Conflict is important, but a leader must know how to manage it: John Buchanan

Australia's World Cup-winning coach John Buchanan (centre) seen here with former captain Ricky Ponting and former chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch. Buchanan says Ponting shared his philosophy of leadership, of wanting to perform the very best all the time for Australia and for himself

John Buchanan has a CV that boasts of two ODI World Cup wins (in 2003 and 2007), three Ashes series wins, and a 70:19 win loss ratio in the 89 Test matches he coached Australia (16 among them consecutive wins). But asked to pick his favourite moment in cricket, the lanky 71-year-old opts for none of those. “It’s coaching Queensland to the first Sheffield League title,” he says. “You could say that, within the Australian team, we created a lot of firsts. But that [Sheffield Shield] was pretty important to me.” 

A close second, Buchanan adds, would be his first Test match as a coach in his home city of Brisbane. “I’d always dreamt of wearing the Baggy Green (Australia’s Test cap) but never got to. To march out on the field and sing the national anthem in front of my family was pretty special,” he says.

Buchanan—often called Ned Flanders for his resemblance to the character in the sitcom The Simpsons—stepped down from the Australian team after the 2007 World Cup victory. His subsequent assignments weren’t much to write home about, especially with the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) at the IPL where he was sacked after two seasons. “I didn’t deal with it [and a failed stint with Middlesex] well at that time, but later saw them as learning experiences,” he says. 

Now, Buchanan channels his know-how of the high-octane world of elite sports into being a business and leadership coach through his company, Buchanan Success Coaching. Along with it, he holds the India master franchisee for Ready Steady Go Kids. an Australian multi-sport programme (for children between 1.5 and six years). Recently in Mumbai to launch it in collaboration with CP Goenka International School, he sat down for an exclusive chat with Forbes India to share his learnings on leadership, coaching an era-defining team, and his fractious relationship with a few players. Edited excerpts:  

Q. You are one of the most successful national coaches ever. But your stint was initially written off, because you had never played for Australia. How did you deal with the backlash? 
By the time I started with the Australian team, I’d had five years of coaching Queensland as a head coach and one unsuccessful season at Middlesex, so those had given me a solid grounding in terms of my coaching ability. I was never concerned about my lack of playing experience when I became the coach of Australia, because I'd already been through that with Queensland—I played one first-class season for Queensland 16 years before I started coaching the team. Yet, when I applied for the role, I believed I was going to bring something different to coaching. In those five years of coaching Queensland, it reaffirmed a number of things in my thinking about what coaching could be. There was always criticism [when it came to Australia], and certainly some inside the team, because, again, some of them still firmly believed you needed to have worn the Baggy Green to be able to coach them. In fact, that's the way most sports were done and are still done, where you've got a long pedigree of playing sports preceding a coaching stint. I won't disagree with that. But, in the end, you still have to be able to communicate with people, lead them, have a vision, challenge them, create the right environments.

Q. Despite the criticism, you have two World Cups, three Ashes series and a 70:19 win-loss ratio in Tests for the team you were coaching. What stirred the team to such great heights?
My job was to create an environment that was always going to challenge individuals and the team. But important to that was my relationship to the captain—and the captains I had were Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting for the most part, and a bit of Adam Gilchrist. I had a very good relationship with all the three gents. Steve Waugh’s mantra was taking the road less travelled, for me, it was about changing the game. So, we had the same sort of philosophy. Ricky Ponting, too, was very much the same, very much about wanting Australia and wanting himself to perform at their very best all the time. And Adam Gilchrist as well. Those sort of elements coming together meant that, as a group, we were always able to challenge ourselves. 

The last game where I was the coach for Australia was the 2007 World Cup final in Barbados. And one of the journos at the time asked me, “As a coach you always talked about coaching a perfect game—have you ever done that?” And I said never, although, at times I’ve gone close. But I did say we had the perfect players, those who wanted to improve themselves all the time. And that was my job… to keep bringing that out.

Q. The batch you coached was the glitterati of world cricket. How did you handle them? 
It comes back to what any leader should do with their staff or their team. First, you try to get to know each of the players as well as you possibly can, because that gives you an idea about how they think, how they tick, what's important to them. It's up to the player to let you into their life as much as they want. Obviously some don’t, so I'd find it through other people.

Q. How? 
For example, I brought in an American baseball coach to help us with fielding skills. I brought him because, while we had the same sort of philosophy and thinking, he had a completely different style to me. And so that meant he was able to talk to players who wouldn't necessarily open up to me. He was a bit of an insomniac, so he'd be knocking on their doors late at night. And I could talk to him to know about players who I couldn’t talk to myself.

Also read: Trust and authenticity make a leader: Eoin Morgan

Q. You’ve faced challenges to your methods. For instance, Shane Warne wasn't someone who would agree with you. As a leader, how does one handle conflict within a team? 
First, I think conflict is important. If you don’t have conflict, then you have either created an environment of fear where nobody speaks up, or you have many people that are exactly the same. A conflict to me is really important because it means people will challenge. One of the key jobs for a coach is to make sure that conflict is well managed, that it doesn't sit there and fester, because that will eventually fragment the team. 

Q. Does this mean you’d sit with Warne to sort it out?
Look, that door was always open—whether he wanted to walk through the door or not is another question. But he would be one of those people that I know, that if I went to my assistant coach, or the American baseball guy or the strength and conditioning guy or the physio—anyone who was in tune with what I was thinking—the messages would come through subliminally and also go back the same way. And that’s the same for any leader in any business—there are going to be those who don’t agree and they’ve got to find a way to make sure that they, if not 100 percent on their side, are not going to be totally resistant. 

Q. When you try to introduce new ideas to an organisation, how do you bring people on the same page? 
I'll give you one example. In 2005, we lost the Ashes, so I had to go back and justify to the board why I should still be the coach. I painted them a picture of what the next 20 months would look like, where my vision was to win an ICC trophy, regain the Ashes and then win the World Cup. Along the way, I said we’re going to be the first team to score 400 in an ODI. All the players were kicked and said they wanted to be a part of it. 

A month or so later, in another team meeting, they suddenly asked, “Hang on, how are we going to do that?” So, I went back to the data and showed them that when we score an innings total of 340 or 350, on an average we score from 50 percent of the deliveries—that’s 150 out of the 300—why don’t we use 10 percent more? Then, in another meeting down the line, the players asked me: “Coach, we’re using all our skills at the moment, how to use more to score from the additional 10 percent?” So, I showed them how by improving the basics we could do that. Like, running between the wickets. We literally trained guys with channels to run straight on the pitch. We brought in a specialist coach in Dean Jones, because he was a fabulous runner.  

Gradually, the players began to work out a couple of methods themselves about scoring differently. I remember Ricky Ponting used to have a beautiful cover drive, but then he said he could drop his back leg a little bit to gradually hit over the top of cover—that would help him score more runs of the same deliveries or score more often.
 
Yes, there's always resistance to change. As a leader and a coach, you're a change agent, so people are going to resist. The players would often say you’re making the game too complicated because you want different things. Well, if we kept doing what we're doing, that's where we're going to stay. But if we want to climb Everest, we’ve got to do things differently. 

Q. You’ve had a stint with Middlesex, another with KKR in the IPL, neither of which were too successful. How did you deal with those failures?
Not well at the time [laughs]... it’s never great being sacked. But they were learning experiences in the end. One of the key elements that led [to the failures] is the opposite of what I said I had with Waugh or Ponting… at Middlesex or KKR, I didn't establish a close-enough relationship with the captains, Mark Ramprakash and Sourav Ganguly, respectively. Mark and I didn’t see eye to eye about how things needed to be done, while I told Sourav that, while he was a very good player, the T20 game had passed him by. I said the same thing to Ponting, and while he didn’t like that, he agreed, while Sourav obviously didn’t agree with that. I guess I kind of knew from my conversations with Greg Chappell [former India coach] that, in India, if you cross an icon, you have a pretty limited life span as a coach.   

Q. How would you assess your legacy in cricket?
I think one of the ways is that when I began to look around, not only in Australian cricket but world cricket, there are so many players that came out of our ear that have gone back into coaching. So, hopefully, some of the things that they do will be a reflection on their time in our group. The other is always simply the fact that the coach always is like a parent who always hopes that they've made a difference in everybody's life.