By John Portch

Seth Meyers has spent his career watching the best in showbusiness fail.

The late-night host, comedy writer and producer recalled his time working on Saturday Night Live as both a cast member and writer while onstage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York.

He told moderator Holly Ransom what he learned from watching the likes of Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell make jokes that “died in the room”.

Meyers said: “Watching them succeed is something you can do if you watch TV, but watching them fail at the table was the real education, because they never failed because they weren’t funny.” His point is that they were confident enough to take “big swings” in the name of comedy and creativity.

Critically, “you knew you weren’t the only one who had this pressure. You weren’t the only one who had these odds set against your material.”

Meyers went on to describe the importance of emotional regulation and safe spaces for risk-taking. He also recognised his own shortcomings as an actor (and strengths as a writer, producer and presenter), which showed him why teams must blend complementary strengths.

‘We haven’t won in here yet’

Meyers is full of admiration for long-time SNL Executive Producer Lorne Michaels, who always found the right words in the rehearsal room.

Michaels would often say “we haven’t won in here yet” when things were going well and, when they didn’t, he would stride into the room and say “you guys can figure this out. I have faith in you. There’s a really good show there”. He instinctively read the mood and gave the cast what was needed, which was particularly important when the efforts of Meyers and his colleagues died a death.

“You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it to next week’s effort,” added Meyers of the need for emotional balance. “You have to shave it off. Every time you start a new sketch, every time you start a new joke, you have to endow the audience with the idea that we’re starting afresh.”

‘You weren’t the only one with the odds set against you’

On SNL, Meyers watched some of the best fail, but he was also on hand for their triumphs.

“As a group of comedians, we were always so excited to realise that we were present for the creation of a new thing. Like the first time we saw somebody do a new character, the first time we saw them do a joke in a new way,” he said.

Michaels had created a safe space to fail. “There was this sense that if you took a big swing and it worked, you would be celebrated by your peer group, who would encourage you to take a bigger swing,” Meyers continued. “You knew you weren’t the only one who had this pressure. You weren’t the only one who had these odds set against your material.”

This attitude stood him in good stead years later when the pandemic forced Meyers and his late-night talk show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, out of the studio and into his attic. Counterintuitively, as he explained, “the show got so much better”. He attributes this to the sense that “we really just wrote the jokes we wanted to tell”. It was not always the case when hosting in front of an audience of 180. The fear of failing faded. “I cannot stress to you after having done the show alone for three months how comfortable I am in silence.”

‘A fun experiment in ego suppression’

Meyers likened his early days building a writing team on Late Night to “putting together the Avengers”. He said: “You want somebody who’s good at this; you want somebody who’s good at that – anybody who seemed unique.” It is his default position. “We’re always the most excited about the thing we haven’t packed. What you want is the one thing you don’t have.”

He recalled the story of hiring a writer with a “very funny Twitter feed”. He and his team reached out and assumed they were going to meet a professional comedy writer based in New York. Instead, “it was a guy from Peoria, Illinois, who just worked IT at an insurance company.” The writer in question “had not been in comedy and had never been in showbusiness. Twitter was his outlet.”

It would have been easier to hire one of the “100 unemployed copywriters in New York” but Meyers, in overlooking the easy option, proved that talent can emerge in unexpected places.

Meyers also experienced the opposite during the 2023 writers’ strike when he and fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon, Steven Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and John Oliver co-hosted a podcast series called Strike Force Five.

“This is like a football team with five quarterbacks and nobody could block, throw, catch or tackle,” he said in reflection. All were hosts in their own right and no one was used to supporting. He and Oliver noted the structural imbalance. “John and I were the ones who decided ‘we’re just going to stand back at the three-point line. We’ll be very quiet most of the time and, if you need us, feel free to throw us the ball’.”

Of their efforts to adapt, Meyers added: “It was a fun experiment in ego suppression.”

There is little space for bad characters in the cramped Late Night writers’ room. “You have to be three times more talented to be worth hiring as an asshole,” he said. “You need to at least feel as though you are kind to people or else this whole group will just turn on each other.” In short, “you’re trying to find the personality to go with the talent.”

As Ransom brought proceedings to a close, she asked Meyers for his parting wisdom for the sporting leaders in the room.

“Don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to,” he said. “We try really hard not to performatively ask our staff questions when we don’t care what the answer is.” You cannot “build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when they’re talking.”

What to read next

Clarity and Alignment: Why your Plan Is Only as Good as the Decisions it Enables

By John Portch

In leading the AFL’s Brisbane Lions to a historic ‘three-peat’, Chris Fagan has once again challenged accepted coaching norms.

He remains the only senior coach to have won a premier (let alone three) without having played at elite level in the AFL or its predecessor, the VFL. Fagan suspects he won’t be the last.

“I think there’s plenty of people out there that could be like me if they were able to get that opportunity,” he told Fox Footy’s AFL360 programme. “Coaching is just a little bit more than how you played the game – it’s a lot about how you teach people, how you develop people, how you give them confidence, how you give them a sense of belonging. All of that comes together in those big performances in finals – it’s not just as simple as knowing a lot about the game, and being a good player.

“One of the good things for me is that I couldn’t rely on my reputation as a player; I’ve had to develop other skills that have helped me be able to communicate with my players and get the message through. I’m proud that I’ve been able to do that, and I just hope others do get the chance at some stage to do the same thing.”

We have very little to add to that other than to point you in the direction of Fagan’s appearances onstage at the Leaders Sport Performance summit here, here and here and offer our warmest congratulations to the man and his organisation, who have long-been esteemed members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

Right, let’s round up the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute for September where the discourse ranged from AI and alignment, to problem-solving and strategy.

Quote of the month:

Remember… AI will not palpate a hamstring. It will not notice the hesitation in a player’s voice. It cannot carry the moral weight of a return-to-play decision. It cannot rebuild trust after a setback. But… it can place the right information in front of the right people. It can preserve why a decision was made. It can return hours to practitioners… give some white space back into a crammed calendar. Free up headspace and offset cognitive load. It can help a department learn from every case rather than simply move on to the next one.

David Clancy of The NXT Level Group and Ivan Peric of Peric & Partners penned a guest column exploring how artificial intelligence can help your performance team to see more clearly, remember more accurately – and learn more quickly.

They make their case using the Premier League. Read the full story here.

(Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

Insight of the month:

Darren Shand, the former General Manager of the New Zealand All Blacks, posed a question at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable: how does your plan unfold when you’re not there? His argument is that he should be able to visit at hear, see and feel your plan in action. However, that can only be the case is everyone is bought in and, as he explained, clarity and alignment are not the same thing:

If we’ve got clarity without belief, we’ve just got compliance. We’ve just got people doing what they think they need to do. But if we’ve got clarity with belief, we’ve got a much deeper commitment to whatever that plan is… The more we could create things together, the better we were… it forced us as management to make the plan even simpler because we had to fit with their way of thinking and their way of being rather than ours.

Read the full report here.

(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

Good to know:

Were you aware that McDonald’s tried to introduce ‘McSpaghetti’ in Italy in the late 1980s?

They held back because, when they put it on the menu, no one ordered it. The idea failed but it was a cheap failure. McDonald’s’ approach in this instance certainly compares favourably with Google’s expensive first-generation Glass product.

John Bull, the Head of High Performance Research at Management Futures, shared those two examples at another Virtual Roundtable that explored the idea of empowering others to solve. He said:

The key trap that we fall into is, when faced with uncertainty or sudden change, we feel pressured to come up with the answer. That is deeply misleading if we don’t know what works… A lot of us are conditioned to think of strong  leadership as being linked to having the ability to give clear direction; and when you are in a time of uncertainty, if results aren’t going as you would expect or like or the expectation on you, a lot of people will look to their leaders for guidance… Faced with uncertainty, sudden change, we feel pressured to come up with the answer, but if we don’t know what works, we should move into an ‘empower to solve’ response rather than defaulting to directive leadership.

Check out the full report here.

(Photo by Daniel Carson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

One pitfall to avoid:

What makes a good strategy? Members of the Leaders Performance Institute answered that question at another Virtual Roundtable, which you can read about here.

Here is a story one performance director shared about their organisation’s penchant for a quick measurement at the expense of long-term development:

I was in an environment where the executive team focused heavily on the number of athletes coming through the facility. The problem was that there wasn’t really a clear plan behind it and trust started to erode among the staff working closest to the athletes. What actually drove success – delivering a world-class service – wasn’t being recognised or measured in the same way. So it was a good example of how a strategy can look clear on paper but still struggle because of issues elsewhere in the system.

(Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)

What’s coming up for members

The Sport Performance Summit London

During his almost three years as Head of Sporting Insights at AS Monaco, Vignesh Jayanth’s remit has evolved from ensuring continuity in the club’s analytical processes to contributing across a much broader set of sporting questions.

“When I joined Monaco, one of my initial priorities was ensuring continuity in the club’s analytics processes,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Over time, the remit expanded significantly. I became involved in questions across coaching, athletic performance, recruitment, player development, academy integration and longer-term sporting planning.”

That evolution brought greater visibility and accountability. Jayanth admits that the transition was not always comfortable. “When you start taking on roles where you are more exposed, it can feel lonely at first. There is a temptation to go back to the safe place where you are not the person expected to contribute to the difficult questions.”

For Jayanth, however, the most useful lesson has been that better sporting decisions rarely come from one discipline or one source of information. They come from creating a structure in which different perspectives can be brought together, the relevant trade-offs made explicit and the reasoning behind decisions retained by the organisation.

Building a longer organisational memory

Football, Jayanth argues, often suffers from a “short memory”. Results can change quickly, coaches and staff move on, and the reasoning behind longer-term sporting decisions can disappear with them. A new coach may arrive with different preferences, but the club still needs to understand why previous decisions were made and which principles should endure.

“The organisation needs a longer memory than any one individual,” he says. “It is about systematising the process: these are the points we discussed, these are the things we felt confident about, these were the risks and trade-offs, and this is what we can revisit later when new information becomes available.”

When the Leaders Performance Institute first sat down with Jayanth in 2024, he emphasised the power of asking good questions. “No coach wants to be told what to do,” he said at the time. That principle still guides his approach.

“You are never going to know the whole truth from a single piece of information,” he says. “You are trying to bring different perspectives together to build a more holistic picture of the question you are trying to answer. Sometimes what people tell you can be genuinely surprising.”

That matters because sporting decisions are made with incomplete information. Performance specialists, recruitment staff, coaches and senior leaders may view the same challenge through different lenses. The objective is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to identify what matters most.

“If we identify the three or four considerations that are most important, they become the basis on which we make the decision,” says Jayanth. “There will always be things we do not know. The important part is being clear about what we have chosen to prioritise, what the trade-offs are and what risks we are accepting.”

His role, he adds, is not to replace the decision-maker. “You share your perspective, the trade-offs and the risks. Eventually, whoever has responsibility for the decision makes it, and then you accept it together as a team.”

Ask rather than tell

This philosophy also shapes how Jayanth thinks about people, roles and organisational design. His work has contributed to decision-making around players, coaches and sporting staff, where the question is not simply whether an individual is talented, but whether that person can create value in a particular environment.

He uses the example of a set-piece coach, an increasingly common specialist role in elite football. Set pieces can be difficult to evaluate because a routine may be well conceived and executed without producing a goal. Judging the role therefore requires looking beyond the immediate outcome.

“What is important is understanding whether a new idea or role will actually work within the existing team environment and culture,” he says. “You can have ambitions to build certain things, but you still need to ask whether they fit the organisation, how they will be received and what conditions are required for them to succeed.”

The same principle applies when evaluating performance. “How does someone motivate players? How do they respond during a scoring drought? You might go four or five games without scoring from set pieces. What happens during that period? Is value still being created and the team has simply been unlucky?”

The numbers can help frame the question, but conversations provide context that may not otherwise be visible. “It helps explain an outcome, regardless of whether the result was positive or negative. There are always other factors — personality, relationships, timing and things beyond our control.”

Beyond analytics

For Jayanth, better decision-making is inherently collaborative. When possible, he conducts meetings and interviews alongside a colleague so that different interpretations can be tested rather than relying on a single viewpoint.

“We are all trying to solve the same problem,” he says. “Someone else may challenge your interpretation, or they may notice something you missed. You have to be comfortable with that. There is a degree of humility required if you genuinely want to improve the quality of the decision.”

His experience in France, he explains, has also reinforced the importance of relationships and cultural adaptability. When he first arrived at Stade Rennais five years ago, he spoke no French.

“I would sit in meetings and not understand what was being said,” he recalls. “Afterwards, I would have to ask someone to translate, and that was incredibly frustrating because I depended on another person every time I wanted to contribute. So I took lessons and attended classes, and after about two years, I was able to start speaking the language.”

The investment changed the way he could operate. “People looked at me differently because I had made the effort to learn the language and could communicate directly with everyone. That creates a different level of trust and respect. The relationships I have been able to build as a result have been invaluable.”

From insight to sporting leadership

Looking ahead, Jayanth wants to continue broadening his contribution to sporting leadership while retaining the curiosity and structured thinking that shaped his earlier work.

“I want to continue developing as a sporting leader and deepen my understanding of how the different parts of a football organisation come together to make decisions,” he says. “For me, the interesting questions are increasingly organisational: how a squad should evolve, how recruitment planning connects to a club’s broader sporting direction, how player development links to first-team needs, how clubs think about coach selection, and how you maintain coherence when people or circumstances change.”

The objective, he says, is not to make football predictable. It is to help organisations make better decisions despite uncertainty.

“You are never going to have perfect information. The challenge is to create a process that brings together football expertise, evidence and organisational context, makes the trade-offs clear, and gives the people responsible for the decision the best possible foundation. Then you learn from what happens and make the next decision better.”

What to read next

What Will Enable you Strategy to Survive Under Pressure?

By John Portch

In the late 1980s or early 1990s, McDonald’s in Italy considered introducing ‘McSpaghetti’ to its menu.

They ultimately decided against doing so following an experiment that John Bull spoke about at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable.

“What would be the cheapest, easiest way to test whether spaghetti was going to work as a product?” he asked the table, before revealing the answer.

“What one store did was just put it on the menu,” he continued. “They didn’t make any and they didn’t even develop the product, but just took note of how many people asked for it from the menu. After three days, no one had asked, so they never even had to bother.”

For Bull, the Head of High Performance Research at Management Futures, the test was a success in learning terms and an example of intelligent experimentation and adaptive leadership. Any ‘failure’ was minimal.

The story is cited by Kirk Vallis, the Global Head of Creativity Development at Google, where their first-generation Glass product proved to be an expensive flop.

“They spent some phenomenal amount of money, in the tens of millions on this without really testing whether there was demand for it in the market,” said Bull.

Few companies have Google’s scale, but their experience is not unique. It brings us back to the message behind this roundtable, which was titled ‘Empower to Solve’. He uses it to refer to situations where a leader must respond to a situation where the answer is unknown.

“The key trap that we fall into is, when faced with uncertainty or sudden change, we feel pressured to come up with the answer. That is deeply misleading if we don’t know what works,” he continued, adding that it is often a skill that leaders struggle to master.

“A lot of us are conditioned to think of strong  leadership as being linked to having the ability to give clear direction; and when you are in a time of uncertainty, if results aren’t going as you would expect or like or the expectation on you, a lot of people will look to their leaders for guidance.”

Bull cautioned against this approach. “Faced with uncertainty, sudden change, we feel pressured to come up with the answer, but if we don’t know what works, we should move into an ‘empower to solve’ response rather than defaulting to directive leadership.”

Over the course of an hour, Bull helped Leaders Performance Institute members to understand that, when facing adaptive challenges, their primary job shifts from providing answers to creating the conditions in which those answers can be unearthed.

Empower to solve: a skill of adaptive leadership

Bull introduced the table to the typical skills found in good adaptive leaders and the traps they evade even in trying conditions. “I think all of us will recognise these, and you’ll certainly recognise them in your organisations. I think that they’re fairly generic and fairly normal as traps”

Is your problem technical or adaptive?

Bull cited the 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Chile as a prime example of what it looks like when a leader empowers their people to solve a complex problem.

A cave-in at the San José copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert in August 2010 left 33 men trapped 700m (2,300ft) underground and 5km (3 miles) from the mine’s entrance. They were all rescued 69 days later.

The rescue was led by André Sougarret, a mining engineer with nearly three decades of experience in an area where accidents were all too common. Yet he was quick to call in others, from people at NASA to psychologists and geologists.

“He said to everyone: ‘your experience is massively relevant here, but your expertise is not’.”

Sougarret even adopted the idea of a 19-year-old American undergraduate who suggested a drilling technique that took six to eight weeks off the rescue.

“As a leader, I think I would have gone, ‘tell the guy to buzz off’,” admitted Bull with a smile. The crucial point, he explained, is that a leader must figure out when ‘empower to solve’ is the best approach. For that, they must be able to distinguish between a technical and adaptive problem.

• Technical problems: where the cause is understood and a known solution exists.
• Adaptive problems: where the cause may be unclear, there is no proven solution, and solving the issue may require trade-offs.

This distinction is important because, as Bull said: “One of the most common traps that we see is organisations inside and outside of sport treating an adaptive problem as though it’s a technical problem.”

In conclusion, as Bull said, a leader must…

Identify the challenge. “The key thing is being able to make a distinction between two types of problem.”

Assemble the best minds. Bull: “Assemble the best minds that you’re able to get fairly quickly together.”

Set the context. Bull said: “People think empowering to solve is just about handing over to others. If you do that, you’re likely to not get good results.” Preparation is essential. As one participant working in professional basketball said: “We can prepare all week for a certain way and then maybe right at the beginning of the game, it’s not going to work and we’ve got to change.”

Run small experiments and learn quickly. “The key takeaway from the session is to start thinking about what are we doing to fire bullets as a cheap way to kind of test things,” said Bull, referencing Jim Collins’ analogy that naval forces in the Age of Sail would fire range-finding shots before committing to cannonballs. Experiments, however, need a clear purpose. As one participant observed, everyone must be “super clear on what it is they’re trying to achieve.”

Sense-make before acting. “One of the key traps we can fall into, particularly under pressure, is move to action too quickly before we understand actually and make sense of what’s going on.”

Debrief and capture learning. Bull said: “In the idea of empower to learn, you are testing to learn and debriefing becomes even more important.” As one participant added, this means “engaging players in the feedback loop and getting them to open up to provide feedback on the changes you’re making.”

If you have any further questions around how to sustain success with your team, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]

What to read next

Want to Be an Adaptive Leader? You’d Better Prepare

By John Portch

After the “lowest of lows” Norwegian middle distance runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen returned to the podium at the European Championships in Birmingham.

The two-time Olympic champion underwent Achilles surgery in January and only returned to training six weeks before his gold medal performance in the 5,000m.

“With 600m to go, I knew I was going to win. I was just hoping I was not going to get too tired,” Ingebrigtsen told BBC Sport. “I doubted myself every day and every minute leading up to the last lap, but I am always hoping.”

Ingebritsen, who coaches himself, has now won seven gold medals at European Championships, but this may be the sweetest. “Coming from the lowest of lows to be European champion again means the world to me. Not even I believed it could happen coming here.”

In announcing his return in Birmingham, Ingebrigtsen wrote: “If you’re waiting for the perfect preparation, perfect conditions, perfect timing, you’ll be waiting your whole life.” He and his team found “no reason not to race”, even if gold seemed fanciful.

It calls to mind the words of Dr Stephen Rashford, who spoke at Leaders Meet: Australia earlier this year about his role as Medical Director of the Queensland Ambulance Service [QAS].

“When you’ve got a really complex decision, and you’ve got to make a decision on care, you’ve got to back yourself. Because ultimately, generally your instincts are correct, and you’ll make the right decision.”

Adapting under imperfect conditions was just one of the themes on the agenda at the Leaders Performance Institute in August. Read on for the full breakdown.

Insight of the Month:

While Rashford is an advocate for evidence and performance analysis, QAS team members must not be held captive by the data. In chaotic or complex environments, complete certainty is a pipe dream. Informed, justified confidence matters more.

“If you look at medicine, we’ve gone into evidence-based care, and it stifles innovation,” he said, citing the example of cervical collars (neck braces).

The medical industry favoured hard collars, but QAS noted that they too often led to secondary injuries in trauma victims. Using frontline experience and available evidence, they switched to soft collars and, Rashford argued, the result has been a better experience for patients.

“The numbers are really important,” he added, “but don’t let them rule your life.”

Read the full report here.

Quote of the month:

At the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York, comedian, broadcaster and producer Seth Meyers spoke of what he had learned from working with the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis on Saturday Night Live.

“Watching them succeed is something you can do, but watching them fail at the table was the real education… It was a reminder of how hard comedy was. To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”

Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it. A true lesson in expression and creativity for the world of sport.

Read the event summary here.

Five questions to ask yourselves:

At a recent virtual roundtable, Dr Robin Thorpe explained what it takes to embed new knowledge and processes in the pursuit of competitive advantage.

Over the course of an hour, he and the table discussed the nuances of research and innovation in high performance and he wrapped up the session by posing five questions to the Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance:

1. Who owns research and innovation within your organisation?
2. How do you decide which questions are worth investigating?
3. How do you communicate the value of innovation to coaches, executives and owners?
4. How do you measure whether innovation has genuinely improved performance?
5. How do you balance short-term delivery with long-term innovation?

You can learn more about what your fellow members said here.

Good to know (literally):

Jeff Pagliano, consultant with Management Futures, explained the significance of tacit knowledge – the practical understanding an organisation relies upon without necessarily recognising or documenting it – at a recent virtual roundtable where succession planning was the topic of the day.

As Pagliano puts it, tacit knowledge consists of “the things that you just assume and that happen, but upon closer examination, it turns out it’s the specialty of one individual”. Because colleagues can consult that individual, they may mistakenly assume the knowledge belongs to the wider organisation. In reality, “if that individual were to leave, then maybe that knowledge would be lost.”

This, he argued, matters for three reasons:

1. Its value is easily underestimated. People with specialist experience may appear to “just do stuff”, concealing the knowledge and judgement behind their contribution.
2. It is difficult to replace. A newcomer may inherit written processes without understanding the relationships, context and previous challenges that shaped them.
3. Its loss damages performance and efficiency. Teams may repeat work, revisit previously solved problems or make decisions without the benefit of earlier learning.

Read about the group’s thoughts here.

Coming up at the Leaders Performance Institute

The Sport Performance Summit London

By John Portch

As Jeff Pagliano explained, if knowledge only exists in one person’s head, then it’s not organisational knowledge. The real risk in succession planning is losing the knowledge, judgement and relationships that made those people effective in the first place.

“The best organisations and teams really build knowledge and cohesion over time, and then every time a strong contributor leaves, there is a risk that you lose the wisdom that they’ve built up, usually because there aren’t ways to successfully capture their experience through a planned approach to succession and long-range handovers,” he said.

Pagliano, a Management Futures consultant, was addressing Leaders Performance Institute members at the virtual roundtable entitled ‘Passing the baton: why succession planning and handovers are critical’.

He noted that this loss is amplified by the expectation that newcomers will bring ideas that solve existing problems. This can lead new personnel and teams “to not pay enough attention to or have enough respect really for what works”.

Over the course of an hour, he explored what can be learned from “organisations and leaders who have built an approach to winning that outlasts any individual?”

He began by sharing what the research reveals:

The importance of transferring tacit knowledge

Pagliano argues that tacit knowledge is the practical understanding an organisation relies upon without necessarily recognising or documenting it. It includes how tasks are completed as well as the judgement, relationships and lessons from experience that enable people to perform effectively.

As Pagliano puts it, these are “the things that you just assume and that happen, but upon closer examination, it turns out it’s the specialty of one individual”. Because colleagues can consult that individual, they may mistakenly assume the knowledge belongs to the wider organisation. In reality, “if that individual were to leave, then maybe that knowledge would be lost.”

This matters for three reasons:

1. Its value is easily underestimated. People with specialist experience may appear to “just do stuff”, concealing the knowledge and judgement behind their contribution.
2. It is difficult to replace. A newcomer may inherit written processes without understanding the relationships, context and previous challenges that shaped them.
3. Its loss damages performance and efficiency. Teams may repeat work, revisit previously solved problems or make decisions without the benefit of earlier learning.

Building bench strength

Pagliano said that effective handovers rely on “building bench strength”, meaning preparing potential successors long before they are needed by gradually exposing them to the role, giving them responsibility and helping them build key relationships. “What actions are you going to take to make sure folks are ready to step into your role?” he asked. “What steps can you take to make sure you are building the next generation of talent?” Once a potential successor is identified, that person must have opportunities to observe the role, perform its important elements, receive feedback and develop an approach of their own.

Several themes emerged during the discussion, including mentoring, relationship-building and knowledge transfer. Pagliano later incorporated these into his framework for building bench strength:

‘Let’s say you leave tomorrow’

Pagliano suggested that leaders can test their handover readiness with a simple hypothetical that begins with their imagined departure tomorrow:

• What aspects of your role is someone behind you ready to step into?
• What aspects of your role would that person struggle with?
• What would the organisation lose if you departed?

He then drew on David Marquet’s book Turn the Ship Around!, which recounts Marquet’s experience of assuming command of a new US Navy submarine. Marquet used a series of questions to uncover the crew’s tacit knowledge, guiding principles and existing strengths before deciding what to change:

• What are you hoping I don’t change?
• What do you secretly hope I do change?
• What strengths should we build on?
• What is holding the organisation back?
• What impediments prevent you from doing your job?
• What will be the biggest challenge?
• If you were me, what would you do first?
• What is the best thing I can do for you?

Pagliano then asked participants three questions designed to surface their organisation’s guiding principles:

1. When times are challenging, what practices do you always come back to?
2. What makes your team/organisation unique?
3. What beliefs underpin your approach?

He also asked participants to finish this sentence: ‘when we’re at our best we…’ before inviting them to reflect in small groups. Their answers revealed the often unstated operating principles that guide behaviour during periods of pressure and transition:

‘Better humans win’

One participant said their organisation returns to the principle that “better humans win”, meaning difficult decisions should still be handled with humility and respect. Pagliano approved. “Even when a transition is necessary and unplanned, it’s possible to do that with grace,” he said.

Codify your processes

Another attendee described their team’s “no-blame” multidisciplinary debriefs. “Those are the things that, when a new leader comes in, you want to make sure that they understand,” said Pagliano.

Don’t ‘waste’ departures

One member described how an individual’s reluctance to speak candidly during an exit interview can indicate deeper organisational problems. “If there’s no exit interview, it’s a missed opportunity because there is a huge knowledge transfer in that situation that could happen,” said Pagliano.

As the session drew to a close, Pagliano presented a final checklist:

As he wrapped up, he offered some final reflections.

“The most enduring organisations are designed to outlast individuals,” said Pagliano, adding, “if it only exists in one person’s head, it isn’t organisational knowledge.” He also invited the table to consider the importance of cohesion.

If you have any further questions around how to sustain success with your team, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]

What to read next

Why There Is More to Effective Succession Planning than Replacing Individuals

By John Portch

As the 2025-26 season drew to its conclusion, Pep Guardiola made up his mind to resign as Manager of Manchester City.

That tales is told in Amazon Prime’s new four-part documentary series A Beautiful Obsession, which captures the highs and lows of his final two seasons in Manchester, largely through the type of fly-on-the-wall dressing room footage commonly seen in another notable Amazon sports docuseries All or Nothing.

In episode four, director, Kevin Macdonald sits down with Guardiola in Barcelona. It is several weeks after his City departure and Macdonald asks him when he decided it was time to leave.

“This type of decision doesn’t happen overnight. No, it’s a process,” says Guardiola. “Like when you are driving your car, when you are on the plane, after the games with a victory, after the games with a defeat, with a glass of wine. These are little pieces of the puzzle, and I said, ‘Okay Pep, it’s enough.’ So… And… all stories arrive to the end.”

In his decade at City, Guardiola won 20 major honours. His run included a treble of the the Uefa Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup in 2023; overall he won six Premier League titles (including a record four-in-a-row) and built some of the most accomplished teams in English football history. City’s 100-point season in 2017-18 is unlikely to be matched anytime soon.

But it was never going to last forever, and though it is almost certain that Guardiola will return from his sabbatical to add to the 41 trophies he has won in his 17 active years as a coach, he knew this summer was right time to leave City. In capturing some of the pivotal moments of his final years in Manchester on film, A Beautiful Obsession raises a question for all coaches: what signs would show you that it was time to go?

Here, we explore four signals that prompted Guardiola to call time on his City career.

Signal 1: When you can no longer replenish your energy

In November 2025, City lost a Champions League match 2-0 at home to Bayer Leverkusen. Guardiola made ten changes to the starting lineup and the defeat came as City endured one of their worst runs in what would become a second season without winning the Premier League. In the two seasons covered in A Beautiful Obsession, City never quite reached the heights of Guardiola’s earlier years.

“I am really fucking tired,” says Guardiola in the City dressing room after the Leverkusen match. “When I see that, I am exhausted, I am drained. I want to quit. I’m tired my friends, I’m so tired. I feel alone. When you play like this, I feel alone.”

On its own, given the emotions that swirl after a match, it may mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but such moments can accumulate. For a coach such as Guardiola, whose intensity and emotional investment are such drivers of his standards of performance, the ability to recharge is crucial.

He later tells his players in a more formal setting: “I had energy, I have energy but deep inside, I will not have it anymore.”

Guardiola recognised he could not continue to coach City to the standards he expects of himself. He has previous in this regard: after leaving Barcelona in 2012, he took an extended break, primarily basing himself in New York, before returning to coach Bayern Munich in 2013. Potential suitors have already picked up the phone, though Guardiola has spurned their advances thus far.

Question for leaders:

Am I tired or simply no longer able to replenish what this role asks of me?

Signal 2: When you can see the organisation needs something different

A Beautiful Obsession depicts the emotional departures of players such as Kevin De Bruyne and the recruitment of younger players, including Marc Guéhi, Antoine Semenyo and Rayan Cherki, as well as the rise of City academy graduates such as Nico O’Reilly.

In one scene, Guardiola stresses how important these individuals will be in building the club five or six years into the future.

“Are you going to be there for that? Five, six years?” asks Macdonald.

“Absolutely not. That’s for sure,” is Guardiola’s response. “No, no. Five, six years, no. Life is not just football, right?… I don’t have time to read, to watch series, to travel… it’s too much to be honest.”

It becomes clear by the end of the series that he does not doubt his abilities as a coach, but, equally, does not think he is the right person to take the project forward.

Question for leaders:

Does the organisation need more of what made me successful or does it now need something different?

Signal 3: If you are only staying because of identity

Towards the end of the first episode, Guardiola describes watching his team play well as the reason he gets up each morning.

“It comes from the joy, still. The joy and the pleasure to see my team play good. That is the motto and the target I wake up in the morning every single day to do it,” he says, before adding. “It’s so addictive.”

That last line is telling for a person whose public identity has been built first on being a footballer and then being a coach.

“Winning gives you the chance to extend your contract, to give you a job, but it’s not the final product of your happiness,” he tells Macdonald. “It will be difficult to come back. Many things happened in my personal life, and professionally I need to find myself in different things, especially sitting and seeing time go by. There is a word in Catalan called ‘badar’, and badar is this…” He mimes being spaced out. “So I’ll do that.”

Question for leaders:

Am I staying because I have something distinctive to contribute or because I cannot imagine myself without this role?

Signal 4: When the evidence starts to mount

For this, we simply need to reflect on the accumulation of signals presented onscreen.

“Don’t ask me the reasons I am leaving,” Guardiola says in his recorded farewell message to the club. “There is no reason. But deep inside, I know it’s my time. Nothing is eternal, if it was, I would be here. Eternal will be the feeling, the people, the memories, the love I have for my Manchester City.”

Question for leaders:

What evidence would tell you that your own time had arrived?

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Who’s your Next Leader? We Discuss the Key to Creating a Clear & Robust Approach to Succession Planning

By John Portch

“We had this strategy that was just sort of floating around.”

Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, relayed the story of the luxury retailer’s failed 2020 DEI strategy at March’s Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy.

The trouble for Selfridges was that despite some well-meaning intentions, “there was not a single Black person in the room” of C-suite executives to advocate for a strategy focusing on Black representation. As John explained, “it would get shown at a couple of team meetings” but senior leaders were talking about a strategy to which, John said, they had “no connection”, “no passion” and “no conviction”.

Nor had anyone connected the strategy clearly enough to Selfridges’ commercial performance. It died a death in that guise.

A strategy cannot simply ‘float around’ if its aim is to unite people behind a common purpose. John joined Selfridges in July 2021 and set about developing a more effective approach that became Open to the World, a co-created framework that gave employees a stake in the plan and leaders a clearer basis from which to explain it.

Sharlene John in coversation with Management Futures’ Shona Crooks at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Robert Obreja

This is the story of how John and her colleagues did it.

They listened across the organisation before putting pen to paper

John consulted people across Selfridges’ organisational levels and locations “before we put pen to paper”. It was critical that ‘inclusion’ did not remain an abstract concept. She asked people: “What does it mean from your experience coming to work? What does it mean for the customers that you’re serving? What does it mean for trade?” Only then could John define Selfridges’ DEI problems and shape the response. The process also created a collective sense of ownership lacking in the 2020 plan. “Every single person in our organisation feels connected to it because in some way they’ve had a voice and had a part in putting that strategy together.”

They did not let hierarchy become an impediment

Consider: what knowledge does your strategy require and are the relevant people involved early enough? John encountered resistance to the notion of involving employees below executive level. “‘That person’s not an exec – they can’t come in and possibly contribute to this’,” she was told before she pushed back. “They absolutely can and they’re going to.”

Where there were “missing voices” in the room she “went down a layer” to find colleagues with relevant knowledge or experiences unavailable to decision-makers.

Different groups require different entry points

John could not rely on a single presentation doing the legwork. “What I discuss with my C-suite is very different from what I discuss with our shop floor,” she said. “It is really important to get everybody on the same page and find the anchor piece that connects your vision, your strategy, to the audience.” For executives, that meant better understanding the relationship between a healthy culture and commercial outcomes; for shop floor employees, that meant understanding how Open to the World affected their experience, opportunities and sense of belonging.

Leaders need to be able to take a central message and make it relevant to their teams. When the translation has worked, every group should be able to answer:

1. Why does this matter?
2. What does it mean in our context?
3. What does it require from us?
4. How will we recognise progress?

Win hearts, move heels, make headlines

“Underpinning our strategy is winning hearts, moving heels, making headlines. Very Selfridges,” said John with a smile. “You’ve got to link the three.”

• Winning hearts: Why should people care?
• Moving heels: What does it mean for them and how have they helped shape it?
• Making headlines: What measurable or observable result should follow?

Check for understanding

Selfridges drew on a cultural assessment containing approximately 70 questions and selected ten for deeper investigation. John and her colleagues asked employees what their answers meant in practice. “When you say you can’t show up as your best self, what does that mean? Talk to me about this. Help me understand.”

Selfridges now uses opinion surveys, quarterly pulse checks and annual reviews to assess whether Open to the World has translated into employees’ everyday experience. “We use that data to understand if it’s translated and it’s working,” said John.

Questions for leaders to consider:

• Can people explain your strategy in their own words?
• Were the people closest to implementing your strategy involved in shaping it?
• Which perspectives or sources of knowledge were absent from the room?
• What should you observe if the strategy is working?
• How will you test whether communication has produced shared understanding?

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5 Ways in Which Alignment Shows Up in the Work of High-Performing Teams

By John Portch

“We’re spending a wonderful amount of time today thinking about cultivating the human, figuring out what it takes to build that capability and execute under pressure,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership specialist was speaking just moments before she introduced Seth Meyers to the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City.

Meyers, a comedian, broadcaster and producer, instantly built on the theme, with his tales of watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis produce sketches that died a death during read-through sessions (and all too often live onstage) at Saturday Night Live.

“Watching them succeed is something you can do,” he said, “but watching them fail at the table was the real education.”

Meyers made clear his admiration for the writers and producers of SNL who, as he said, “have seen and heard more sketches than anyone in the history of the world”. “It was a reminder of how hard comedy was,” he added. “To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”

Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it.

And it was not just Meyers’ musings. Across both days, we heard from leaders in high-performance environments as diverse as the US Air Force, Juilliard School and the Brooklyn Nets, who lent us their home for two days. Together they delivered insights on how leaders can cultivate environments in which people fail cheaply, learn quickly and perform sustainably.

Below is a selection of five insights that paint a picture of proceedings.

1. You have to cultivate people, not merely manage performance

The Brooklyn Nets have been on an exciting trajectory since the arrival of Sean Marks as General Manager in 2016. His tenure began with a question: “What are we going to stand for?” Marks believed that the Nets needed an identity that meant more than mere wins or losses and he landed upon ‘Brooklyn grit’ – a system of behaviours that extended beyond one, single individual. “It’s really important that you take the responsibility to drive a culture that everybody can observe,” he said.

Marks and the Nets have continually hired the best people, regardless of their professional background. A quick roll call of their staff would reveal people with experience in fields as diverse as soccer, baseball, finance and, of course, basketball. Each is given the platform to perform. He said:

If you give people the opportunity, you empower them to speak up, you empower them that they do have a voice, they’re motivated far more than a group that isn’t empowered to have a voice.

Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks in coversation with host Holly Ransom. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

2. The best leaders listen

Across both days, listening emerged as an important performance tool. Whether building an NBA franchise, leading a writers’ room or cultivating future performers, the speakers repeatedly stressed that leaders who genuinely listen create environments where trust, challenge and innovation can flourish.

Marks for one said:

I want a diverse train of thought [and] if I’m going to hang my hat on hiring the very, very best, shame on me if I don’t listen to them.

Similarly, Seth Meyers’ beliefs have been shaped by his time in improvisational comedy as well as his time as a talk show host. He said:

One of the first rules with improvising is you have to be a listener. You can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when you’re talking… and don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to.

Seth Meyers on a different New York stage. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

3. Safe experimentation helps to breed resilience

So what actually happened when a sketch died during SNL read-throughs? What would Meyers do? What if the sketch actually died onstage?

“You have to shake it off,” he said. “You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it with you to your next week’s effort.”

As one of the longest-serving head writers in SNL history, Meyers was responsible for managing exceptionally talented people operating under intense deadlines and, if writers carried every disappointment into the next week, their performance would deteriorate. The key was to try ambitious ideas, accept that many would fail, then learn quickly and move on.

Meyers was echoed by Evan Yionoulis, the Director of the Juilliard’s Drama Division. “If we’re worried about fear, we have to foster an environment where you can be brave,” she said. She tells her students:

‘I believe in you, I brought you into the school. You’re going to graduate, and I’m going to take you all the way there, and I’m going to be patient… I’m not judging you, good or bad’. I’m going ‘what’s the next step to take it further? What’s the next step to take it deeper?’

Evan Yianoulis of the Juilliard School. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

4. Replace blame with curiosity

Dr Wendy Walsh is the Chief Learning Officer for the US Air Force, a role in which she oversees education for approximately 700,000 personnel. Her work goes beyond training to the creation of conditions that enable learning across a sprawling, complex system. She argues that high-performance environments are “complex adaptive systems made up of continuously changing people, relationships and influences. She argued that learning starts from observation:

It’s the most important thing that we do is to be present with each other… I might not agree with you, but it’s a requirement for me to understand a different person’s perspective, because that will reveal more possibilities.

Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer of the US Air Force. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

Walsh was joined onstage by Andrea Tullos, who explained why the US Air Force pivoted from focusing on factors such as strength, endurance and swimming ability in recruitment. Ultimately, they were alarmed by the numbers of recruits dropping out. They shifted the focus to factors such as resilience, learning agility, tolerance for discomfort and motivation. Tullos said:

We need to know who they are before we understand what they can do… [and] it’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better.

Andrea Tullos, former lieutenant general in the US Air Force and Founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

5. It’s not about medals but building the conditions that make medals possible

Team USA finished second in both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic medals table (behind Norway) and Paralympics medals table (behind China). The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee wants to be No 1 in both tables in 2030, which means creating the conditions that make future medals possible.

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance, told the audience of her organisation’s continuing efforts towards meeting their target. She said:

We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games [Milano Cortina]. We needed to spend time building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance… We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline… [we asked also ourselves] How are we keeping athletes in sport and then the opportunities to bring new athletes into Olympic sport?

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

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Want to Be an Adaptive Leader? You’d Better Prepare

By John Portch

There are some scenes that no-one wants to imagine, but that did not stop Dr Stephen Rashford, a trauma specialist, painting a gruesome picture of a casualty at a road traffic accident.

“Sometimes a motorcyclist with an open-faced helmet will use their face as a brake when they hit the road, and they will tear their face to smithereens,” he told the audience at February’s Leaders Meet: Australia with a tone that suggested it was an all-too-common occurrence.

“And so you’re looking at this person thinking ‘how am I going to anaesthetise them? How am I going to place that tube down into their lungs?’”

So what is the answer in a moment like that?

“We teach our people to rely on your training, rely on the data; because the data tells us we can perform. In our most adverse situation, we want them to take a breath, redistribute that blood to the prefrontal cortex and make critical decisions – not primitive ones.”

In setting the scene for his work as Medical Director at the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), Rashford recounted the tale of airline captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009 when bird strikes took out the aircraft’s engines.

“All Sully’s experience over 40 years of flying before that had deposited information in his brain; and when he needed it most, he withdrew from that bank of information,” said Rashford. “And we do exactly the same. If you haven’t seen someone with 95% burns before, you will have been at an audit where we’ve looked at it in detail. And so when you’re confronted with your first major burn at that level, it won’t be a surprise to you.”

Whether it’s a paramedic attempting a difficult tracheostomy at a roadside accident or a pilot attempting an emergency landing on water, there is an element of individuals responding, or adapting, to conditions of uncertainty. As Rashford says:

“We never know what’s going to come down the line.”

How successfully they manage those calls is due in part to leaders, such as Rashford, empowering their people to solve problems on the fly.

“As a leader, you need courage to back your people at the front line.”

Here are four ways Rashford empowers others to solve problems when certainty is unavailable.

1. He gets people to back themselves

Rashford himself said it:

“I’m always telling our teams to back themselves. When you’ve got a really complex decision to make, and you’ve got to make a decision on care, you’ve got to back yourself.”

Much like Sully, they are specialists with the tools to do what is required.

“Generally, your instincts are correct and you’ll make the right decision.”

His role is not to make every decision. It is to create an environment in which others can make them confidently.

“It may not always work,” he added with reference to failures in the field, “but you need to be the person who’s there for them the next day or the next week when other people are looking at it. And you need to wear it because that’s your job.”

2. He promotes continuous improvement

This is not unique to trauma medicine by any stretch, but it is still a major feature of QAS’s approach.

“We do detailed performance reviews, just like you do, and that’s really important,” Rashford told Leaders Performance Institute members. “We get people together, we watch the videos, we analyse the data.”

It is also a world of KPIs where “everything is measured down to the second”.

That said, it is always brought back to QAS’s purpose: ‘We will deliver timely, quality, and appropriate, patient focused ambulance services to the Queensland community’.

“We try to explain to our staff how that translates to the performance of the team or patient outcomes,” said Rashford.

“When you can do that, you get buy-in. It’s actually incredible – they want those KPIs, so it’s not just a box-ticking exercise. It actually means something.”

Rashford also recalled a former medical student who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury.

“The most important thing as part of his care before we got to hospital was someone touching him on the brow, reassuring him that he was going to be okay and he was safe,” he said.

“For all the fancy things we do, not to forget about the basics.”

And underperformance, when it comes, is viewed through a lens of empathy and support.

“Generally speaking, we want to analyse whether it’s something else going on outside work,” he added.

“We just talk to them and explain ‘we’re worried about the performance’ and ‘how can we improve it?’”

Invariably, the individual is already worried about their own performance and, as Rashford said, “we take them on that journey.”

3. He enables frontline decision-making

Rashford recognises that those on the frontline are best placed to make decisions.

“While we think the pyramid starts at the top, for us it actually starts as close to the patient as possible,” he said. “The team leader needs to stand back; ideally not get involved. It always runs better when you stand back.” Rashford is more of a coordinator than a controller.

4. QAS medics do not wait for ‘perfect’ conditions

While Rashford is an advocate for evidence and performance analysis, QAS team members must not be held captive by the data. In chaotic or complex environments, complete certainty is a pipe dream. Informed, justified confidence matters more.

“If you look at medicine, we’ve gone into evidence-based care, and it stifles innovation,” he said, citing the example of cervical collars (neck braces).

The medical industry favoured hard collars, but QAS noted that they too often led to secondary injuries in trauma victims. Using frontline experience and available evidence, they switched to soft collars and, Rashford argued, the result has been a better experience for patients.

“The numbers are really important,” he added, “but don’t let them rule your life.”

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