A man arrived at a Sydney Swans training session at Homebush and could not catch a football. He had never played AFL. He was 25 years old. A Canadian rugby union player who had represented his country at the World Cup and scored a try against the All Blacks, he had been playing professionally in France when his coach suggested he try Australian rules. The Swans watched him fumble through the session and still put him on the rookie list.
Kieren Jack was standing on that oval. He remembers thinking: are we really going to pick this bloke? Kieren went on to play 256 games and is in the Hall of Fame. Mike Pike played 120 games and was pivotal in the 2012 premiership. The Sydney Swans, meanwhile, have missed the finals. Jack’s count: four times in 25 years, in a league built around equalisation, salary caps, and giving the worst teams the best draft picks. None of that should make sustained finals football possible. Unless, of course, you are selecting for something the draft cannot measure.
The argument I want to make is straightforward. Most organisations believe they hire for character and develop for capability. What they actually do is hire for demonstrated performance and hope the character follows. The Sydney Swans inverted that model deliberately, consistently, and with measurable results over a quarter of a century. The lesson for senior leaders is not inspirational. It is structural.
What the Draft Actually Measures
The AFL national draft is the most sophisticated talent identification system in Australian sport. Combine testing, psychological profiling, footage analysis across years of competition, interviews with families, school records. Clubs spend millions identifying which 18-year-olds are most likely to perform at the elite level. And yet Kieren Jack, draft pick 138, played 256 games.
The system is good at measuring what has already been demonstrated: speed over 20 metres, aerobic capacity, disposal efficiency under pressure. It is almost useless at measuring what a person will do when told they are not good enough. What they will do at five in the morning on a Tuesday in July. What they will do when the coach they trusted retires and the system that supported them is rebuilt around someone else.
Most recruitment and promotion processes inside organisations have the same structural flaw. They measure the resume, the interview performance, the track record in conditions that existed before this role. What they cannot measure is what that person will build when the conditions change, when the support is removed, when the role turns out to be harder than the brief described.
The Character Standard Is Held or It Isn’t
What made the Sydney Swans sustainable across 25 years was not just that they valued character. It was that they operationalised it. Paul Roos, the coach who built the culture, recruited against it as a standard, not as an aspiration. When Mike Pike could not catch a football but had the physical profile and, more importantly, the disposition to learn, the club picked him and built the rest around craft.
Jack tells it directly: the senior players at Sydney when he arrived in 2005, the year they had won the premiership, were talented yes. But they were so hard working. And that standard was modelled constantly. Brett Kirk. Jude Bolton. Jared Crouch, who mentored Jack in the specific craft of tagging elite forwards. Not coaching staff. Senior players. People who had done it, who had the results to show for it, who could demonstrate the standard rather than describe it.
The mentor programme was not a nice thing Sydney did for young players. It was a performance system. It carried the character standard from one generation to the next without requiring the head coach to hold it alone. The standard became self-sustaining because the people who embodied it stayed long enough to pass it on.
When No One Carries the Standard
Most high-performance cultures in business erode not because the values change but because the transmission breaks. Senior leaders who hold the standard move on. New people come in selected against criteria that look right on paper. The culture drifts. Not dramatically. Gradually. Until one day you look around the leadership team and realise the eyeball test fails. Not everyone there would make the cut against the original standard.
Jack describes the pre-game huddle as the moment you find out whether the transmission worked. You look around the room and either trust is there, or it isn’t. That 2012 team, a group of offcuts, traded players, and rookie list picks with one top five selection across the squad, passed that test. They knew their roles. They trusted each other. They had been built that way.
The 2018 West Coast Eagles won the premiership. By 2023 they had the wooden spoon. Jack, now in an executive role at the club, talks carefully about what happened. The commitment to win now is understandable. Every leader faces the pressure of results in the short term. But when that pressure causes you to extend players past their window, to delay regeneration, to prioritise this year’s finals campaign over next year’s list health, the compounding costs arrive faster than most organisations expect.
How to Hold the Standard
This is not an argument for ignoring talent. It is an argument for treating character as the primary filter, not the secondary check.
Three moves worth considering.
First, build explicit criteria for the character standard before you assess anyone against it. What does the person who embodies your culture actually look like in behaviour, not values? How do they behave when things go wrong? How do they behave when they are told no? What do they do with feedback that is uncomfortable? If you cannot describe it in observable terms, you cannot select for it.
Second, protect the senior players who model the standard. The instinct when performance drops is to move experienced people on and accelerate young talent. Sometimes that is right. Often it strips the transmission mechanism. Before you move someone on, ask what they are carrying that is not yet in anyone else.
Third, audit your selection decisions against character data, not just capability data. When you review a hire or promotion that did not work out, what was the character signal you had before the decision? Was it absent, or did you have it and discount it? The pattern across most organisations is the second one.
The Question Worth Sitting With
The Sydney Swans built something sustainable because they were willing to pass on players who looked right on paper and back people who looked wrong on paper but carried the thing that actually compounds over time.
Most organisations could do the same. Most don’t.
Who in your current team would not make the cut against your character standard? And what are you doing about it?
If this question is landing for your leadership team, Performance Intelligence works with organisations to build the systems and behaviours that make high performance repeatable. From diagnostic assessment through to embedded leadership development, the work starts with getting honest about what your organisation is actually selecting for, and building the systems to hold that standard.
Explore our corporate programs
Enquire about Andrew’s keynote
About the Author
Andrew May is a mental skills coach, leadership advisor, keynote speaker, and author. As founder and CEO of Performance Intelligence, he works with senior executives and high-performing teams across Australian business, elite sport, and the Australian Defence Force to build the systems, culture, and mindset that make high performance sustainable. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Exercise Physiology and a Master’s in Coaching Psychology, and has served as mental skills coach to the Wallabies, NSW Waratahs, Manly Warringah Sea Eagles, and World Champion boxer Tim Tszyu. He is the author of MatchFit and The Ripple Effect, and host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
