The Leaders Performance Institute brings you a series of thinking points and initiatives from the recent Women’s High Performance Sport Community Group calls, where the focus was on how being intentional in your environmental design can enable women to flourish.
To begin each call, we’ve asked several individuals from a range of sports, including Major League Baseball, Australian rules football, as well as several Olympic sports in the United Kingdom, to share how they have helped their female staff to thrive.
The Leaders Performance Institute has picked out a series of thinking points and initiatives – some from beyond the realms of sport – highlighted during the two calls.
Focus on recruitment
People are integral to an environment. We know women are less like to apply for roles. Thus, we must take time to encourage talented and capable women through our doors. Some methods of reducing the barriers to women applying for roles in high performance include deliberately not expecting them to have experience playing the sport, being mindful of the wording of the job description, tailoring the interview experience itself, and facilitating job shares. However, we must then consider what support will be needed to enable female staff members to thrive once in situ. This includes making sure there’s the capacity to provide the necessary training to compensate for any experience gaps.
Encourage a sense of belonging
There’s many layers to ‘belonging’, and we were reminded of the hormonal soup described by Owen Eastwood in his book Belonging, as well as the perceived heightened importance of this in women’s sport. Across the calls we discussed a handful of specific ideas. Firstly, removing cliques. Where individuals have a genuine, mutual interest in one another, there’ll be connection and appreciation of everyone’s individuality. With such thinking in mind, the Brisbane Lions’ women’s team, for example, aim for every player to enter and leave the playing group having not wavered from being their one true self. The collective also works purposefully to ensure that every player knows their value to the team. All of this can be enhanced by helping others be true to themselves, as explained in the next consideration.
Know who you are beyond your role
From a performance lifestyle perspective, this can come back to creating space for athletes to explore, embrace, celebrate, and share their identity beyond being an athlete. We can help our staff and athletes bring their whole selves to work, the ‘bells and whistles’ versions of themselves, and help them to achieve their biggest dreams.
Get women to the table and let them support others once they’re there
One group described the process of bringing more women to the table of the decision makers as a journey. They broke it into six steps for an individual woman:
Step 1: Find a route to the table; ‘get in the door’.
Step 2: Build up the courage to speak at the table.
Step 3: Build a community of support through conversations with those at the table, and by inviting others to the table.
Step 4: Take on a leadership role, volunteer to be responsible when opportunities arise.
Step 5: Dare to lead the group to places they haven’t been before. This might include adding new roles at the table, or the discussion of new topics.
Step 6: Encourage those at the table to think in new ways that ensures the topics and challenges and, therefore, work that needs doing, is done by everyone at the table, not just you.
Make sure everyone helps to create the environment
Where many won’t be at the table, it’s important to enable women to have a voice, asking for their opinions and experiences, not merely assuming they will come. We can also provide space for people to talk; and listening and responding to what we hear will generate additional buy-in. We should challenge ourselves to also consider how we still enable athletes to learn life skills when we’re removing some of the challenges that taught lessons as women’s sport progresses.
Have the difficult conversations
If we’re asking for and creating spaces for voices, we need to make hard conversations easy to start. Organisations are striving to be fearless about hard conversations, which normalises being bold and starting a conversation. Beyond having a conversation, there is now an expectation about the level of support needed once a conversation has been had. This means that people in these organisations a) have allies and it’s not only women bringing contributions to the table; and b) can have open conversations that focus on what’s not been done rather than barriers; breaking big challenges down to what they can do next. Ultimately, we can see that progress is being made when these types of conversation are started by allies for us, potentially before we’ve even recognised a need for them ourselves.
Help people through the change
Potentially the point that has resonated most with the Leaders Performance Institute in recent weeks is the need to ensure change happens. When we are having difficult conversations, for example, we need to educate those involved on the challenges brought forward so that they can be fully understood. We shouldn’t expect those who haven’t experienced something to understand the impact and gravitas the first time. There has been consensus in the calls that further educational resources, socialising, and normalising are needed, especially around female health. This needs to be for staff, including coaches, as well as athletes.
Furthermore, understanding will support the pursuit of justice, which gives strong foundations to equity over equality, and in theory sustainable change.
Know what still needs to change
At the same time as the above, we need to map and continuously challenge ourselves to identify where changes are still needed. If that’s where there isn’t diversity in a specific job role, it’s understanding why there’s a lack of diversity in the first place. We need to ask ourselves ‘do we show people what’s possible? Is it how we’re recruiting? Is it how we’re developing?’ as a method of understanding how to best implement further development.
