is one of the several defining aspects of his successful reign that has led to two back to back RWC titles. His determination and hunger was obvious in a podcast interview he did with supersport.com before last year’s series against Ireland that kicked off this World Cup cycle.

“All I can say honestly is that as long as I still have an opportunity to still pull on the green and gold jersey that is all that matters. There are very few people that can wake up or dream that they want to be Bok captain.

"It has been an absolute honour and I have loved every single moment of it, tough though it has been, but all I want to do is wear the jersey. It doesn’t matter if I am captain or not. There are some amazing leaders in the group, so I am happy to just be part of the group.”

“Yes, I can make another World Cup, and so can some of the other players who have been part of the last two World Cups, I still feel good.

"If I am not injured I feel like I can go (until 2027). And so can some of the other players who have been part of winning the last two World Cups. It is all about what we can do on the field, but playing in the next World Cup is the plan.”

SELFLESSNESS

One of the defining characteristics of the eight seasons and counting that Kolisi has been leading the Boks has been his selflessness, all of which was inspired by a meeting with the Bok coach when he was first chosen as leader.

“Rassie pointed out to me you can change the future of other kids who will realise they don’t have to suffer like you have suffered. He said he didn’t want my success from what we get as a team to be about me alone.

"I believe in our country and that if every single person who has a platform that can be used to help the country and help others, they should use it.

“That is what I want to do. All the achievement in rugby needs to be channeled towards helping other people. Maybe they are people I don’t know. That is how we make South Africa better.”

Kolisi reckons the Bok coach summed up the mission of the team perfectly in the closing episode of Chasing the Sun 2, the docuseries on South Africa’s second successive World Cup triumph and the follow up on the first series, which focused on the first win in Japan.

“The message at the end where Rassie explained what the whole idea of doing Chasing the Sun was about was very strong. Where he said that our mission, what we want to explain as a team, shouldn’t only end on the field, it should be with us every single day.

"What we go through as a group and a country, the different challenges we face and overcome, there are a lot of positive we can focus on and cling to.

“It is basically about focusing on finding solutions rather than focusing on the problems. For us we are in an incredibly privileged position of being able to do what we love and in so doing be able to control the whole country’s mood through our exploits.

"That we are all from different walks of life and yet were able to come together successfully to achieve a common goal that is bigger than all of us was the big thing in Rassie’s message.

“We are black guys, we are white guys, we are English guys and Afrikaans guys, there are Xhosa guys in the group and Zulus in the group, there are also Sothos.

"We had to find a way to work together towards a common goal which was to make South Africa proud but at the same time, in doing that, understand that we all have our own ways of living, our own different culture.

Some things work for some of the guys, but not for others. A person needs to get an understanding in that situation that what works for him might not work for others.”

RESPOND WELL TO CRITICISM AND DON’T BE SENSITIVE

There is no place for sensitivity to criticism in a high performance environment like the one that Kolisi works with under Erasmus at the Boks and the direct honesty that he gives his teammates is a tone set by his coach.

“You would have seen in Chasing the Sun that there were some hard conversations between myself, Duane (Vermeulen) and Eben, because at the end of the day you have to be moving towards the same goal and put differences aside and find a way to work together.

“I am just glad that through Chasing the Sun people can see that becoming a Springbok is not easy and not for everyone, you have to go through a lot. You get challenged, taken to places you’ve never been to before. You have hard conversations. Like after the Ireland game in the World Cup.

“When Rassie said ‘Siya is not the only thing to come out of South Africa’ it made me ask questions about myself. I started thinking, is he saying that because he thinks that I think I am too big.  Am I acting differently?

"It gave me a moment to pause and think about whether I was being the best teammate I could be. Am I humble, am I putting myself up above everybody else.

“Those things (interactions) are tough and a lot of people wouldn’t be able to take that. But he (Rassie) knows exactly when you do need those hard words, a reminder to check yourself. Also a whole nation is depending on you and their hopes are on your shoulders. So we have to keep ourselves in check.

“When Rassie spoke about his team for the quarterfinals my name wasn’t in the team, Eben’s name wasn’t in the team, Duane wasn’t in the team. So all I did then was say ‘Okay, I am going to show you, I am going to show that I am better than you think I am’. Whereas some people would just give up and become negative.

“What I liked about that was that the guys just got together and started to build each other up, started to work towards making ourselves a better team, to show we are not arrogant and we know South Africa is more important than us. The Bok team is more important than my goals and my personal dreams.”

MENTAL STRENGTH

The Boks won the three play-off games at the last World Cup by a solitary point, but the mental strength advertised by those results didn’t just come about as if someone had waved a magic wand.

“When it comes to our mental strength, it’s all about the hard work we do before we get into tight situations. We work flipping hard. That is what we are majoring in, the hard work and the physicality, both things being a given for us. And never giving up.

"I remember we were at a camp for three weeks in Cape Town where Felix (Jones) and the other coaches started talking about chasing lost causes. No matter whether it looks like it is going to be a try to the opposition, don't stop chasing. That was our mentality at the World Cup in France.

“It has been like that for many of us in our lives too. Jacques (Nienaber) said we mustn’t let others script our movies for us, that most of us shouldn’t be where we are today given what it took for us to get there.

"I could have given up when I was young, and a lot of the other guys as well. I could easily have just said ‘You know what, this is how it is going to be, I will stop now’.

“But no, we chose to stick with it, we chose to go to training when the fields were a bit thorny and you played bare foot because you didn’t have shoes.

"That is why when Rassie spoke in 2019, he said we picked you because maybe there are better guys than you when it comes to playing rugby, but what you bring through is that you are the right people for this group. The stuff you bring through makes you get to where you are, and it helps you when you get to the gutter to get up and keep on fighting.”

BEING ALL INCLUSIVE WITH THE SQUAD

“Sometimes you have doubts but it is not over until it is over. That is one of our sayings, it is not over until it is over. That is the kind of team that we are. It doesn’t matter who we playing, when it gets tough or it looks like we are not going to win we just focus on the job we need to do because worrying about the scoreboard will not get you to where you want to go.

“You just keep pounding the rock until something goes right. That World Cup semifinal in Paris was one game that really brought through the concept of rugby being a 23-man sport. The reserves came on and made it clear they would win it for us. And they did.

"That’s the beauty of our team and our attitude, when you get subbed you know that is happening because the player replacing you on the field can take it to another level.”

SURVIVING HARDSHIPS TOUGHENS AND CREATES WINNERS

Kolisi never had it easy as a youngster and he is not the only member of the Springbok winning group from the past few years who became successful by coming through hard, tough times. The same is true of the Boks as a squad, with what they faced down to win Covid impacted British and Irish Lions series in 2021 being an intensely difficult apprenticeship for what has followed.

"That was a different challenge. The amount of positive Covid tests we had made it crazy. Before the first game I was with the team for the first time on the Monday before the first test. It wasn’t just me, but Handre (Pollard) and a couple of the guys too. We couldn’t train, we were sitting in a hotel room. You could only cycle by yourself. It was crazy.

“We were doing gym sessions in our bedrooms off computers by doing exercises with your chairs and bed. But the one thing we said as a group was that we would not make an excuse afterwards.

"We said if we lose we won’t make excuses because if you put on the jersey and you accept it when they present it to you and you go and play, people expect to see the Springboks. Not Springboks who have had Covid or Springboks that have been lying in bed.

“We are too proud a nation and there have been far more difficult things people have faced down in this country. We were still getting our meals, we still had our gym downstairs where we could cycle. We didn’t want to make excuses.

"We wanted to win and we believed we could win. That belief comes from the time the coaches and management show their belief in you by putting their trust in you. That takes away all your doubts and excuses and focuses you just on what you need to do.”