Langthorne: ....We are in a funny situation when dealing with coaches. Barbarian mentioned in another thread (quite rightly) that we don't really know what goes on behind closed doors, so given our lack of inside information, we can't really pin the blame on Deans for poor performances. The part I find strange is that some of the same people who play down Deans' role in the Wallabies (poor) performances will happily heap criticism on John Connolly or Eddie Jones as 'poor' coaches (despite the relatively good w/l results under their tenure), or will heap praise on Rod McQueen for his excellent results. ....
Langthorne - yes, that is Barbarian's assessment. However, I must say that I consider it one of the most bizarre 'ideological' (his word) standpoints on such a matter that I have ever encountered. Ultimately, all paid leaders are responsible for some form of outcome, over time. They are accountable to their employers, or the equivalent, and maybe other stakeholders too. If they are not responsible for delivering some form of measurable, useful, improved outcome, their employers are negligent in spending money in a totally needless and wasteful manner. The ARU articulated quite clearly post RWC 2007 what a new national coach's broad KPis were to be (which btw JO'N reaffirmed in late June 2010 post the Ireland match), we have not achieved any of those KPIs, not even close. So what are the updated KPIs from the ARU? No one quite knows any more, but obviously a RWC is one of them somewhere.
If one takes the position that no retained, senior leader (coach, CEO, whatever) is actually identifiably responsible for hard outcomes, after a fair period of elapsed time in the job, 'because we the observer are not party to the inner deliberations of that person with the parties that must deliver that person's goals and vice versa', then, in effect, that leader is not accountable for anything, the only parties accountable are players or, say, middle level executives and workers. In this scenario, the shareholders in a company would not be appropriately demanding a CEO delivers enhanced profits over 3 years, as they are not privy to the inner board of directors' deliberations, or the communications with the workers. That is, we can't demand accountability as 'we don't know precisely what is going on inside the company', etc.
It is surely quite clear that no one accepts that model outside GAGR, a model that, if broadly implemented, would see the role of a leader as essentially redundant as no one was really entitled to demand value or hard outcomes from them, but we were only entitled to demand results from 'the actual doers that we can see on the street', so to say. There is no doubt that a new leader or coach needs time to achieve results, and he/she should not be assessed too early in a period. But nobody in the general business or professional sporting environment would argue that 3 years is a premature assessment point for the expectation of measurable outcomes that are significant improvements upon what went before.
