Minutes before Jesse Marsch appeared on screen, close to a thousand business leaders from coast to coast answered a live poll: when the pressure is on, what’s your leadership instinct? The winner, by a comfortable margin, was calm and steady. Focus on the plan came second. Then the head coach of Canada’s men’s national soccer team gave his own answer.

“I kind of like the pressure,” he said. “I enjoy being in the situations that test individuals, test teams.”

That gap, between our instinct to settle things down and his instinct to walk toward the fire, set the tone for an hour of conversation with Chris Pinkerton, Managing Director of Employment Hero Canada. Marsch has led Canada to its highest-ever world ranking, a historic fourth-place finish at the 2024 Copa America and the country’s first-ever World Cup victory. He has also inherited struggling teams, coached in a language he barely spoke and had a star player angry with him the day before a World Cup match.

He was candid about all of it. And he opened with a warning worth pinning above any leader’s desk: “As the emotion starts to climb, the intelligence and ability to be rational starts to dip.”

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How do you keep a team rational under pressure?

Chris went straight to the moment everyone wanted to hear about: June 16 in Vancouver. A home World Cup. The Prime Minister in the stands. Two years of building toward one whistle.

Marsch didn’t pretend the plan survived contact. His squad is young, most players between 20 and 30, and while many had played at a World Cup before, “a home World Cup is a whole different ball of wax.” The occasion swallowed the first 40 minutes.

The night turned at halftime, and what turned it was calm repetition of who the team had agreed to be. “I reiterated the things that were going to be important, and how we wanted to make sure to stick to being ourselves,” he said. “We got stronger in the second half, we got stronger as that game went on and we got stronger as the tournament went on.”

His takeaway for anyone whose quarter has ever unravelled in week two: plans attract wrenches. “You’ve got to be ready to pivot, you’ve got to be ready to adjust, and you’ve got to have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening.”

Ask more than you tell

Marsch played 14 years professionally in MLS, and the coach who shaped him most, Bob Bradley, led with questions. What do you think of training? How would you attack this opponent? Bradley didn’t always take the answer, and that was fine. “The fact that he valued my opinion made me feel like I had ownership of the environment, and I would do anything for him.”

He has built that memory into every team since. His leadership council, five to seven players acting as a conduit between the squad and the coaching staff, gets asked about video sessions, training, meals and travel. “Typically, I do what they think,” he admitted. The payoff is trust that survives his mistakes. Because the relationship is genuine give and take, players back his decisions even when they disagree with them.

Underneath the tactic sits a conviction about people. Canada is often called a melting pot, though defender Alistair Johnston “always reminds me it’s a mosaic, not a melting pot,” a correction Marsch has happily adopted. “The one thing that people like in general is feeling like they belong.”

The recap can carry the ideas, but only the recording carries the stories behind them.

The case for the imperfect leader

At 44, Marsch spoke no German. At 47, he was a head coach in Austria, running an entire professional environment in his third-best language. He got vocabulary wrong. He sounded foolish. Players would pull him aside after meetings to explain that Austrian German phrases things differently.

He expected that to cost him authority. It did the opposite. “My vulnerability as a coach really drew them closer to me,” he said. The players took ownership of his development the way he was taking ownership of theirs, and the bond that grew from it marked him. “We don’t have to be perfect as leaders. Acknowledging that you make mistakes, and acknowledging that you need help, is often the best way to create a really strong bond with the people that you’re managing.”

For every founder who feels they must have the answer to everything, and every People leader coaching a manager who fears looking uncertain, this was the most quietly radical idea of the hour. Credibility comes from the plan and the standards. Connection comes from being human about the rest.

The conversation before Morocco

Accountability got the least comfortable and most useful stretch of the session. The day before Canada played Morocco at the World Cup, one player, unhappy at not starting, let his frustration seep into the group. Houston was hot, the team had been together for eight weeks and everyone was tired of hearing the coach talk. Marsch understood all of it and still pulled him aside. “He was letting himself down, and he was letting the team down.”

The half-hour conversation that followed uncovered the real grievance: the player felt Marsch held him to a harsher standard than everyone else. The coach didn’t deny it. “He might have been right about that, but the reason that I had those higher expectations is because I believed in him more.”

That reframe, high standards as a form of belief, runs through how Marsch handles all his best people. “Talented people mostly don’t like compliments,” he observed. “Talented people want to be challenged.” Whether it’s Alphonso Davies or Jonathan David, the stars he has coached want difficulty, honest feedback and an environment that tests them daily. The relationship became stronger after Morocco, though Marsch keeps a joke ready for anyone still sulking about his decisions: “The good news is you only have four more years of me to deal with.”

The same directness applies when results go wrong. “I know the way I show up the next day after big losses is more important than any other time that we’re together.”

Make yourself obsolete

Asked about silos and cliques, Marsch offered what he called maybe his most important principle: “My idea of leadership is to make myself obsolete.”

His measure of success is a training session where he only sets out the cones. The players run the standard themselves, push each other and stop looking to the bench for answers. “There’s nothing more beautiful than autonomy,” he said, then laughed about explaining this in Germany, where colleagues asked what his job would be if he ever achieved it. That was the whole point, he told them.

He was honest that delegation doesn’t come naturally to him, and guessed plenty of leaders on the call shared the affliction. His argument for doing it anyway was simple: you can’t be everywhere, you can’t hold every solution and pretending otherwise caps your team at the size of your own attention.

Is everyone tucked in?

Pressed for one thing leaders could do tomorrow, Marsch borrowed a phrase from a psychologist he once worked with: “Is everyone tucked in?” Is every person engaged, clear on their role and set up to do their job well?

His staff turned it into a Monday ritual. Who’s not engaged this week? Does their role need clarifying? Do they need to feel more valued? He spends more relationship-building time on players 20 through 23 on his roster than on his starters, because a team is only as good as its weakest link, and the people furthest from the spotlight decide whether the environment holds.

Go all in

The hour closed the way it opened, with Marsch refusing the podium. He’s still learning, he told the audience, still a work in progress on switching off, and still carries one phrase everywhere he goes: all in. His parting words to a thousand Canadian leaders were an instruction: “go after it, go all in, enjoy the process.”

The poll at the start of the session wasn’t wrong. Calm and steady matters. But the coach who delivered Canada’s first World Cup win spent an hour showing what sits underneath the calm: ownership shared widely, imperfection admitted openly, standards raised out of belief and a leader working to make himself unnecessary.

Ready to hear the stories we couldn’t fit, straight from the man in the arena?