Justin Langer: From sport to life, embracing values and character is a signature move for good leadership

A senior coach I’m working with in India told me a story this week that I haven’t been able to shake. He pointed out something so simple, it felt obvious the moment he said it, but I had never heard it described as he so eloquently did. Bharat Arun told me, “Every person on earth has different handwriting, but many of us are writing with the same alphabet.” He said, “Twenty-six letters in the English (Latin) alphabet, written by billions of hands, and yet not one signature is the same” My friend’s message wasn’t about language; he was making a point about leadership and coaching. In sport, in business, in families and in life, fundamentals don’t change, even though the style of the individual achieving those basics does. Look at the AFL right now. Of the 18 teams, six senior coaches have won premierships, while twelve are going to work every day looking to fulfil that dream. All have the same ambitions, and think they know the formula, yet you would struggle to find a collection of men who are more different from each other. Take Chris Fagan at the Lions, who has just delivered back-to back flags. He is process oriented and calm as a country dam. Craig McRae at Collingwood, looks all warmth and humour and sounds more like a favourite uncle than a senior footy coach. Luke Beveridge seems to keep his cards close to his chest and his footy unconventional. Chris Scott has been at Geelong since 2010 and has built one of the most quietly relentless cultures in professional sport. If you put their press conferences side by side, you’d swear they were running different jobs. They’re not. They’re “writing the same letters” but with different signatures. Then take Craig Bellamy from the NRL. More than two decades at Melbourne Storm. Multiple premierships and a record stack of Dally M Coach of the Year awards. He is has had one of the great coaching careers in Australian sport. And yet this season, his Storm are 2-6 with a six-game losing streak, the worst start of his entire career. Suddenly his reputation is being questioned, and we read about a couple of newer coaches who are presently being lauded because their teams have won a few games this season. Another great coach, US baseball and throwing coach Mike Young, who worked for over a decade with the Australian cricket team, used to tell us all the time, “We confuse two things constantly; reputation and character.” “Reputation moves on results. Character doesn’t.” Watch how Bellamy is showing up. No blaming officials, no blaming injuries. He stepped aside this month from his NSW State of Origin advisory role to give everything to Melbourne. Same standards. Same intensity. Same demanding, deeply caring man he’s been since 2003. Consider that he has also been quietly battling a neurodegenerative disorder that was this week diagnosed after weeks of tests and you understand his character. His signature hasn’t changed. The scoreboard has, presently, but does that mean the basic principles of his success have? No they haven’t and because of this I am sure, the scoreboard might be keeping him awake at night, but you can be certain his character isn’t. Reputation can be as fickle as the scoreboard. It’s the share price, the last election cycle, the most recent grand final. Reputation can be volatile, it’s external, and it can swing a long way in a short time. Win three-in-a-row and the same coach who was “out of his depth” a year ago is suddenly a “mastermind.” Lose three in a row and yesterday’s mastermind is a dead man walking. But character is something else entirely. Character is about who you are when no one’s clapping. When the champagne bottles are being replaced by reflection and soul-searching. It is the way you treat all your people from the kit man to the captain. The conversation with the player you’ve just dropped. The call you make when no one is watching. The way you speak about others when they are not in the room. Reputation is what others write about you. Character is what you write yourself, every day, in every small choice. One is loaned to you by the world. The other belongs to you. The same could be said for measuring people by what they earn instead of what they contribute. Their bank balance is reputation by another name, an external scoreboard that fluctuates with markets, with contracts, with luck. The real measure of a person, in any field, is what they contribute to their craft. The teacher who shapes a generation. The coach who builds people, not just teams. The tradie whose work outlasts them by decades. The carpenter who cares whether the back of the cupboard is finished as well as the front. The musician who keeps practising long after the crowd has gone home. None of that shows up in a payslip. All of it shows up in the lives of the people they’ve touched. Think about Adam Gilchrist in the 2003 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka. He nicked one through to the keeper. The umpire gave him not out. He walked anyway. At the time he copped it from some, Australia was chasing a final, you don’t give your wicket away, what was he thinking. Others applauded his actions. Two decades on, Gilly’s walk is one of the most-told stories in our sporting history. The reputation took a short-term hit. The character compounded. And I am certain Gilly sleeps sound at night knowing his character is as solid as granite. I’ve come to believe after a few decades of coaching, sitting in board rooms and raising kids, that great leaders protect their character, not their reputation. They know reputation will rise and fall. They’ve made peace with that. What they refuse to compromise is the alphabet they’re working with. Alphabet of leadership? What are the letters that don’t change, regardless of style? After years of watching this up close, a handful of things show up every time. Care for people, deeply and without performance. Honesty, especially when honesty costs you something. Courage to make the hard call early instead of the easy call late. Humility to learn faster than the room. Discipline that’s so embedded it looks like talent. A standard that doesn’t move when the pressure does. Those are the letters, how you write them is as distinct as your fingerprints and it is up to you what they look like. Some leaders are loud. Some are so quiet you have to lean in. Some lead with humour, some with precision, some with relentless work rate, some with vision so clear it pulls people forward like a current. The handwriting varies. The alphabet doesn’t. I see this most clearly in the boardroom. The best chairs and CEOs I’ve sat with don’t share a personality type. They share a foundation. One will dominate the room with sheer presence; another will say six sentences in two hours and shift the whole meeting. The best teams I’ve ever been part of, whether playing, coaching or governing, were not made up of identical people. They were made up of complementary ones. Someone who’ll set the standard. Someone who’ll lighten the room when the standard gets heavy. Someone who’ll ask the question no one else will. Someone who’ll do the unglamorous work that makes the glamorous work possible. Take any of them out and the team gets thinner. If everyone on your team writes in the same hand, you don’t have a team, you have a robot. Get this distinction right and a lot of leadership noise quietens down. We stop trying to clone the last winner. We stop panicking when the scoreboard turns. We stop apologising for not being someone else’s version of a leader. We get clearer about the basics, and freer about the style. The senior coach who told me this story has had a long career and seen plenty of trophies come and go. What’s struck me about him isn’t the silverware. It’s that he treats the person making the coffee exactly the same as the way he treats the chairman. Same alphabet. Same hand. Every day. That’s a leader. That’s a parent. That’s a teammate. That’s a person worth following. Reputation will rise and fall. Let it. But the same letters underneath; integrity, clarity, courage, care — are what we should be looking at because with those the scoreboard will invariably turn in your favour more times than not.