Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

A Gambling Harm Prevention Podcast brought to you by our Partners

“You can watch the room change from that lived experience approach,” says Marc Williams, a programme facilitator at gambling harm minimization consultancy EPIC Risk Management.

Marc, a former professional footballer who suffered the consequences of gambling harm, will speak to athletes and teams with a view to educating and informing them about the pitfalls and trigger associated with gambling harm.

“They can see what we’ve been through, where gambling took us, and from that they can really relate to it themselves and think ‘wow, this could be me’,” he tells John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast.

Marc is joined by Rachael Jankowsky, the Head of Player Care & Well-Being at Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire, to discuss EPIC’s work with the club, which included Marc presenting in front of young players.

On today’s special episode, we discuss topics including:

• The beginnings of the Fire and EPIC’s collaboration [6:30];
• The difference between ‘textbook’ education and an in-person presentation [10:00];
• Marc and EPIC’s post-session support services [15:30];
• Overcoming the challenges of low base knowledge and the language barrier [18:30].

For those seeking more information on gambling harm prevention, check out EPIC Risk Management’s white paper review from February 2023.

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Luke Whitworth

As part of our final Performance Support Series virtual roundtable series of 2023, we are focusing our attention on the overarching topic of performance planning.

Over the course of the three sessions, it is the intention to focus on three core areas as part of this topic:

• Leading with purpose: the relationship between personal and professional purpose on shaping organisational and team planning.
• Goal harmony vs team harmony: how can you create team alignment to galvanise and focus your team performance?
• Debriefing: implementing effective debriefing to create a learning culture in your team.

 The importance of leading with purpose

Leading with purpose was our first port of call and the aims of this particular session were to reflect on and share what we value and what our professional purpose is. Why is the notion of leading with  purpose important when considering Performance Planning? We are operating in both a complex world and landscape, such is the pace of high performance sport. This quote below from Ronald Heifetz et al (2009) in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership captures why this is important.

“When you understand your orienting purpose, you can understand and make day-to-day decisions in that larger context… When things get tough, you orienting purpose serves as a reminder to you and to others of the reasons you are seeking to lead change.”

Harry Kraemer (2011) supports this thinking by suggesting that ‘becoming the best kind of leader isn’t about emulating a role model or historic figure. Rather, the leadership must be rooted in who the leader is and what matters most to them. When the leader truly knows themselves and what they stand for, it is much easier to know what to do in any situation. It always comes down to doing the right thing and doing the best you can’.

Living and leading with purpose is so important in a complex world.

Engagement is driven by clarity of values

What makes us have a great day at work or engaging effectively with the environments we are in? Evidence from researchers Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner (2007) points to our engagement being driven by clarity of values, in particular alignment of organisational and personal values. Finding alignment in both values is a multiplier and developer of oxytocin. Do your personal and organisational values connect?

The late Steve Jobs talked of this dynamic – “I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit”.

The science of connection

How does purpose create trust and joy? As part of this next segment of the conversations, we explored why being clear on our ‘why’ creates a sense of wellbeing and joy.

Research by Paul J. Zak shows that having a sense of higher purpose stimulates oxytocin production – as does trust. Trust and purpose mutually reinforce each other, providing a mechanism for extended oxytocin release, which in turn produces happiness. Joy or engagement with others comes from doing purpose-driven work with a trusted team.

Are you connecting your values? Do you have a real sense of purpose? Does that give you joy? A simple but effective exercise for you and your teams to do is a ‘professional purpose statement’. Take the time to reflect or write down what that purpose is. Start with the words: ‘my professional purpose is to…’.

How to find purpose?

It can be challenging to find and define your purpose. To help guide this discovery, there are a few simple questions you can ask yourself or have members of your team reflect on themselves to identify core values and purpose:

• What are my strengths?
• What inspires me?
• What fills me with energy, accomplishment and passion?
• What impact do others say that you have?

In summarising session one as part of this series of learning, we leaned into the work of Hubert Joly, businessman and Harvard Business School faculty member, on five core principles of purpose leadership. Joly suggest that these five principles include the below:

1. Being clear about your purpose – how are you connecting to your company purpose?
2. Being clear about your role – not your job title.
3. Being clear about whom you serve.
4. Being driven by values.
5. Being authentic.

By Iain Brunnschweiler

Your heartbeat is racing, and you’ve got a sick feeling in your stomach.

You are about to walk into a meeting with the rest of your leadership team and you know that you’ve got something to say to add value to the conversation. However, the dynamic in the room means that you already know that you will hold your tongue and won’t feel comfortable to say what you really think.

Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, then you’ve done extremely well to navigate a career thus far without this experience!

For the majority of us, this kind of feeling may have occurred a handful of times, or it may have occurred hundreds of times. You might be reading this thinking that this is exactly how you will be feeling either tomorrow, or later this week.

Seeking optimal

This situation surely cannot be optimal. It cannot be optimal for the individual who is suffering the anxiety-inducing thoughts, and it certainly cannot be optimal for the business who is deploying this group of people to work together.

Whether in business, music, sport or military, the ability for us to maximise the combined forces of those ‘in the room’ is absolutely paramount for success. And, more importantly, for the humans involved to feel comfortable enough to contribute and feel valued.

One of my key focus areas in recent years has been supporting people to work better together. In sports, a key objective has been to look at what is broadly termed ‘co-coaching’.

Co-coaching is the ability for multiple coaches to work together in the same coaching session. With growing support staffs, often in elite team sports today there will be two or three technical coaches, along with multiple other specialists such as strength & conditioning coaches, analysts, psychologists and physiotherapists. With all of these expert practitioners on the same field at the same time, the coordination of their roles and responsibilities is paramount. So, co-coaching could describe two coaches working together with the same squad, in the same session. Or it could be an entire support staff of seven or eight working together at the same time. This can get pretty complicated, and it is very easy for their to be a lack of role clarity, which results in a lack of impact on player development.

In my experience, there are three broad, fundamental qualities needed to co-coach effectively. They are:

1) Having an aligned purpose or intended outcome.

2) Having clarity on individuals roles in order to achieve the outcome.

3) Having a level of respect for the other members of the team and the contribution they are making.

The special sauce

As my old boss, the relentlessly successful Simon Timson (currently the Performance Director at Manchester City) once said to me, we need “no precious professional boundaries”. What the heck does that mean, I hear you cry!?

Well, I learned, and then experienced exactly what that meant during my time at England Cricket. We had a performance support team comprising technical coaches, an operations team, a physio, S&C coach, analyst, psychologist and education/welfare coaches. Similar teams will be present in many sports performance/development environments.

However, I have rarely experienced these teams operating anywhere near optimally together. And that’s where Simon’s wonderful phrase comes in.

For example, as the head coach of a national age group team, I embraced the view of the physio. This is not uncommon, he is a highly qualified technical expert in his field. However, it was not just his physio-medical view that I would be seeking. I would also genuinely embrace his view on the way a batter had approached an innings, or the field setting that we were going with during a youth international match. That’s what it means, that is what Simon meant. As a staff, we were aware that there was a high level of technical expertise in our own fields, but the special sauce was that we trusted each other to provide a view that wasn’t necessarily in our lane. The fast bowling coach could genuinely provide a view on the gym programme or the analyst discuss the education provision. This feeling that we had amongst us is rare. Too many times I have seen people being shut down because the leader in the room was not open to a level of cognitive diversity. Their mind was shut to the fact that someone deemed to be a non-technical coach might actually have value to add.

So what led this group to come to this place? I think there was one fundamental skill that we worked on, got better at, and evolved: listening.

It sounds simple, but how often do you REALLY listen to your colleagues? Listen to understand. Listen with all of your senses. Listen for the story behind the story, for the values or beliefs that might be guiding the narrative. To create and hold space for the contribution of others, as a leader, rather than to fill it with your own preconceived ideas or to confirm your own biases.

Listening is a whole lot harder than it sounds. Especially when the heat is on, and decisions need to be made. Listening takes energy and it takes attention. It is also really easy to hear what you want to hear rather than what is really being said. I have often asked a player “How was training today?” To which the answer is almost invariably “Good, thanks”! Only by asking a better question such as “What did you learn in training today?”, or “What made you think the most in training today?”, and then really listening carefully to the answer have I unlocked conversations with players that I never thought I would have.

So when you reflect on your own contribution to a team, or specifically a team meeting, please do consider the role you are playing. Are you causing anxiety in others, to the point at which they may not say the one thing that could be critical to success? Are you creating and holding the space to genuinely listen? Because if you aren’t, then you’ll almost certainly be making much worse decisions due to not having the full picture from all of the minds you’ve got in the team.

Questions for leaders:

• How aware are you of how members of your team are feeling in different meetings?
• To what extent do you embrace the thinking of someone who may not be a technical expert in that area? (Some call this a ‘naïve expert’)
• How much of your energy and skill are you protecting to genuinely listen?

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and most recently was the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.

By Luke Whitworth

For the latest edition of our Leadership Skills Series, we delved into the skill of strengths-based development.

Which areas of skill should we focus our energy on? If you were to rank those skills on a scale of 1-5, the tendency is for individuals to focus on the weakest link and what is ‘holding you back’ from a development point of view. This is the traditional way of thinking about the development of skills.

Think about your own world, what is one strength that you know that you have? Secondly, what is one area that could hold you back? As part of the interaction on this particular session, we asked attendees to reflect on the time spent on their development based on whether they spend hours, days, week or they don’t spend time on their development because it is too hard or they don’t have time:

• Hours: 72%
• Days: 22%
• Weeks: 3%
• I Don’t Because It’s Too Hard: 3%

The consensus is that we invest time in developing the areas we are weakest at and the most popular response to this with 72% was that a large percentage of people dedicate hours to this focus of development.

A strengths-based approach

A Strengths-based approach (part of positive psychology) is based on the assumption that each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of their greatest strength. Research by Gallup over the last 22 years indicates that when we focus on strengths, productivity can increase by up to 40%.

How would your development look if you invested those hours, days or weeks into making your strengths super strengths, as opposed to focusing on weaker areas?

The notion of a strengths-based approach sits in the field of positive psychology which is a science of the positive aspects of human life such as happiness, wellbeing and flourishing. Psychologist Martin Seligman offers the definition that positive psychology is “the scientific study of optimal human functioning (that) aims to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals to thrive”.

When considering a strengths-based approach that sits within the space of positive psychology, it is important to outline the differences between positive psychology and traditional psychology which can be evaluated by two different types of modelling – disease and health:

Disease model (psychology)

• Focus on weaknesses
• Overcoming deficiencies
• Avoiding pain
• Running from unhappiness
• Getting to a neutral state

Health model (positive psychology)

• Focus on strengths
• Building resilience
• Fostering strengths
• Pursuing happiness
• Nurturing positivity

Dr Ilona Bonniwell stated that ‘psychology has more often than not emphasised the shortcomings of individuals as compared with their potential’. Seligman supports this point by stating that positive psychology ‘is the psychology of what is “right” with people. What are people doing when they are in ‘peak performance’ state, optimistic and positive?’

Identifying our strengths

How do you know that something is a strength to you?

• Something feels core to who you are as a person. It’s part of who you are. Your identity. It captures your uniqueness.
• It energises you when you use it.
• It more than likely comes quite naturally to you.
• You sometimes go into a ‘flow state’ when using it, losing track of time.
• Others might notice you using your strengths.

If you reflect and think about your teams, who in your teams are positive and thriving, and what is the potential for them if they actually unlock that even more? For those who aren’t perhaps thriving – what are their strengths? What are they not yet perhaps conscious and aware of? Actually, if we focused on those things, could they unlock their sense of self-belief and, therefore, their development?

The notion of realising your strengths forms a key component of positive psychology. In the literature, you will often come across the equation referring to Talent x Effort = Realised Strength. If we were to focus on the traditional model of psychology, we give maximum effort to the weakest components.

Developing strengths in others

Our roles as leaders is to help others be their best and we can use a strengths-based approach to do that. Gallup’s State of the Workplace report explored what happens when managers primarily focus on employees developing a weakness and employees developing strengths:

• Employees developing weaknesses: this led to a 20% chance of the employee being actively disengaged.
• Employees developing strengths: this led to a 1% chance of the employee being actively disengaged.

Creating opportunities for self-awareness in others feeds part of developing strengths in others. Are they aware of who they are when they are at their best, and how to do that? Do they have strong strategies to be that?

To explore the landscape of self-awareness, we ran another interactive poll to explore the awareness of those in your team. What are they more aware of?

• They are more aware of who they are when they are at their best? 32%
• They are more aware of who they are when they’re not at their best? 68%

The responses were overwhelming in suggesting that our team members are more aware of who they are when they’re not at their best (68%) as opposed to being at their best (32%).

Enhancing awareness of strengths

Who are we when we are at our best?

• ‘Peak’ performance state: our mind and body are in a state of congruence.
• Strategies to make the best of our strengths and resources: when you are in that peak performance state, how do you do it? How do you think, behave and communicate with yourself and others around you to get the best outcomes?
• Intention and attention: who do you intend to show up as and are you aware of that person?

The five concepts below recreate the Logical Levels of Change model devised by renowned thought leader Robert Dilts. The model identifies our experiences when we are at our best:

1. Identity: how you (and others) might describe you.
2. Beliefs & values: what is important to you. What you believe. The Values you navigate yourself by.
3. Capabilities & resources: your skills, talents, strengths and capabilities – the unique inner resources you draw upon.
4. Behaviours: your behaviours, habits, routines and communications – the things you do.
5. Environment: your environment and your impact on it.

What can unlock the awareness of strengths in ourselves and others? There are three ways that leaders and managers can do it. It is useful to ask yourselves the questions of what do we want our teams to experience and who do they need to be in order to experience that?

• Intention: to unlock that potential.
• Attention: what do we need to pay attention to?
• A coaching approach: how do we give ourselves the best chance? Countless studies show that a coaching approach sits in the highest performance of managers.

To support a coaching approach, we explored Professor Angus MacLeod’s Three Instruments of Coaching to provide us with some simple but effective tools in developing this approach:

1. Questions: focusing those questions on their strengths. Ask them, what is it that that you want and who do you want to be? If you want to develop that strength, where do you already have it?
2. Silence: coaching can often be about being silent and expecting them to have an answer because they have beliefs and desires. So what is it they want? And then who do they need to be to be able to get there?
3. Challenge: challenge them to explore who they are when they are at their best, and when you see it.

By Bobby L Scales II

When organizational change is needed it usually means something has not gone well.

Results may have slipped, your culture may have drifted. Perhaps the market is telling you there’s something you need to improve upon.

Recognizing the need for change is one thing, coming into a new environment and selling that change to the team you have inherited is quite another.

We know change is difficult. Change can illicit feelings of fear and uncertainty and when those feelings arise, as humans we naturally go back to what is comfortable and safe. The problem is that more often than not what is comfortable and safe is exactly why the change is needed. Your team may feel isolated or alienated. Even when the change is 90% good, people are going to worry about the ‘bad’ 10% and how it inevitably affects them. The leader needs to create an environment where people are willing and able to embrace change.

Leading a team or organization through times of change is a heavy lift and there is no escaping that, but there are things a leader can do to give themselves the best chance during those first 90 days and beyond.

Below is the ‘30-60-90’ model I would follow if I were leading a team or department through a period of transition and development. For the uninitiated, the 30-60-90 model divides those first 90 days into three phases where you sequentially identify your team’s issues, formulate your strategy, and begin to execute your plans.

Know your personnel

Your first 30 days should be spent asking the people around you a ton of questions. You need to have an idea of what needs to change but, in those early days, you must get a proper gage of the temperature ‘in the room’. How are people feeling? What was the sentiment of the group previously? Allow them to ask questions of you. Find out about the ‘who’ first, then you can begin to ask questions about the ‘what’. It is important to ask what happened in the past and understand why things were done a certain way before. This will inform your ideas of where you need to go. It’s impossible to do the latter until you win the people first.

In my view, this is the most difficult phase during those first 90 days because you and your staff are learning and, oftentimes, you’ll have new personnel either in management or in the rank and file – or just an entirely new group on both sides – because something has not gone to plan. You are not changing for the sake of change: you’re changing because something needs to happen in order to grow whatever group you are part of.

It is crucial to know your personnel, as former NFL Head Coach Herm Edwards memorably put it, you need to learn who is in front of you and to whom you are talking. Staff members cannot be bucketed into broad categories as you solicit their feedback. You need to understand each and every person on your team as an individual to fully understand where they fit or if you need to move on.

Identify the right people, get them in the correct seats on the bus

One thing you’ll find with long-tenured individuals is that they can become stifled or bored, which does not alter the fact that they may have some great ideas stifled because there is no real pathway for advancement and bored because there have been ideas that have been put forward and for whatever reason haven’t gone anywhere. If you have a smart and sharp talent base, you need to afford staff members the space to run with those ideas. Another way to put it is that you need to make sure that your people are sat in the correct seats on the bus.

All people want to be challenged in their job. People want to feel they can master their job and excel in their role and grow into more. As a manager, that can mean being secure in the fact that you are not the smartest person in the room. Part of the first 30 days is understanding that and then folding that into your plan.

It also speaks to your authenticity as a leader. Yes, ‘authenticity’ is a buzzword these days but, when you’re creating an environment, people want to know you are real. You have to be yourself, you have to be honest, and you have to be up front. It goes hand in hand with your integrity. People need to understand that you’re still doing the right things when no one else is watching too.

With the right questions asked of the right people, we then turn our attention to days 31 to 60. This phase is about formulating your plan and how you’re going to put all the pieces into play. Towards the end of that period you need to tell your group: ‘this is what we’ve got here and these are the answers I got from you all. This is not me making this up because I was not part of this group before. Here’s how we got here, these are the answers I’ve gotten from you and this is the path forward as I see it for this group’. You have to lay out your vision and plan for innovating or iterating in your environment and, when you have buy-in, it alleviates a lot of those questions such as ‘what’s in it for me?’

Here’s what’s in it for you: a chance to grow your career that you didn’t have before because you were stifled. You were bored and now you have the opportunity to stretch your legs and run with it.

It is also a question of communication and there also needs to be an intentionality to your strategy. There are key people you should have identified inside your department that are your influencers, people whose words and actions carry weight. It is important to communicate effectively with and through those people.

Full steam ahead

By the time you reach day 61 you’re going full steam ahead as you put your plan in place and you let your people run with it.

Your plan must also be nimble. Having a process and a framework is important but if market factors change then you will need to have the space to amend your approach. In that scenario, you need to be honest and open. You need to communicate that message in a way that is supportive rather than aggressive. Again, it comes down to communication and being genuine in gathering people’s ideas about how to remedy the situation when things are not going according to plan.

It is amazing what you can ask people to do when they feel like they are part of a team and in the know.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

How well are you serving your female athletes and what more could you be doing?

That was the question at the heart of Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, our two-day event at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester.

On day one, speakers from organisations including Hockey Canada, British Cycling, High Performance Sport New Zealand, Harlequins and the UK Sports Institute all answered that question in their own way.

This is a snapshot of their responses, four factors pulled from the discourse to illustrate that while female sport has come on leaps and bounds in a relatively short period of time, there is still a long way to go before female athletes, coaches and practitioners achieve parity with their male counterparts.

1. Coaches: are you doing enough of the right things?

Male and female athletes are more similar than they are different, but there are differences, such as in bonding dynamics or the need to ask ‘why?’ on the training pitch (this is a trait more widely noted in female athletes than male). The most astute coaches recognise this and adapt accordingly. Danny Kerry, the Head Coach of the Canada women’s field hockey team, has worked with male and female coaches and has, following considerable self-reflection, learned to tweak his approach to male and female cohorts. Emma Trott, an Academy Coach at British Cycling, has called upon her own experience as a rider to inform her work with Britain’s young prospects to develop her coaching style. Kerry and Trott arrived at the same conclusion: when trying to optimise athletes, it is the environment that gets the performance out and that comes down to the coach.

What they said

Danny Kerry on managing team vs individual dynamics:

“All facets of coaching [consist of] trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping people adapt to the bell curve, finding their value in that, finding what works for them in that is the real craft of coaching – and in my experience that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”

Emma Trott on listening to athletes:

“People don’t listen all the time. We hear what we want to hear and we want to hear it because we’ve already made a decision in our head about how we’re going to impact something rather than listening to what is actually being said. It’s that question: ‘How are you?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ – what does that really mean?”

Next steps

• Coaches need to be empathetic to the needs of female athletes and that often requires the coach to be mindful of their own conduct and adapt accordingly.
• The issues that arise from female biology are numerous and there can be limiting factors on performance. However, it is important to understand that gains can still be made when the athlete is not at 100%.
• The coach needs to understand what is required of them at any given point in time. Sometimes it will be heavy instruction, at other times they need only offer words of encouragement or a serene demeanour.

2. Is everyone on your team speaking up?

In 2017, Helene Wilson took the reins of a talented but under-achieving Northern Mystics side in the ANZ Premiership, the national netball league of New Zealand. Two years later, they finished bottom of the table but, in 2021, were crowned champions. Wilson, who worked concurrently as a mentor at High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ, where she works full-time today], realised that her playing group were skilled but their diverse backgrounds, rather than representing a strength, created division and hindered alignment in the pursuit of high performance. That needed to change.

What she said

Helene Wilson on the HPSNZ Te Hāpaitanga pilot programme [launched in 2019, it initially paired 12 emerging women coaches with experienced mentors, giving them guidance through workshops] and how it influenced her coaching at the Mystics:

“During this time the penny dropped for me. We were busy teaching the coaches about tikanga, the customary system of values and practices. I realised that space for ambiguity where we translate our different approaches and lenses to what really drives high performance was missing in my environment.”

Next steps

• Understand that everyone is a leader and leadership is defined by your actions and behaviours. Some have more responsibility in their role, but everyone has a role to play.
• Ensure that everyone feels included while also not fearing rejection, because they are the first to comply, first to be passive, and not speak up when you really need them to.
• Deploy yourself against a problem last. Lead from behind rather than from in front.

3. Removing the physiological barriers to participation

In the afternoon, Dr Nikki Brown, the Associate Professor in Female Health at St Mary’s University in London; Emma Brockwell, a specialist women’s health physiotherapist at PHYSIOMUM, a female pelvic health specialist clinic; and Dr Amal Hassan, the Women’s Team Doctor at Harlequins, took to the stage to explore issues in female physiology, from skill acquisition during the menstrual cycle, being able to show up as best you can, and the risks presented by fashion over function in the use of sports bras.

What they said

Nikki Brown on breast health:

“It’s important to recognise that breasts will impact participation. Half of school girls drop out of participation because of their breasts, with one in three adults seeing the breasts as a barrier to participation. Then there’s that performance aspect, with breast support, because [an athlete’s] breasts will move during activity, and it changes how they move, it changes their confidence, changes their breathing, changes their muscle activity and movement patterns.”

Amal Hassan on the impact of the menstrual cycle:

“Periods can be a barrier to participation, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it can stop certain players from developing at crucial points.”

Emma Brockwell on issues related to female pelvic floor dysfunction:

“It’s understanding that pelvic floor dysfunction is not just in the perinatal population or the older population. In fact, it occurs in younger girls and female athletes.”

Next steps

• There is more work to be done in normalising the conversation around periods, breast health or other concerns. These terms cannot remain taboo.
• What is your ethical code? If you’re encouraging a practice you need to put in place a structure, decide who is leading the programme, who is driving the educational aspects, and who are your go-to people for answers.
• Teams with bigger budgets can fit out a sophisticated programme or offer bra-fitting assessments, but action could be as simple as putting up a bra-fitting poster in a changing room or on the back of the toilet door. Even little nudges can make a difference or spark a conversation about breast health issues.

4. Bridging the gap between innovation and research in women’s sport with practical application

The UK Sports Institute [UKSI] has a major aim: to develop a nationwide programme to advance the science, medicine and application of female athlete health and performance support. However, as Richard Burden, the Co-Lead of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UKSI, explains, there is a gap between innovation and research and delivery in female high performance environments.

What he said

“When delivering education sessions you can’t assume that because you’re talking to female athletes they know about the menstrual cycle, they know about bra fit – they don’t all know about these things. Even when it comes to female coaches, you can’t assume they know how to prioritise for female athletes.”

Next steps

• It is important to find ways to increase the translation and applicability of research.
• You have to bring athletes and coaches on a journey through knowledge generation, education and the delivery of a programme.
• Ask yourselves: are we giving them a reason to engage? How can we be resourceful? How can we create more time? How can we improve practicality?

“Serial winning coaches don’t just want to get ahead – they want to stay ahead,” Professor Cliff Mallett tells the Leaders Performance Podcast.

“But they know that staying ahead means having healthy relationships of mutual trust and care with the people that they work with.”

Cliff and his colleague Sergio Lara-Bercial join Henry Breckenridge and John Portch for this episode to discuss their new book Learning from Serial Winning Coaches: Caring Determination.

In an extended chat we delve into:

• Why Serial Winning Coaches are the ‘outliers amongst outliers’ [7:00];
• How coaches should approach developing ‘care’ and ‘determination’ with their athletes [31:00];
• How Serial Winning Coaches can help us to inform the identification, recruitment and development of the next generation of coaches [39:30];
• Why coaching is about striving, surviving and thriving [45:00].

Learning from Serial Winning Coaches: Caring Determination is published by Routledge.

Henry Breckenridge Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Iain Brunnschweiler

A football manager on the side of the pitch, volleys the water bottles and screams in disbelief as one of his players makes a passing error on the field.

It’s a scene we have all witnessed time and time again. The crowd get to see how passionate the manager is, how much they care about the team’s performance and how much this error hurts them personally. But as an executive sitting in the stands, paying the manager a huge salary, I would be asking myself just how effective they are being at their job in that moment?

In psychological terms, unless this display of anger is some form of ‘DiCaprio-esque’ acting skills from the manager in question, it means that they are emotionally deregulated. And when any human is emotionally deregulated, psychologists tell us that their ability to perform a number of high level tasks (such as taking in information and strategic decision-making) is massively impacted in a negative way.

Having stepped out of full-time work and into a world of consultancy, supporting a number of different organisations, it has given me time to reflect on my true beliefs, and aspects of performance development that I hold as truths.

One area that I keep circling back to, is the power of self-regulation.

Desirable adult behaviours

My observations of the best staff I have operated with is that they have worked out ways in which to self-regulate in the most pressurised moments. Now, this self-regulation takes numerous different forms based on the individual in question, but it is grounded in the fact that everyone needs personal strategies to stop themselves from essentially turning into a spoiled child when the going gets tough!

I have been extremely lucky to have worked alongside some of the industry’s top performance psychologists over the past two-and-a-half decades, both as a player and as a member of staff. My major learning from these leading members of the fraternity, is that they unlock introspection and retrospection in the people they are working with, in order to help the individual understand their own ‘personal best state’ to operate in. Then they help them work out their derailers, and identify when these derailers are likely to occur, in order to develop strategies to minimise the negative impact. It sounds simple! However, in reality this is a live process that can take years.

In youth development, one of my observations, present in football more than any of the other sports I have worked in, is that coaches can demonstrate levels of deregulation which are seemingly totally disproportionate to the age group of athlete they are working with. I have seen coaches of U9 teams screaming at 15-year-old trainee referees because they are certain that the ball went out. I’ve seen opposition coaching staff of U14 teams nearly coming to blows on the side of the pitch because the game is not going the way they envisaged it going. In the cold light of day, if you were to show these adults footage of themselves, especially alongside a GIF of a screaming child, their embarrassment levels would be high I have no doubt. In these cases, more work is needed in order to help them effectively self-regulate. Because, in my opinion, behaviour like this is letting down the children in their care. The role of a youth coach is to not only help the kids to learn the game, but also to be a role model of desirable adult behaviours.

Another observation is that it is not just the game itself that causes a non-desirable state in adult members of staff. I have seen many coaches lose sight of what is really at the heart of coaching – in my opinion this is genuinely attending to the children/people within your care in order to help facilitate their development in a skilful manner.

One of the reasons this occurs is the current audit-driven, process-oriented world in which we live. Coaches behave in insecure ways, sometimes unable to attend to the players in front of them because they are so nervous about what their boss thinks, or what is written down on their ‘curriculum’! As a wise man once said to me, the players ARE the curriculum. The thought that a bunch of middle-aged folk in tracksuits, can predefine the development needs of an entire squad every day of the year, by writing down a development curriculum before the season starts is once again, misguided at best.

The heart of coaching: guard rails, not train tracks

The best coaches (and I use that term in the broadest sense to include multiple ologies) I have worked with, are the ones who prioritise human interactions above all else. These elite practitioners are aware of the organisational documents, and will create environments that are guided by club principles, yet at the heart of their decision making is the child or adult in front of them at that moment. I heard a great analogy once, that development environments should have guard rails, rather than train tracks.

My interpretation of this is that it is really helpful to have broad principles and guidance (‘the way we do things around here’), but that it is genuinely unhelpful to have prescribed sessions that staff are forced to deliver. This normally just serves to deregulate or demotivate – two states that are certainly NOT optimal for performance development.

For those in charge of delivering performance and/or development environments, it would be worth considering the behaviours you are seeing from your staff teams. Are they operating in a manner which indicates that they feel psychologically safe enough to be themselves, within the broad principles of the organisation? Or are they nervously hoping that they are adhering to their boss, curriculum or audit’s demands, whilst compromising the athletes within they care?

When you’re reflecting on your own personal optimal performance state, it’s useful to consider what your derailers are, and what your strategies are. I am certainly NOT suggesting that we should not be passionate, and should not show that we care. But hopefully we can see fewer water bottles being volleyed, and fewer 15-year-old trainee referees being shouted at by the people who are supposed to be role models. I know that most athletes would prefer this.

Questions for the reader:

• What derails you?
• How do you know when you’ve been derailed, and what/who can help you regulate yourself?
• What are the potential negatives of operating in a deregulated state, whether this is in business, sport or any other environment?

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and most recently was the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.

By Graham Turner PhD

People that think sport is easy don’t know the amount of time and effort you have to put in #f***ingopenyoureyes

Tweet from an athlete featured in The Young Athlete’s Perspective

In my book The Young Athlete’s Perspective, six young athletes share their talent development stories, reveal what it is really like to be a young person in a sports talent development programme and share what they think, but dare not say.

The book provides valuable insights into key topics and issues, such as:

• How to support young athletes to progress in the sport that is right for them.
• How a positive talent development experience relies upon personalised and holistic athlete development.
• How to guide the young athlete through competing physical demands and psychological challenges.
• Why optimal athlete and coach collaboration relies upon a genuine relationship and authentic communication.
• How autonomy, connectedness and a sense of competence are critical to a young athlete’s motivation.
• How to teach the young athlete to become the best learner.

The key to becoming the best learner – self-regulation                                                                                        

In this article, I have focused on self-regulation and its role in enabling young athletes to become better learners.

To be successful, young athletes must be proactive, independent, resourceful, and persistent. Self-regulation is the process by which an athlete continuously monitors progress towards their goals, evaluates outcomes and redirects unsuccessful efforts. Key to this process is the individual’s awareness of and knowledge about their own thinking (metacognition). Each athlete must be behaviourally proactive in their own learning process and learn to be self-aware, problem-focused and goal-oriented. Higher-level athletes learn to self-regulate by exerting greater control over their feelings, thoughts and actions during three distinct phases:

• Forethought – the processes and beliefs that occur before the effort to learn is initiated.
• Performance – the process of behaviour that effects planned execution.
• Self-reflection – the processes that occur after each learning effort.

Through the use of direct quotes, the book explores the developmental journeys of these young athletes and provides examples of how young people demonstrate initiative, take responsibility, and optimise learning by:

Seeking out specific environments

At the end of this season I think I am going to move to ######… Yes, it is a much better team.

Rowan

Creating specific structures

Time management is the only way I’ll ever get anything done otherwise I end up just leaving it. But if I set myself out what I need to do every day, then I’ll get it done and it’s fine.

Eboni

Implementing consistent processes

I use my diary a lot, the goal setting is really helpful, you just need to keep doing that, that’s how you are going to improve as a player.

Steve

The level of learning achieved by an athlete will vary depending upon the level of their self-regulatory skill. Young athletes’ accounts of engagement with adults within the talent development environment demonstrate how being listened to and understood positively impacts this process.

Yes, they are much better, much better coaches, yes. They have one on one conversations with you about things, like what they want you to do next game or how the last game went, and they seem like they care a bit more and they are actually happy that we have done well.

Steve

And athletes who successfully self-regulate eventually become distinguished by their sensitivity to the social context and a proficiency in the ability to recognise how an adult may,

Help learning

Author: Do you think he (your Athletics Coach) stepped it up as well?  You said, “I’m serious.”  And suddenly he’s thought, oh right…

George: Yeah, definitely.  Yeah as soon as he saw I was making decisions to focus on it a lot more, he’s given me a lot more time and he’s given me a lot more focus.

Or hinder learning

I didn’t feel like I got anything out of it. The coaches weren’t very helpful they kind of told you what to do but weren’t very good at correcting the stuff that you had wrong.

Steve

The young people in this book have revealed that for them, the essence of being in a sports talent development programme is hard work. Each young person details an individual set of contextualised circumstances that has subsequently influenced the extent to which they have been able to take control of their own learning. Individual stories depict how the behaviour of different adults teaches young athletes how to act and how for the young person, their interpretation of and response to this is key to their talent development experience.

I spoke to my coach recently and said well I don’t really see the point in doing it anymore if I’m not going to get any further so then we had a talk and she said I need to improve my fitness, which I did, and I needed to get to the next step and need to go through regional for another half a year, so I can get moved up to the next level.

So now she has moved me up again, so I am half in regional and half in the local Academy.

Eboni

The self-regulated learner incorporates self-motivational beliefs with task strategies (plans and methods) to develop and apply self-regulation processes and is influenced reciprocally by the results of those efforts.

Positive collaboration

When the young person is motivated to find solutions to the challenges they face the key to positive collaboration is dependent upon the adult’s ability to create conditions that promote engagement. The narratives of the young athletes in this book demonstrate how for them, the experience of talent development extends far beyond the time spent in training and competition and can come to influence every area of their life. This existence requires the young person to live in a reality where the expectation is that they are continually striving to improve performance, and so for as long as they commit to meet this demand they must constantly search for ways to positively influence individual progress.

The Young Athlete’s Perspective is available now from all good booksellers.

Graham works for the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) as a systems leader, supporting sports to establish world’s best High Performance Pathways that identify, develop, support and progress talented athletes to achieve medal winning performances. He has previously worked at organisations including Wolverhampton Wanderers, Gymnastics Australia and Leeds Beckett University. He holds a PhD in Talent Development in Sport.

By Luke Whitworth

For the latest edition of our Leadership Skills Series, we delved into the skill of analytical thinking.

Most people in high performance sport are operating in a volatile and complex landscape, so as part of this session, we explored common errors we make in our thinking and why, strategies for improving the quality of our analytical thinking, and identify opportunities to use more analytical thinking in our environments.

Before we delve into some of the detailed content and ideations, what do we mean by analytical thinking? Here is one definition: ‘It is our ability to collect information, analyse it and use those insights to solve problems and make decisions’.

System one & two thinking

To kick off the session, we leaned into the work of Nobel Prize winner (in Economic Sciences) Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman suggests that there are two types of analytical thinking. The first is the ‘fast thinking system’ or ‘system one thinking’ where our brains come up with automatic answers to things without a conscious effort. This mode of thinking is both efficient and effective in domains where we have deep expertise of experience. There are downsides, however. These lines of thinking are influenced by emotions and affected by biases which can lead to highly predictable mistakes. As humans we make a lot of errors in our thinking, but often those errors are predictable and it quickly becomes a case of how do we prevent these from happening again, or what to look out for.

To summarise system one thinking – it is automatic, intuitive, influenced by emotions and affected by biases; and so we can make predictable mistakes.

How does System two thinking differ from one? Kahneman defines this as the slow reasoning system which requires more effort and deliberation. We have a higher level of intention to stop and move into a space of deliberate thinking, it isn’t a case of the thinking just popping into your head, it takes energy and tends to be more complex. Analytical thinking is more aligned to system two thinking. There are downsides to this as well – it uses a lot of energy so there can be a tendency to delegate to system one.

To summarise system two thinking – it is effortful, deliberate, requires complex computation, it controls urges but can make you experience laziness and over-trusting system one.

Common errors in our thinking

As part of the session, we explored eight common errors that can affect thinking in our environments. It’s important to be aware of these as they will influence your ability to think analytically.

The first error is the law of small numbers. This error refers to the idea that we can get sucked into drawing conclusions using limited information – making small sample sizes to find a pattern when we shouldn’t. This is a good example of what Kahneman aligns system one thinking to.

The second error is confirmation bias. Often people pay attention to and seek evidence to support existing beliefs. This error is one of the most important to think about as our brain is setup to look for evidence to support the assumptions we already have and doesn’t look out for or seek counter evidence.

The third error is operating from an out-of-date mental map of the world. It’s quite a wordy one but it factors in the idea that we continue to keep acting as if the world we understand is still the same without challenging it. In high performance sport this can be a dangerous error in thinking, such is the fast-paced nature of the landscape.

The fourth error is unconscious bias about people and their potential. It is often perceived as black and white or either positive or negative. There are two other types of bias – projection and affinity. In considering unconscious bias, we often hear talk about negative bias, but not as much about the ‘halo effect’ which is where you recognise a characteristic you have seen before in high performance and you expect it to show up again. Projection bias incorrectly judges someone’s potential on the basis of current skills. Finally, affinity bias looks for the same qualities we have seen before. Arguably, this is one of the most common and well-known set of thinking errors.

Loss aversion is another error we see in thinking. It is where the fear of loss or losses is stronger than the desire for gains. There is a lot of research and evidence that suggests that humans will put more effort in avoiding a loss than getting a gain – the gain is undervalued.

The sixth error is status quo bias. This is the preference in maintaining assurance of current approaches and having an opposition to change. This is a dangerous game to be playing.

The penultimate thinking error as part of this section is the ‘bandwagon effect’. This line of thinking is a pull in wanting to adopt an approach because everyone else is doing it – the idea of conforming to thinking in a group and we will do what others do. This is a downside to analytical thinking. The real question we should be evaluating is whether there is evidence that what someone else is doing will work for us. Contexts are unique.

Finally, attribution error. This is defined by overestimating the impact of personality, character and underestimating the impact of the environment on behaviour. It’s very common that people can struggle in certain environments but thrive in others.

Improving analytical thinking

We’ve highlighted common errors in thinking, so how can we shift the dial and improve our ability to be more analytical? Before we explore some specific strategies, we discussed four tips to consider as part of this process:

1. Save your critical thinking for things that really matter.
2. Do it when your mind is fresh to avoid decision fatigue.
3. Leave emotions in check.
4. Invite challenge from others. We can spot errors in other people’s thinking much easier than we can spot our own.

What about strategies for improving the quality of our analytical thinking?

When thinking about your role as a leader or collectively how you operate as a team, the below are a set of strategies that can support analytical thinking in a positive way, in a number of different contexts.

The first strategy is ‘STOP moments’. Stand back, Take stock, Options, Proceed. It is also known as hot-debriefing during events and something that can be done in the moment. When thinking about ‘stand back’, this is taking more of a helicopter view of a situation or problem. ‘Take stock’ is the acquisition of data and analysing what is happening around that. ‘Options’ is as it sounds. Exploring options around what you can do differently. Finally ‘proceed’ is stepping back into the moment, taking action and assessing what impact your new approach has.

Debriefing. We would hope that many of us are already doing this to support their analytical thinking.

Another strategy is holding ideation sessions, also known as front foot innovation. There are traditionally two types of innovation: response which is where change needs to be imposed and proactive, which is much more disruptive and intentional in how to be innovative.

Improving cognitive diversity is another important strategy for analytical thinking. Seek out different perspectives, as so often we get multiple people with the same expertise approaching problems and questions.

Have you considered the idea of perspective shifting? This strategy looks at a situation from someone else’s perspective, putting yourself in their shoes, if you will. Often you will find that we look at problems and questions from our own contexts, which dovetails the thinking error of status quo bias.

Perspective taking underpins Edward de Bono’s main argument in his renowned 1985 book Six Thinking Hats. De Bono discussed two pairs of hats which allow us to reflect on our own particular preferences – the first is red and white, which refers to gut feel and intuition (red) and facts (white). What is your default and comfort when evaluating this first pair of hats and do you bring in enough of the other? When does the red or white hat have to be challenged? For the second pair of hats we have yellow and black. Yellow refers to being optimistic, assuming something is possible and thinking about the how. Black is of course the opposite – the constructive critic which is thinking through what could go wrong. Effective techniques that enable black hat thinking are pre-mortems and red-teaming. Pre-mortem is the assumption for a moment we will fail. From that perspective, it involves looking and identifying what is most likely to go wrong. Red-teaming is the idea of tasking some of the team with figuring out how to beat your strategy.

Finally, a really effective strategy for analytical thinking is root cause analysis. Many of us have heard of the ‘5 Whys’ which is a simplistic but effective method. Perhaps more impactful is the use of multiple cause diagrams which allow us to work from a challenge and identify the different causes that are having an impact.

Further considerations

As we have covered in this review of analytical thinking, it does take more time, deliberation and effort to do effectively. That is the nature of the beast in doing system two thinking well. In reflecting on the common errors and strategies above, ask yourself these questions:

• When do you currently do your best analytical thinking as an environment?
• What strategies could you make more use of?
• When and how could you introduce more analytical thinking?