Evolve Before You Have To: Leadership Lessons From Rugby's Greatest Coach

Implementing effective leadership lessons for clubs is the key to breaking free from the traditional "old boys club" mentality. When your organisation is searching for volunteer retention strategies, committees must look beyond their immediate circles. Embracing remote volunteering for associations allows busy professionals to handle digital tasks without burning out. Successful committee management requires leaders to balance hard database metrics with genuine club culture. Instead of waiting for a crisis, modernising clubs by implementing robust membership management software ensures your organisation is prepared to evolve before it has to, ultimately solving the age-old problem of how to find volunteers.

Before we get started, I need to make you two promises. First, this will be relevant and useful; you won't need to know a single thing about rugby union to find something valuable here. Second, this won't be a 2000-word saccharine love letter to the game they play in heaven. 

What You’ll Learn In This Article 

This article takes the masterclass leadership strategies of Johan "Rassie" Erasmus, the coach who pulled the South African Springboks from their lowest point to back-to-back World Cup victories, and applies them directly to running a membership organisation. You'll learn:

• How to break free from the "old boys club" mentality to find new volunteers.
• Why your committee must balance hard data with genuine emotion (club culture).
• Why the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset is a trap, and why you must improve and innovate before a crisis hits.

A Brief History Of A Massive Turnaround 

It is 2017, and the South African national rugby union side, the Springboks, has fallen to an all-time low. The two-time World Cup winners have dropped to a historic sixth in the world rankings. In the last three years, they have suffered their first-ever losses to Argentina, Japan, and Italy, and have recently endured their worst-ever defeat, a 57-0 thrashing against New Zealand. The headlines and news stories are scathing, with South African publications calling the team “shameful” and “frauds.”

Enter Johan “Rassie” Erasmus. In 2018, he took over as head coach and South Africa's Director of Rugby.

What happened next is nothing short of a masterclass in turning a failing organisation around. Under his leadership, the Springboks:

• Won back-to-back World Cups (2019 and 2023), becoming the only nation in history to ever win four titles.
• Handed the New Zealand side their largest-ever defeat. 
• Became the undisputed number-one-ranked team in the world and heavy favourites heading into the 2027 World Cup in Australia.

The headlines have changed from “shameful” to opponents declaring they are “dreading” facing a team that is “head and shoulders” above the rest of the world.

The question we should be asking is, how one man engineered this massive turnaround, and what we can learn from it. The fundamentals of this transformation are not about rugby techniques or specific game plans. This was engineered with clever management, careful planning, and empathetic leadership.

So, let's look at exactly what we can learn about running a membership organisation from rugby’s greatest coach.

Look Outside The "Old Boys Club" For Talent 

In South Africa, as in many rugby nations, including Australia, elite talent scouting historically occurred at only a few select private schools and universities in major cities. If the world's greatest young player was tearing up a field in Newcastle, just 90 minutes north of Sydney, they would literally never see a national scout at their game.

The old way of thinking was that if someone was good enough and dedicated enough, they would eventually find a way to get themselves to the right places to be seen. Rassie realised that was simply untrue, and it was costing the country massive amounts of undiscovered talent.

One of the first things he did when he became Director of Rugby was set up the Elite Player Development (EPD) program and the Mobi Unit. Long story short, suddenly Springbok talent scouts and coaching staff were visiting basically every tier of rugby across the country.

To use the Australian analogy again, whereas before you had to be playing for a prestigious Sydney school or uni to get noticed, there were now national scouts watching under-16s games at public schools in the equivalent of Coober Pedy or Mount Isa. This program has been wildly successful, with multiple current World Cup-winning players discovered entirely outside traditional pathways.

A perfect example is Makazole Mapimpi. At 27 (an age widely considered too old to start playing international rugby), he was playing for a semi-professional provincial team that was in administration. He was found by the EPD, and two years later, he became the first South African to ever score a try in a World Cup final. Great talent is out there if you just look. 

How to Find New Volunteers for Your Membership Organisation

Most membership organisations suffer from a chronic reliance on their own version of the "old boys club." The same three to five exhausted volunteers end up running everything, year after year. When they finally need to recruit new committee members, they only look within their immediate circle of friends or to the loudest voices at the AGM. 

The old way of thinking in clubs is exactly the same as the old rugby scouts; if a member is dedicated enough, they will simply put their hand up, take on a board role, and give up their Tuesday nights for the next five years. But just like in rugby, that isn't true. 

Finding new committee members or volunteers can be tough, and it is doubly tough if you are only pulling from a small pool of people. To truly broaden your horizons and find your own undiscovered talent, you need to change not just who you ask, but how you let them help. 

• Embrace Remote Volunteering: You no longer need to be sitting in the clubhouse to help run the club. A busy parent might not be able to attend an in-person meeting at 7:00 PM on a weeknight, but they might happily spend an hour on a Sunday afternoon updating your website, scheduling social media posts, or writing the monthly newsletter from their couch. Similarly, removing geographic limits means a passionate member living three hours away can easily serve as your digital secretary or treasurer. 
• Enable Micro-Volunteering: By using digital systems, you can shrink the time it takes to do the big jobs. If your organisation uses membership management software, processing renewals might only take 15 minutes a week. Suddenly, a busy member who only has bite-sized pockets of free time can take on a core committee role without burning out. 
• Target Different Demographics: By making volunteering flexible, you suddenly open the door to entirely new demographics. A younger member or university student might have zero interest in running the weekly meat tray raffle, but they will happily run your digital marketing or social media accounts as a way to build their resumes. 

Look, I’m not saying that all your volunteers should suddenly be 19 and four hours away from you. But by looking outside your usual areas for recruiting volunteers and applying that same mindset to recruiting new members, you can completely revitalise your club. If your organisation has historically been one specific demographic, break the pattern. Actively welcome women into traditionally male-dominated spaces or create genuine pathways for younger generations. Just like Rassie found world champions where no one else was looking, you may find some truly amazing, hard-working people who make your organisation even better. 

Balance Hard Data With Genuine Emotion

There are two distinct sides to how Rassie manages his team. 

The first is an obsession with data. When Rassie was playing for the Springboks in the late 90s, he would grab the tape of the game they had just played and sit down to watch it. While the rest of his teammates and coaches were at the pub, he would be doing rigorous video analysis, well before it was a common practice in the sport. He brought this extremely analytical, stat-focused approach with him as head coach, building strategies based on cold, calculating numbers.

Secondly, he balances this intense data focus with genuine emotional intelligence. He makes it his mission to understand the core of what makes a player who they are, and what their personal "why" is. He is famous for saying that he wants “the right people, not the best people” on his team and staff. 

Whether it’s openly weeping while recounting how Makazole Mapimpi lost his mother and both siblings in his teens, inspiring Pieter-Steph du Toit by telling him to picture his infant son behind the defensive line (leading to du Toit becoming infamous for tackling opponents so hard they are atomised on impact), or selecting Siya Kolisi as the Springbok captain; a now two-time World Cup winning captain who shies away from all praise and is almost pathologically focused on lifting up those around him. 

This combination of cold, calculating facts and raw, unfettered emotion is the engine that drives their success.

Balancing Club Culture With Membership Management Software

When it comes to running a club or association, committees often fall into the trap of leaning too far toward one side or the other. They are either all emotion (great club culture and community vibes, but disorganised, stressed, and losing money) or all data (incredibly efficient and well-funded, but sterile, corporate, and lacking any real soul).

Your organisation needs good data and strong strategies; you need to approach things from a calculating, factual place. But you cannot lose sight of why you are all there in the first place.

Say your treasurer is an absolute wizard on a spreadsheet and can balance a budget like nobody's business, but they are impossible to work with, belittle others, and make every meeting uncomfortable. Should they be there? Remember Rassie’s rule: you want the right people, not just the best people. You want your organisation to be a supportive place where everyone has a genuine passion for what you are doing. It doesn’t matter if it’s under-11s football, 80s muscle cars, or furthering the field of radiology. If someone is only there for the power trip that being on a committee gives them, or doesn’t actually care about helping the community improve, they are going to do more harm than good, no matter how great their technical skills are.

To build a truly sustainable organisation, you need to balance both sides:

• The Hard Data: You need the numbers to survive. You must know your membership renewal rates, track your event attendance, monitor engagement, and understand your financials. This is where digital systems and membership management software like Member Jungle come into play. You need a system that effortlessly tracks the cold, hard data so you can make informed data-based decisions about the future of your organisation.
• The Genuine Emotion: A spreadsheet won't convince a volunteer to spend their Sunday morning setting up for an event, and data won't make a new member feel welcome. You need the emotional hook. You have to actively foster community, remind your committee members why their hard work matters, and keep your culture and shared passion alive.

Ultimately, the goal is to stop treating data and emotion as opposing forces. They are meant to work together. Let your digital systems do the heavy lifting on the analytical side; tracking the numbers, processing the renewals, and balancing the books. This frees you up to be the emotional core of your organisation. When you let the software handle the calculating, you actually have the time and energy left to focus on the people. That is how you build a culture that members want to join and a committee that volunteers never want to leave.

Evolve Before You Have To

Rassie has become famous for completely innovating how the game is played. He turned the bench from a waiting area for second-stringers into a key tactical weapon and a genuine honour. He pioneered the 6:2 and 7:1 splits, hybrid players, blind rucking, midfield mauls, deliberately too short kicks, double-throwing at lineouts, deploying the "Bomb Squad" in the first half, hiring a former referee as staff, and creating a backline defence that is a literal optical illusion. 

Okay, so I did make one of those up, but you don’t know which one.

The real point here isn’t just that he innovates, but when he innovates. He makes massive changes even when his team is already on top.

After the Springboks won the 2019 World Cup, they didn't just run the same playbook back. Rassie made massive changes to the side, altering the way they attacked, the way they kicked, and how they controlled games. This meant the team that won the 2023 World Cup was vastly better than the one from four years earlier.

There was no resting on their laurels after the 2023 victory, either. Rassie brought in a new attack coach and turned their offensive structure on its head. By 2025, a team already feared as one of the best defensive sides in world rugby had transformed into one of the best attacking teams as well.

They evolve well before they have to. At no point has a single member of that coaching staff or team said, "We are the best” or “We are perfect." There is a constant drive to tear down and rebuild their own successful systems so they are never left behind.

How to Future-Proof Your Membership Organisation

There is a real tendency not just in managing a membership organisation but in life in general to leave things as they are if they are working. There is a reason there are so many sayings along the lines of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, “don’t mess with success”, “Leave well enough alone,” “Let sleeping dogs lie”, “Don’t re-invent the wheel” or any other number of idioms.  

While there is definitely logic in those, particularly the dog one, if you take it literally, they are not a recipe for achieving long-term success or building a sustainable club. 

When running a membership organisation, “doing things the way they've always been done” is simply not a good strategy. Unfortunately, most organisations wait until they are in a crisis before innovating. This creates a vicious cycle: everything is working fine, so they change nothing; things slowly take a downward turn; when things finally look dire, they panic and innovate; things start going well again, and the cycle repeats.

Clubs waited until their member numbers were really dwindling to get a website. Then they waited until that website was basically useless to upgrade it. They waited until their volunteers were completely burned out to get a membership management system. And right now, many of them will wait until their websites are getting almost no traffic before starting to optimise for AI search engines.

To run a truly successful organisation, you need to evolve before you have to; innovate while you’re ahead. 

If your current manual membership renewal process is working right now because you have two incredibly dedicated volunteers handling it, that's great. But what happens when they retire? Don't wait for the system to break to modernise it. If you implement a digital system like Member Jungle while things are stable, you actually have the breathing room to train people properly without the stress of a crisis. Right now, not using AI to make running your organisation easier might be working fine, but there will come a time when ignoring it will cost you massive amounts of wasted time and leave your club miles behind the curve.

If your club is currently thriving, that is the exact moment you should be looking at how to reinvent your member experience, try new event types, or upgrade your digital presence. Evolving from a position of strength means you are steering the ship; waiting until you are forced to change means you are just desperately trying to stop it from sinking.

The Cost of Complacency

In 2015, the New Zealand All Blacks had won back-to-back World Cups and were the most successful international sports team in any sport. In 2017, as I mentioned earlier, they handed the Springboks their worst-ever defeat. However, they have only won three out of their last ten games against the Springboks, and two of those defeats have been the worst losses the All Blacks have ever suffered: a 35 to 7 loss in England in 2023, and a 43 to 10 loss in New Zealand in 2025.

At the risk of really upsetting the Kiwis, I think you could write another article just like this, listing the ways that complacency let the New Zealand All Blacks slip from that number-one spot. The All Blacks were on top and didn’t innovate, so now they are playing catch-up. The Springboks, on the other hand, have been innovating even when they are on top, and because of that, this era of Springbok dominance might just prove to outlast the previous era of All Black dominance.

My point is that success is not a permanent state. In the world of club management, you can be the most popular, well-funded, and stable organisation in your community today. But if you stop looking for ways to improve, if you stop recruiting new demographics, fail to balance your data with emotion, and refuse to upgrade your systems, you will eventually find yourself playing catch-up to the clubs that did.

Don't wait until your organisation has suffered its own version of a "worst-ever defeat" to start making changes. Keep moving forward, look outside your usual circles, and always evolve before you have to.

If you are not a sports fan and you are still here reading this, thank you for sticking with it. I hope the lessons were helpful and that I didn’t spend too long in the sporting weeds. If you are a rugby fan and you are currently furious with me for oversimplifying things, failing to mention Ireland or France, or for my assessment of the All Blacks, I can only apologise. This was never the time or place for a detailed rugby debate. 

The Key Takeaways 

If you only remember three things from this article, make it these:

• Look beyond your usual circles: Stop relying on the same exhausted volunteers. Embrace remote and micro-volunteering to attract entirely new demographics to your committee.
• Let software do the maths, so you can focus on the people: Balance cold, hard data with genuine emotional intelligence. Let digital systems handle the spreadsheets and renewals so you can focus on building a supportive club culture.
• Evolve before you have to: "Because we’ve always done it this way" is a dangerous mindset. Upgrade your tech, rethink your events, and innovate while your club is thriving, not when it's sinking.

If you are looking for practical ways to apply this new mindset to your committee and protect your current team from exhaustion, check out How To Retain Volunteers & Prevent Burnout In 2026.

Or, if you are ready to evolve your club's administration before you hit a crisis and want to know exactly how the technology works, have a read of What Is Membership Management Software For Nonprofits? - All Your Questions Answered.