Romain Poite
TBS 2019
Company speaker and lecturer, Professional Referee F.F.R.

Commerce 2019 We could of course, be surprised that an international rugby referee should be questioned about leadership. And yet here we are! All it takes is spending an hour with Romain POITE to understand how much he puts the collective forward in a role that is too often perceived as desperately solitary.   So Romain, how do you become a leader on a Top 14 field? I don't choose my colleagues, so I assume that they are competent and that I have to work on team cohesion, so on the human dimension it is that that will bring us together. The leader must firstly be exemplary in his or her dimension in order to be the catalyst and activator of links that enable community activity. You have to be inspiring rather than authoritarian. This does not happen in the training courses but before the match!

What behavior do you promote when you enter the field?

Naturally, I would talk more about being a performance coach by reminding people of the framework, avoiding adversity while making them understand things or wrong behaviors.

How can we improve our performance to assume leadership?

What is interesting in team leadership is not only the anticipation of scenarios, but especially putting things into question in order to develop. I take part with my fellow referees of the Pro D2 and Top 14 on training courses where we stage difficult situations and where experience and the ability to adapt allow us to better evaluate certain facts of play.

In fact, we try to go and look for the negative in order to think about it.

Can you tell us something about your training at TBS Education ?

My time at TBS Education allowed me to develop in managerial situations and to appreciate how the role of a manager in a company and as a referee on the field are quite comparable.

I would like to thank Romain POITE in particular, whose empathy and obvious sense of pedagogy made me regret my lack of courtesy towards the refereeing body years later.