By John Portch

Wales have made a positive start to their 2023 Women’s Six Nations campaign, with wins at home to Ireland and away to Scotland in their first two matches under Head Coach Ioan Cunningham.

A stern test awaits them this weekend in round three, with England travelling to Cardiff Arms Park on Saturday (15 April), with Wales’ schedule wrapped up back to back away matches. They will face France at Grenoble’s Stade des Alpes on 23 April before ending their Six Nations campaign against Italy at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi in Parma on 29 April.

Cunningham explains to the Leaders Performance Institute that, instead of coming home after the France match, the team will then make the six-hour coach journey to Parma and spend the week in Emilia-Romagna preparing for Italy.

“You don’t lose two travel days [returning to the UK and setting out again] and it gives you the best chance to prepare,” says Cunningham, who recently contributed to a Leaders Performance Special Report on how teams can manage their preparations for major competitions.

“We can set up camp in Parma ready for the week,” he continues. “Already family and friends are looking to come out and spend time with the players.” He indicated that the players would have some free time in Parma on the Wednesday. “They get to see their friends or family and spend some time outside the camp. The weather will be decent in Italy in April and they can feel good; ‘the sun is good, I feel I am in a good place, and I’m getting ready to play Italy at the end of the week’.”

Cunningham also emphasises the importance of fun. “We created mini teams within our squad with different responsibilities or creating games. We asked the girls to name their teams. They chose famous Welsh people and had t-shirts made and, suddenly, you have an identity and you’re part of a team.”

What were some of the names chosen? “Duffy, the singer, was one,” he says. “The Nessa character from [British sitcom] Gavin & Stacey. So you’ve got a t-shirt with the picture on front and it’s quite funny when you get those up and running. What was really good, you had an opportunity then where I might say there’s a trade opportunity here, ‘do you want to trade anyone out of your team because they’re not pulling their weight?’ And those are quite funny when they’re trading players and there’s an opportunity to draft. It was quite fun.”

Connection and downtime are essential too, which is why friends and family were invited to Parma, just as they were for Wales’ 2022 Rugby World Cup campaign. “If you’re away from home and family and friends have travelled to watch you, making sure the players have contact time with their family and friends and also inviting the family and friends into our environment is massive. On those downtime periods, parents are always welcome to come into our hotel and team room to spend time with the players, as well as the players going out.”

Cunningham also spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute about the development of his newly professional squad. Here, we turn attention to Cunningham as a leader.

How important are your instincts? How do you prevent yourself losing touch with your intuition?

IC: Instincts are huge. Your gut feel. Your coach’s eye as well as your gut. ‘I’m not feeling this today, it’s a bit off, I need to have a chat with this person’. Another part of instinct, as well as data, if you have a short turnaround and you haven’t had much in the tank in that week, we might do a 20-minute run through on a captain’s run day [usually a Friday, although Cunningham’s team do not undertake this traditional rugby practice in a typical fashion; see below] but the majority of the time we won’t. But it’s having that feel, even at the start of the week, if you’ve come off a good win, for example, they think they’re in a good place, they have just beaten one team but there’s another team coming after us, so maybe it’s bringing their feet back to the ground and why. Instinct is huge, not only on players but on management; feeling if they’re a bit fatigued. We did something last year when we felt people were tired and we’d been in a long time; ‘right, let’s cut tomorrow. We won’t come in tomorrow’, just having a mental recharge away from the environment or we know someone who’s very friendly with us in the group and he’s got a coffee van so we put a coffee van up inside the training field, so we’ll finish the session and then go have a coffee at his van; just spending time together, having a chat, we put some music on, and then just having those connections then. It just recharges us and makes us feel like we’re ready to go again.

Must data back your intuition?

IC: 100%. It’s got to be aligned to everything we want to do. Regarding rugby stats, our main page is stats that are important to us in the game and which change behaviour. So if we want to get off the floor quicker, we’ll stat that up. Say with that, ‘60% speed of feet, we need to get to 70%, then. How do we get off the floor quicker?’ That’ll change behaviour. But then there’s other data regarding volume and load from a GPS point of view, which we know now the type of load we want to put into the players in a test week; ‘if we want to cover 22k, we need to get this amount of high speed metres into the players’. That’s all important and relevant to the game we want to play.

What is the key to getting the big decisions right and managing them effectively?

IC: Regular communication with the right people, constant drip effect of the same message; ‘why we’re doing it, this is the game we want to play, because it’ll give us this’. Those conversations in a week are huge for me. We’ll always wrap up the day with ‘how did it go? ‘it went well’ ‘do we need to change anything tomorrow?’ We’ll run through tomorrow’s sheet and we’re constantly working a day ahead, then we’ll look to the week ahead. It’s really important.

Do you reflect on your own decision making and communication skills?

IC: Some of that could be better, if I’m honest. When you’re in it, you’re entrenched in the work and when someone asks you a question you’re into something else, but I do deliberately try to give myself time to reflect on ‘did I give that message correctly? What tool did I use? Did I react well to that? How do I want to come in tomorrow? I need to speak to this person and how do I do it?’ I do try to deliberately reflect on my day and what I’ve done. It’s a huge part of performance. I like to have good relationships with some key members of staff as well that will give me feedback on how I’ve done; or ‘how was our meeting? Were we happy with it?’ Those things are important for me as well.

How do you protecting your own time and resources?

IC: You can turn around and, before you know it, the day’s gone and there’s so much happened in that day that sometimes the car journey or just driving the car is good, reflect, and put something on, music or a podcast, just putting something on to reflect is good.

What do you do in lieu of the captain’s run?

IC: We do a walkthrough and we do this exercise called ‘walk the map’. So the map is our pitch. We’ve got this five-metre pitch that we roll out and we walk through everything that we’re taking into the game both with and without the ball. We’ll do ‘what-if’ conversations. ‘What if we concede in the first two minutes? What do we do? What does it look like? What if we get a yellow card to a nine? Who steps in?’ We cover those sorts of things as a team as we walk the map. On the captain’s run day, we’ll actually walk the ground from try line to try line with our leaders just walking and talking through what we’re going to do and the kickers will kick and that’s it.

Ioan Cunningham is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Welsh Rugby Union, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Hockey Ireland. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth

The Leaders Think Tank is at once a network and a knowledge platform.

It is designed to connect people with responsibility for performance at the highest levels of world sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best. The top jobs in elite sport are often lonely places and always comprise unique challenges. The following is a record of the Think Tank meeting that took place on 28 March at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. A behind-closed-doors event, the account that follows is a general one and aimed at presenting the lessons learned from the conversation.

Attendees

General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs

Head Coach, Toronto Maple Leafs

Senior Basketball Advisor, New York Knicks

Performance Director, Manchester City

Head Coach, Scotland Rugby

1. How leaders can create environments for their people to be successful

How can the leader of the team reduce both the pressure and distractions faced by coaches and athletes? The first and most important step is to create an environment that enables athletes and staff to be at their best.

Key points:

• External noise and distractions can be reduced if you are laser-focused on the processes that underpin your standards of performance. When it is clear what the procedure is, the leader can assure that athletes and staff are supported in a suitable fashion.
• Communicate expectations and give athletes and staff an understanding of the resources available to them. The leader can also enable people to share feelings, learn from the past and, ultimately, remove pressure.
• Anxiety is normal is any high performance environment. Normalise people’s experience of anxiety by identifying hidden stressors and understand the roles in the team where people are always close to the edge.

2. Replacing an iconic coach

Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, Mike ‘Coach K’ Krzyzewski, Joel ‘Coach Q’ Quenneville. These were some of the longest-tenured and most successful coaches in sporting history when they left their highest profile roles. Replacing figures of such stature can be daunting and fallow periods are almost inevitable as teams seek to fill the vacuum. What can be done to ease the transition from a legacy coach?

Key points:

• An internal successor may or may not be the way to go. The key is to communicate that a playing style is a collective philosophy and not beholden to one individual. Reassure athletes and staff while reducing fear of the unknown.
• A team must be aware of the mechanics of its system, as it is all but sure that a successor will not enjoy the same power and influence. It will take a collective effort to bridge that gap.
• Can you be intentional in engaging your long-time tenured coach in a handover (circumstances permitting)? ‘Centennial’ companies – those who have survived and thrived for in excess of a century – are particularly adept at managing these transitions.

3. The best approaches to load management in performance

In some elite sports, there is an underdeveloped understanding of when athletes are conditioned or deconditioned. Moreover, this does not always align with training-to-game models. Where should the emphasis be placed in this continuing challenge?

Key points:

• Do you truly understand the demands of the game? Yes, there are physical components but there are also emotional considerations, perhaps linked to your people, style of play and intensity – understanding those is critical.
• Prioritise recovery. Educate your people and insert recovery practices into your processes. Consider how you can take what you do at home on the road. What are the recovery opportunities on the journey home?
• Decisions around training and programming should be made independent of results. Emotion is removed and the health of the team is not compromised.

4. How to be your organisation’s greatest-ever team

A lofty ambition, for sure, but a noble goal for all teams regardless of their pedigree. At the very least, all teams can strive for their pinnacle.

Key points:

• At what can your team be the best in the world? Consider: what are your super strengths and where might your weaknesses prevent your progress? Contextual training is another critical component.
• Resilience is a characteristic of all great teams and shared experience of previous failure can help you to better understand where support is needed at moments when your team is under pressure. Equally, people in your environment need to feel safe when displaying vulnerability and, with time, connections and relationships develop as you become battle-tested.
• Shared belief should come right from the top. There needs to be an input from senior management or ownership in developing the right strategy.

By John Portch

Lisa Jacob has worn several hats during the course of her sporting career.

She is a former dual international athlete, having represented Ireland at both field hockey and rugby sevens. In hockey, she accrued 139 caps and scored 17 goals between 2006 and 2014 and, upon retiring from hockey, took an 18-month contract to play sevens.

In her post-playing career, she returned to hockey and coached the Ireland girls’ under-16 and under-18 teams. She also worked as a coach developer. Then, in 2019, Jacob was appointed to Hockey Ireland’s board of directors and she became the organisation’s Strategic Director later that year. It began a run of several swift transitions.

In 2020, Jacob became the women’s programme’s Team Manager, in charge of logistics and operations – “the glue that gets things moving” – as she puts it. “I had no career plan – I just ended up as Team Manager perchance,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I did that into the Tokyo Olympics and then we had a couple of coaches who finished up after the Olympics, but the team had a World Cup qualifying tournament maybe eight weeks later. So I went from Team Manager to an assistant coach. I knew the group and I had a coaching background anyway.

“I had that critical choice of ‘do I go towards coaching or do I go towards something else?’”

Her decision was ‘something else’ and she became High Performance Director in September 2022. It is a role she discusses in the first half of a two-part interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I sit overarching all of high performance over the men’s and women’s programmes and the pathway,” she continues. “My role is trying to support the head coaches to enable them to focus on their role and take away some of the stakeholder management and fight for resources, and go between the institutes.”

Hockey Ireland identifies, develops, trains and selects players from across both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which means that Jacob works closely with Sport Ireland, Sport Northern Ireland, the Sport Ireland Institute, the Sport Institute of Northern Ireland, as well as the Olympic Federation of Ireland.

“They would all be big stakeholders with whom I work directly and my piece is as a kind of advocate; planning; doing all of the policies and proposals.

“The performance director’s role is important because that fight for resources always exists, so there needs to be somebody who’s always separate, who can oversee everything and go ‘hold on, if we join these dots we can get more bang for our buck’ or ‘this is more important than this space, even if you don’t like it, and this is why’, ‘this is the bit that’s important for you’ etc.”

Working under the programme’s head coaches (Mark Tamilty on the men’s side and Sean Dancer on the women’s) is a mixture of Hockey Ireland employees and institute service providers.

“There’s a lot of staff around the team, which can be great, but it can also cause a disconnect,” Jacob says. “I see my role as checking where everyone is at. I feel by listening that you really get a feel for it, where things are at, what might need to happen. It might seem small but I am helping people with their performance challenges as they see them.

“I also have a role in working with the athletes. By and large, I work with the leadership group to address any issues. In some ways, I need to be separate enough but also connected enough to understand if there are issues or changes of direction needed. I need to be approachable enough for those to come to the fore.”

What have been some of her reflections on her first six months in the role? “I’ve learned that the role is quite hard to define,” she says, adding, “there’s more than one way to do the performance director role, certainly in Ireland. You take the piece around how you can position and engage yourself and engage everybody in a way that you can shift the dial.”

There is not always unanimity. “It’s certainly not always an easy one but there’s a lot of really good people in the programme and my job is to get the best out of them, make sure that things are working well, so they can do what they’re best at.”

At the time of writing, both the men’s and women’s programmes are placed thirteenth in their respective FIH World Rankings (“that’s probably accurate enough”) but the women’s team exceeded all expectations to finish runners-up at the 2018 FIH World Cup. It was a breakthrough moment for the women’s game in Ireland and, in the subsequent time, the programme has enjoyed an increased range of, and access to, service providers. “That has allowed us to professionalise the programme for the girls. They get more direct support to be able to commit to hockey as well as pursuing work or study. They’re not scrambling to make things work.”

While that silver medal provided a watershed, there have not been wholesale changes, and there will not be any on Jacob’s watch.

“The programme is in place and has had a really clear plan over the last four years or so,” she says. “We’re now in 2023, which is a key year for qualifying for the Olympics. You might sit down and look at something with the coach but it’s really now small tweaks with a few key questions such as ‘are you going to go on a warm weather tour?’ So I’d work with the coach to set the direction of the programme but it’s not from a blank page or throwing out everything we’ve been doing.”

To wrap up the first part of her interview, the conversation turns to social support for athletes and staff and how Jacob can make an impact. She discusses her role with regard to the Ireland women’s programme, stating that the squad is a “really good group of friends” and “sometimes that can be good and sometimes that can make it harder to have honest conversations in the performance space.”

This is why the team have placed an emphasis on building relationships in the truncated time between the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games. “When we have lunch, we need to sit together, you need to be asking your mate what’s going on in their life proactively rather than just hoping it will happen just because we’re in the same training base for two days a week.”

Players and personnel may not always talk about themselves but they may tell other Hockey Ireland staff about a teammate or colleague. Jacob explains that the work of Hockey Ireland’s head of performance services is invaluable in that regard. For her own part, she is sure to have contact points within the staff.

“I have realised in the last six months that there’s one or two people who sit very naturally in the space of supporting people through performance challenges.” She must ensure the right person is available for each challenge. “If you’re on the ground observing, you can send the right support towards someone or even follow up with them yourself – but there’s so many people I that I literally cannot do it all myself – with me, there are key people I try to keep across because I tend to be the glue for everybody else and it’s made me think quite a lot about how you structure and support people’s wellbeing and mental health in a high performance environment.”

Lisa Jacob is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Hockey Ireland, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: Building Winning Organisations, hosted alongside the Toronto Maple Leafs, was our first physical North American event of the year. Throughout the course of the day, we engaged in case study sessions, an observation experience, roundtable discussions and skills-based learning centred around some key ingredients that contribute to building a winning or high performing organisation.

These are the highlights from the afternoon programme, which featured Dr Cheri Bradish, the Director of the Future of Sport Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University; Glenn Zujew, Chief People Officer at the world’s largest independent commercialisation partner for life science, Klick Health; John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance at leadership and organisation consultancy Management Futures.

[Already up-to-date with the afternoon? The morning takeaways are available here.]

Session 4: Designing the Environment & Innovating at Pace

Speaker: Dr Cheri Bradish, Director of the Future of Sport Lab, Toronto Metropolitan University

Innovation + Culture

• Innovation: the action or process of innovating. Innovation is crucial to the continued success of any organisation. Includes new methods, ideas, products, etc. Linked to technological innovation(s).
• Innovation economy: supports that knowledge, entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and collaboration are the key drivers of economic growth. Companies can increase their value by creating new ideas which can be developed into products, services, and business models that bring us collectively into the future.
• Does innovation culture work: “we found a significant correlation between the ideation rate at these companies and success (growth in profit or net income): The more ideation, the faster they grew.”
• Sport innovation: proactive and intentional processes that involve the generation and practical adoption of new and creative ideas, which aim to produce a qualitative change in a sport context.
• Key growth areas: fan experience and player performance.
• Global sport innovation ecosystem: there has been increasing trends in innovation and additional technology.
• Designing a winning innovation environment: what do good organisations do who innovate effectively? “What gets measured, gets managed!”
• Open innovation: internal and external innovation. Resourcing and Collaboration.
• Decentralised innovation: internal labs, ventures, M&A, partnerships.
• Product development: design labs and studios.
• Project time commitments: 10-25% of time in the organisation dedicated to time to intentionally innovate and foster an innovation mindset.
• Maintaining a culture of sport innovation: it’s an extraordinary time for innovation. Technological change and industry disruption seem to be accelerating. And digital information networks are linking individuals, organisations, and nations as never before. Five themes have emerged in maintaining this culture:

1. Be comfortable being uncomfortable: both leaders and staff.
2. Be connected, build a strong network: what are other people doing in their space?
3. Prioritise good, committed and collaborative people.
4. Diversity of thought and team.
5. Stay curious.

• In those that do it well, there is a clear culture of innovation across the organisation.
• What’s holding sport back: we know that sport is an early adopter industry. A lot also depends on the culture of the organisation.
• Leading innovation: where is the support and leaders perspective in all of this? How open is your leader to being innovative and supporting your team in its development?
• Assessing cultures of innovation: do you have an innovation or growth mindset in the organisation?
• A lot of rich innovation is looking outside of the box.

Session 5: The People & Culture

Speaker: Glenn Zujew, Chief People Officer, Klick Health

• People that are good at culture pay a lot of attention to it.
• The culture: an extreme focus of Klick when it started 25 years ago was culture. Core principles were designed and then the organisation identified the people who were needed to achieve that. What type of person would be successful in our organisation? Culture starts at recruiting level and how you promote yourself in the marketplace. Even after 25 years, the organisation still considers themselves in ‘beta’.
• Recognise innovation in a company: the organisation likes to shine a light on those that have tried and failed. The organisation has ‘Breakfast Meetings’ that are designed to give positive recognition to those that have tried to innovate and failed – the organisation want to promote that behaviour. A lot of people experiment in the environment and the organisation even intentionally allocates hours to innovation.
• People-first #1: this can often be misconstrued as ‘me first’. Realigning on the goal you are trying to achieve is something that you need to keep an eye on. We don’t want to slip into ‘me first’.
• Cultural principles: in recent times, creativity and candour have come into the existing principles.
• Listening: the organisation has also prioritised listening in a big way. Not everyone communicates in the same way so the organisation has used a variety of communication tools to collate insight and feedback to cater for different styles.
• Feedback: aligned to the above, create different styles and numerous opportunities for feedback: bi-weekly calls with the Chief People Officer and President, fire-side chats, weekly one-on-ones, yearly polls – some people want to communicate verbally, others through technological tools. The Chief People Officer is basically a Chief Learning Officer, and the data that is collated has informed what the organisation does next.
• Collaboration: have you been intentional in asking your teams how they interact and what is working?
• Induct & onboard to culture: it starts with how you position yourself in the marketplace. At a recruiting level, there is clarity on what the organisation wants: there is a list that is stress-tested; identify individuals that will add something to the culture.
• Fit & add: Glenn shared that the organisation had almost too strong of a culture. There was a laser focus on looking for someone that would fit the existing culture seamlessly. This focus actually ended with the organisation having too many similar people. The organisation engaged in one small change: ‘fit to add’. The organisation wanted people to add to the culture, which in turn witnesses an increase in innovation and diverse thinking.
• New vs existing: we often see challenges in trying to combine existing versus new. In terms of culture, a large part is creating a safe place for existing individuals. Listen, talk and alleviate what’s on people’s minds. People want to be heard. Every environment has stewards who have a key role in connecting to what is important.
• Cultural champions: who are your cultural champions? Look to recognise where things are working well and make people aware of what that is.
• People-first #2: in trying to be a people-first organisation, you can get sucked into trying to be everything to everyone. In reviews and feedback opportunities, the organisation asks employees honestly about how things are going; is it what you want it to be?

Session 6: Debriefing Skills

Speaker: John Bull, Director & Lead for High Performance, Management Futures

“The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than the competition” – Peter Senge

STOP: for live debriefs during the event:

• Stand Back: take a helicopter view.
• Take Stock: analyse what is happening.
• Options: explore options around what you can do differently.
• Proceed: step back in and take action. Assessing what impact your new approach has.

• Aviation principles: there is a lot we can learn from aviation. They don’t look at human error, instead system first.
• People and organisations who are good at debriefing are really curious.

How Debriefs Help Create a Winning Culture

• Coaches only recall between 16.8% and 52.9% of events.
• Involvement in discussions builds self-awareness and ownership of learning.
• Fosters an openness to feedback.
• Builds relationships and team cohesion.
• Helps decrease negative emotional effects and remove emotional baggage.

Features of a great debrief

• Psychological safety: create a calm, positive and supportive space. Set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive; and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
• Questions: use open, non-judgemental questions and a lot of follow up questioning. Focusing on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
• Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. Key insight: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works. Consider ‘appreciative inquiry’.
• Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals. Write the thinking down before the debrief. Who is well placed to provide feedback that isn’t in the current group?

Broad structure of debrief questions

• Reviewing where we are against our goals.
• Drawing out the learning around what has gone well.
• Exploring areas for improvement, and insights around what’s not gone well? Focusing on learning, not blame. Using root cause analysis.
• Getting clear on key insights, and how we are going to act on this learning.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the morning here.

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By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: Building Winning Organisations, hosted alongside the Toronto Maple Leafs, was our first physical North American event of the year. Throughout the course of the day, we engaged in case study sessions, an observation experience, roundtable discussions and skills-based learning centred around some key ingredients that contribute to building a winning or high performing organisation.

These are the highlights from a morning programme that featured Simon Timson, the Performance Director at reigning Premier League champions Manchester City and a Leafs’ training session followed by a session with their General Manager Kyle Dubas.

[Already up-to-date with the morning? The afternoon takeaways are available here.]

Session 1: Insights from a Winning Environment

Speaker: Simon Timson, Performance Director, Manchester City

• It’s important to remember that there is no silver bullet or magic formula in creating winning environments.
• A considered formula: any formula related to winning requires great people. Complementing this is creating the right environment, having a clear plan, knowing the plan and being disciplined in sticking to that plan.
• Starting point: understand the environment and situation you are coming into, both the internal and external dynamics. What can you control and what levers can you pull to create the right environment?
• Confront the brutal facts: where is the programme in its life-cycle? In Simon’s experiences from the different sports he came into, he encountered a range of phases, including start-up (skeleton) / turnaround (tennis) / accelerated growth (UK Sport) / sustaining success (Man City).
• Evidence-based situation analysis: we often here the quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – something from Simon’s experiences he doesn’t particularly agree with. You can’t deliver success or sustain it without a strong evidence-based strategy and a strong culture.
• Psychological safety: do people in your environment feel psychologically safe and open to be vulnerable where people can express what they are thinking and feeling?
• People work hard & together in good cultures: something that Simon has experienced is the power of a transformational approach = engaged, motivated and valued people.
• Good environments: Simon’s belief is that he doesn’t think you can succeed with just a good environment where people feel psychologically safe – if you don’t have the right strategy and tactics, it will be difficult to execute against.
• Good strategy provides clear direction: evidence-based strategy = right direction and tactics.
• Strategy delivered transformationally: evidence-based + transformational approach = high performance culture.
• Evidence-based strategy: this concept is about gathering the facts and not collecting the perceived wisdoms. There might be clues from those perceived wisdoms, but also red herrings woven in.
• Assumption is the enemy of excellence: do we know the things where the evidence tell us how to win? Having a What it Takes to Win model that is complemented by key concepts and underpinning principles. This alone isn’t the solution but it points you in the right direction and how to most effectively allocate resource.
• What it Takes to Win in practice: an example of this is live coding every game against those factors in the What it Takes to Win model.
• World-leading environment (British Skeleton): Simon’s arrival in the British Skeleton environment, with a clean slate, provided an opportunity to build a strategy from scratch.
• British Skeleton performance formula: Athletic Potential x Maximum Ice Time x World-Class Coaching x Cutting-Edge Equipment.
• Contributing factors behind formula: Clear vision / empowering / nature and nurture / role efficacy / equal expertise / individual support / rewarding excellence / being reflective / demanding / process-driven / high support / high expectations / process vision / integrated services / fierce internal competition.
• Beware the implementation dip: this concept comes from business strategy. ‘No plan survives first contact’.
• Stick to the formula and constantly evolve the plan: have a clear defined formula and game model with clarity to execute. At Manchester City in particular, the coaching team have a clear plan, are prepared to listened to the evidence and prepare to adjust as required.
• Transformational delivery: rigorously recruit and develop great people. Role model behaviours you want from your staff and players. Invest in the long-term development of coaches and practitioners in the same way you do players or athletes to help to retain your best people, make them feel valued, and get more out of them.
• The leader’s behaviours impact on performance: two theories – support and challenge. Challenge is far better received when followed by support.
• Research: a colleague of Simon’s looked at the relationship between leaders challenge and support behaviours – it is predictive of performance. High Support & High Challenge – outperformed. When walking into the facility everyday, ask your people how they are doing, feeling; then provide support.
• Zero tolerance of precious professional boundaries: cross boundaries, don’t stay in your lane. Value everyone’s opinions. Debate, discuss and ask good questions.

Summary:

• Confront brutal facts: understand the dynamics of your organisation’s situation by gathering and confronting the facts.
• Establish an evidence-based strategy: relentlessly focus resources and effort on what the evidence says it will take to win.
• Stick to the formula and continually evolve the plan: prepare everyone for the possibility of an implementation dip and logically adjust your plans.
• Role model the behaviours you want to see: challenge is better received when it’s preceded by support.

Session 2: Toronto Maple Leafs – Training Observation

Transitioning from the insight shared in session one, we switched our attention to an immersive session, watching a light training session for some of the Toronto Maple Leafs players. The purpose behind the session was to observe a live environment, in particular a team building towards success.

The group were posed three questions to consider when observing:

• What stood out?
• What impressed you?
• Room for improvement?

What stood out:

1. There was pace and fluidity in the session which allowed it to be short, sharp and efficient.
2. It was clear that the session was player-led. The coaches were not overcoaching, there were purely there to support and fine-tune.
3. There was a high coach-to-player ratio.
4. Lots of changes in the drills to keep the session fresh and energetic.
5. Every drill that took place was done so with a clear purpose that sat behind it.

What impressed you:

1. The group were very impressed and surprised by the coach-to-player ratio on the ice. This notion fed into something that followed in session three, where there is a clear culture of development within the organisation, and this was a good example of how that is being lived in the daily training environment.
2. Players leading the session and being focused on what works for them. Not much coach interference as well, only small pieces of feedback to provide input.
3. In some sporting environments, the Head Coach wants to be involved in every session that takes place, but the head coach wasn’t present at this light session. It was a good sign of empowerment and trust in both the players and the coaches to do what needs to be done and to not overcoach within the group.
4. Impressed with the appetite of those players involved to hone their craft, even on the morning of a game where the tendency can be to rest and not engage in too much pre-game priming.

Session 3: Building Towards Success

Speaker: Kyle Dubas, General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs

• Mission: upon taking the General Manager role in 2018, a key part of that mission was creating an environment for younger players to move into the next phase of the development of the team and complementing them with new talent.
• Convention: it’s often safest to stay close to convention vs. going against it. In the sport of hockey, there is a lot of tradition, so the organisation has tried to challenge established conventions. Be okay when things don’t quite go to plan when you have tried to innovate thinking and, instead, use those lessons to inform what happens next.
• Player development: an opportunity Kyle saw was that in a number of hockey environments there was lack of operational plan around player development. Traditionally, players are lectured on how to become a pro, so when shifting into a leadership role at the Leafs, the creation of individual plans and imparting those on the player became a key focus. There was an emphasis on measurement, particularly technical and tactical aptitude. The organisation have backed this up with a higher ratio of staff per player, who are responsible for the specific development plan.
• Scouting operation: combining the scouting and analytics lexicon was another big focus, particularly working with scouts to embrace technological tools and imparting their wisdom back into the system.
• Silos: first several years, departments weren’t collaborating and focused on separate opinions. Now there are more robust conversations. Credit is really centred around those who have been around a long time and have embraced this new way of working.
• Getting commonality: providing time and space where groups saw how they benefit one another is a simple but effective way of breaking down silos.
• Alignment: being steadfast in the philosophy that we will get the scouting and analysis departments working together – the reality is that data and objective information is going to be missing some contextual information. Don’t try and outsmart other departments and instead look at it as a source of competitive advantage.
• Player personnel and scouting: what do all of those in the process think are their weaknesses? Tried to shift language towards ‘our picks’ versus different departments taking credit for someone who is brought in.
• Learnings: in coaching and scouting, one of the things Kyle would go back and try to do differently is if you have this feeling of someone not quite working out in a role, there is a little bit of arrogance in trying to continue to make it work. Make a decision sooner when someone isn’t going to be a fit, as often they feel it as well. Being more definitive and helping people out by others having to go through that difficult stretch. Vice versa, be patient and show confidence in those you think are a good fit.
• Today vs tomorrow: you have to have the long range in mind. With every decision you make or consider as General Manager, coaches and others are only thinking about the game today versus you. Have conversations and generate clarity.
• Small things, big impact: taking feedback from players that have retired. Their opinions were that if you have a more direct interest in their individual development as a player versus just tactical coaching, it means a lot to them as you are investing in them more holistically. Looking at them as the person and not just someone on the ice.
• Characteristics: in staff, empathy is a key characteristic. We have players from different cultures, so being empathetic to who they are as a person and their culture in order to understand what they need.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the afternoon here.

By John Portch

How useful are the buzzwords and phrases that emerge as the hallmarks of great leaders?

“Everyone’s goal in team sports is to have their team perform at a high level and to get to the top of their league or division,” Jack Easterby told the Leaders Performance Institute via email.

“To do that it seems only common sense to most that there are initiatives, mantras and banner sayings that need to be uttered from the mouths of leaders upon the launch of the program for everyone to buy-in and begin to improve. After all, most teams don’t have new leaders unless the previous leadership was not executing what ownership wanted them to.”

The performance specialist, who most recently served as the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans, goes further. “The truth is that most leadership sayings, catchphrases and quotes are better lived out than uttered! Good leaders know that sayings are the least of the problem when they take a new assignment.”

As Easterby said in the first instalment of our interview, asking great questions is a good starting point, but you can also rephrase those buzzwords for better effect, as he tells us here in part three.

He argues that something such as ‘work hard’ could be tweaked to ‘outwork our opponent’. “At the outset of a leadership post,” he wrote, “great leaders simply schedule work, presentations and meetings in a way that demand everyone to earn each other’s respect while working hard, and then they ask ‘did we outwork our opponent?’ which ultimately becomes a core fabric of the team and a calling card for preparation in every area.”

He later meets with the Leaders Performance Institute to build upon his point [he discusses dealing with systems failure elsewhere]. Think of it like this,” he says. “You’re at the front of a room of 300 people and you say to everybody ‘work hard’, what does that mean? It means something different to every person. You may have said something that sounds great but it means nothing. But if you say: ‘are you willing to do what’s best for the team?’ That’s a ‘yes/no’ question. Now, if someone is ducking out early or not sending you things on schedule or maybe not communicating efficiently then you’re not doing what’s best for the team. It’s clear.

“Behaviours are a lot more digestible when you’re trying to create culture than slogans. I think slogans should be later – let that come later – I think you want the beginning to be behaviours. That’s why I mentioned instead of saying ‘work hard’ you’ve got to schedule meetings to show people that you care, and they should care. The meetings should be productive, where everyone has a voice and ‘we’re all working together here, let’s go’. So when you schedule a meeting structure you are actually working hard and not just telling everyone to work hard.

“When you say ‘think about the team’ what you’re saying is that ‘if this person is not willing to stay 20 minutes extra to help break down the training room, then they don’t really care about the team’. That’s as simple as that. That’s what I was saying in my email.

“Digestible phrases are good for t-shirts and all of that stuff but, in the end, it’s behaviours – behaviours of championship culture. That’s the one you want to be able to say: ‘we have championship behaviours’ not ‘championship slogans or mantras, we have championship behaviours’. And when you do that you have a chance to win and change people’s lives.”

All that said, are there phrases he thinks resonate? “I think the unorthodox phrases are the most valuable,” says Easterby. “I think of Coach Belichick’s ‘do your job’ or I think of some of the things that happened during the course of doing business and also what potentially comes out of your mouth, not just a premeditated ‘put the team first’ or ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’. Those things can get cheesy.

“What happens when you’ve got some things going wrong, some things going right, and you’re trying to apply some good vision and some good energy and you’ve got to go to something? For me, that was ‘it all matters’ because when you’re trying to create buy-in, a lot of times you’re standing in front of people and saying ‘guys, this is really important’ and then the next day you’re in front of them and you’re going ‘this is really important’ and then you realise ‘hey, I’ve said that nine times’. So the best thing to say is that ‘it all matters’ because now you’ve covered the gauntlet of when things are good, things are bad, when things seem small, things seem big; you’ve always said ‘it all matters’ so that was my go-to phrase because I didn’t want any body to have the premonition that something was a lot more important. The ops role is just as important as the star wide receiver and if you have equal pressure on everybody’s job then everyone will look to perform accordingly for the love of the team and the love of each other.

“But I do think the best buzzwords and the statements that are uniting come from the pressure where the leaders had to say certain things and that gave everyone a spark to rally around.”

By Sarah Evans

Recommended Reading

What Are your Trade-Offs in the Quest for Success?

Our Athletes Are Not Always in Tune with their Bodies, But Help Is at Hand

Performance Perspectives: Balancing the Emotional and Rational in Performance Support

Framing the topic

This was the third and final session of our first Performance Support Series of the year, which focused on ‘The Performance Paradox’. Across these sessions, which are led by our Performance Advisor and performance specialist Dr Meg Popovic, the aim is to explore the trade-offs, and considerations in the quest to win for staff, athletes, and their wider organisation. This series is centred around Transformational Learning Theory; how we learn to transform ourselves and our teams we co-create. This final session focused on the voices in athlete-led leadership.

Recap

The Oxford Languages definition of ‘paradox’: ‘a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true; a statement, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities’.

“A flower won’t open if I yell at it and say ‘bloom!’” – Marion Woodman

Assumptions

1. Our athletes are growing into their (young) adult selves.
2. Athletes become great via being highly coachable. Part of coachability is being able to be told what to do, how and when.
3. We as organisational leaders have yet to fully embrace athletes’ voices, thoughts and insights into our design, processes, multidisciplinary teams.
4. We have a responsibility as adults and roles with power in and over athletes’ lives to help them be their best versions of themselves; this includes creating a container for them to find their voices in their athletic journeys and lives.
5. The co-active way is possible for athlete-led leadership in high performance sport.

Holding space: athlete-led leadership

If we imagine more space for athletes to find and integrate their voices into the system (club/team/organisation that surrounds the athlete):

1. What would it look like?
2. What would it feel like?
3. What would have to change?

Our own voice process – “All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Pedagogy, coaching = reflective practice, self knowing.

Meg asked our members to reflect on their own voice process, and make notes on the following questions:

• What is the age of athletes you work with? If it’s a large range, pick either one team or level of the athletes you relate to least. This is the age you need to remember yourself at. Try to relate these questions to you at this time of your life.
• Details – where did you live? What school did you go to? What sports did you play? Did you have a part-time job? Did you travel at all by that time in your life?
• Influencers – who were you living with? Who had the greatest impact on your life decisions and choices at this time?
• Life learning – what was something that this younger version of yourself had to go through or learn from? What happened in your life that made you learn an important lesson?
• What were your greatest worries? How did you handle it? Who did you talk to?
• What was your peer group like?
• What were your relationships like with people in their 30s/40s at this time?
• How did you think about and/or handle money and wealth at this time?

It’s important to understand our younger athletes, think about what life was like for you at that time, and how to help them in order to get the best out of themselves as people and performers.

Agency vs structure

When looking at the social relationships between individuals and larger groups and social institutions that have influence on those individuals, consider the following:

Structure – macro: the recurrent patterned arrangements / social structures which influence or limit the individual choices and opportunities available. The Club / Organisation and its departments.

Agency – micro: the capacity of the individuals to have the power and resources to fulfil their potential, express themselves and act upon their own will. The athletes.

The structure and the agency are always in a co-active dance together, let’s see where they blend and where they don’t.

Low agency, low structure = drift

• Athletes are vulnerable.
• Little resistance and athletes disengaged and disconnected.
• Boundaries and expectations are unclear.
• Staff are out of touch with the athlete’s needs, wants, feelings and experiences.

High agency, low structure = laissez-faire

• Under-regulated, no clear boundaries.
• Expectations are not clear or articulated for the athletes.
• Athletes speak and often drive decisions, but results in wishy washy standards and inconsistency.

Low agency, high structure = regulation

• Compliant athletes.
• Shallow resistance.
• Shallow engagement in broader decisions made for them.
• Dominant authority by staff over athletes.

High agency, high structure = alignment

• Integrity and awareness in athletes and staff.
• Strong engagement between athletes and staff.
• Co-active player development; athlete voices invited into the decision making and ideation that impact their careers.

Think about the departments of your organisation, if you were to evaluate the relationship between the club, the department and the athletes and the dialogue between them: where would you plot them on a graph with the quadrants above?

Strength-based best practices

Thinking about the departments within your club or organisation, if they’re really good at engaging players’ voices:

• Why so?
• What are they doing?
• How are they doing it?
• What’s the impact?

By John Portch

Last week Roy Hodgson returned as Manager of English Premier League club Crystal Palace and, in doing so, came out of retirement for a second time.

With the south-east London club enduring a poor run of form, they turned to the man who led them between 2017 and 2021.

When Hodgson left Selhurst Park at the end of the 2020-21 season he indicated that he would be retiring from management after a 35-year coaching career that started in 1976 at Halmstads in Sweden and took in spells in Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Middle East over the next four decades.

There were numerous highlights. He won league championships in both Sweden and Denmark, achieved World Cup and European Championships qualification with Switzerland’s men, and one could even make the case that Hodgson’s finest work came in his homeland, where he led Fulham to the Europa League final in 2010 and helped Palace to consolidate their status as a Premier League club.

He had hard-earned laurels on which to rest. Yet eight months after retiring he was back, taking the reins at struggling Watford in January 2022. The club slid into the Championship that May and Hodgson slipped into retirement again,  seemingly for good this time. That is until last week when Palace returned to a familiar face, who has signed a contract until the end of the season.

In light of his appointment, Hodgson’s words, spoken at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in Abu Dhabi in February, seem prescient. He had been asked by Leaders’ Jimmy Worrall about his efforts to cope with the stress of management and indicated that it was more of an “obsession”, “a way of life”, than a mere job.

“To some extent, the adrenaline and the emotion and the passion, the excitement – that’s what drew us to becoming a coach in the first place,” he said with a smile while looking at fellow football manager Alan Pardew, who joined him onstage. “We signed up for it, we wanted it.”

Hodgson has a reputation for inspiring underdogs to over-performance, but no one can predict how his latest tenure will go or if Palace will preserve their Premier League status, and there are plenty of observers with reservations about his appointment, but there were signs in Abu Dhabi that he will be ready for the challenge come what may.

Bring players on a journey

Hodgson described his first days on any new assignment as a “classic leadership task”. He said: “You have to sell yourself and your ideas because what you’re going to need to have any success at all is to create the environment that you think is going to be conducive to producing the type of results and the type of football you want to see.

“I think that your first impressions are very important, I think you need a lot of belief, and that belief that you maybe have in yourself, in your methods and the way you think the team’s going to need to play in order to win matches, you need to be able to get that over to the players in a way; and that will involve to some extent a very clear-sighted but somewhat stubborn approach to the subject.”

He recounted his first spell at Serie A side Inter in the mid-’90s when he tried to shift the team away from the style to which the players had become accustomed.

“To get that, you’ve somehow got to bring the players with you. Your personality, your belief in yourself, your ability to sell the idea to them, and the ability to convince them that ‘if you do this, if you follow me, if we go together, there’s a chance that we’ll make this succeed’ and that’s how I went about it.”

Good and bad apples

Hodgson has held 23 management or head coaching positions (including two tenures at Inter and Crystal Palace) and experienced both success and failure along the way.

Worrall asked him how he reacted at those times where his approach simply didn’t take hold. Hodgson cited a lack of trust and the potential impact of negative public perceptions of his personality and work. “That is how it is and, if you’re going to do the job, or have any chance to do the job, you have to fight through those things,” he said.

Where he enjoyed positive results, Hodgson felt he had the backing of senior leadership. Fulham was a prime example. He joined the west London club in December 2007 and picked up just nine points from his first 13 Premier League matches. However, the results turned, with Fulham claiming 12 points from their final five matches. With Fulham’s Premier League status secure, the club had a springboard from which to secure the European qualification that led to the Europa League final.

“The first months were very difficult and I suppose it was fortunate that I came to the club after periods of success in previous jobs,” he said. Self-belief was important too. “Because if you start to lose faith in yourself, and your belief that what you’re offering is something that will help the players, then you really are doomed. That could easily have happened because, to be honest, we were doing so badly at the time and  people were expecting the new manager bounce and that certainly didn’t happen with me.

“But we kept faith and I could see on the training field that the players weren’t averse to what we were doing; they weren’t thinking ‘this is ridiculous and we’re never going to win playing like this’. We got the feeling they did believe and the results didn’t improve that much but performances did.”

At Fulham, the team kept the faith, and Hodgson’s work was supported by the team’s senior leaders, with forward Brian McBride and midfielder Danny Murphy cited onstage in Abu Dhabi.

“These two guys got so much behind the team and what we were trying to do, that their leadership on the field was an enormous bonus for myself and my coaching staff  because if you can get the leadership on the field from your players then your chance of being a good leader yourself can improve enormously.”

Hodgson also cast aside those he perceived as bad apples. “One of the things we had to do, quite frankly, was to move some people from the first-team squad. It was a big first-team squad and it was pretty obvious to us in that early period that these are not only not helping us, they’re hindering us because of their negativity. We wanted resilience and positivity. These guys were negative. We had to move those aside and work with the positive ones that we had left in the group.”

Work-life balance

Hodgson’s time away from the game left him with a realisation about the impact of stress. “You don’t sometimes realise what the stress and pressure is doing to you until you’re not doing it at the moment and you watch the television and you see the faces of the people who are out there; the last minutes of games, hanging onto a win or trying desperately to get an equaliser, and you see that tension there and you think ‘was I like that?’,” he said.

However his second spell at Palace goes, he gave the sense in February that although the pressure of Premier League management is real, his resilience would not be an issue should a club come calling.

“People would ask me, especially as I got older, ‘how do you cope with the tension, don’t you find the pressure is getting too hard for you, especially at your age?’ ‘No, I don’t really feel it, I think I’m OK’. But I think I was fooling myself because, looking at these people, I’m sure it was just the same because, unfortunately, the cliché about the coach on the side line [is true]. You’re kicking every ball, you are to some extent, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t know how you get away from that.”

Time, however, has taught him the importance of a balance, even if football management is “a way of life”. “The only way out of it is your balance,” he said. “The balance between your working life and your family life or time with friends and time with leisure activities, and of course your perspective.”

With perspective comes awareness. “The awareness that no one is really forcing me to do this, this is something that I’ve always wanted to do; and if I don’t feel capable any more of dealing with this pressure then it would be up to me for my own health and for the benefit of my family to move away.”

Whatever else, Hodgson has not reached that stage and there could yet be a successful epilogue to his career.

By John Portch

In January 2022 Welsh Rugby Union issued the first professional contracts to 12 members of its senior women’s team.

The number has further increased since then and Head Coach Ioan Cunningham reflects on this development with pride, particularly in light of Wales’ creditable performances at the delayed Rugby World Cup in 2022. The team reached the quarter-finals in New Zealand before bowing out against the hosts.

“I think creating history meant something special to the group,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. The changes have been noticeable too, as Wales seek to bridge the gap between themselves and the World Cup semi-finalists, namely England, Canada, France and the world champions New Zealand.

“The physical changes – we were able to put the players on full-time programmes, maximising their rest and recovery – allowed them to get better,” Cunningham continues. “We were able to put a daytime training programme together, which was fantastic for our group, zoning in on our skillset work as well as physical conditioning, building athletes that could play the style of rugby we wanted to play.”

Cunningham, a notable contributor to our latest Special Report, is set to lead his Wales side into the 2023 Women’s Six Nations this weekend. Wales host Ireland in Cardiff on Saturday afternoon (25 March).

The preparations were in full swing when the Leaders Performance Institute sat down for a Teams call with Cunningham, who delved into his team’s hopes for the competition while reflecting on his style as a leader.

Ioan, how has the team’s transition to professionalism influenced you as a leader?

IC: I began by being coaching-focused on the grass, really getting close to the players, building relationships, growing trust, building self-belief in the players. But then as time went on, it’s sort of stepping back a little bit to that satellite view looking down on the whole programme. So what do we need to make us better? Trying to take a more holistic approach around the players, trying to get the psychologist involved, the nutritionist involved and how that fits into the team; another S&C coach and growing that department and those groups and allowing the players to flourish in the environment. My style has changed. I’m still coaching the players quite hard but also making sure that the team around me is delivering and I am checking in with them regularly to make sure that we maintain our standards.

What is the link between your standards and the culture you are seeking to create?

IC: First and foremost, we want our players to come into our environment and enjoy what they’re doing. That’s the most important thing. Within that, we will be up front and honest with each other. We did a piece early on about performance conversations and how that’s different to maybe just having a normal conversation with anyone. So when we have those performance conversations they might be difficult or hard to hear, but the feedback is coming from a good place because we want you to get better. Also, how players give feedback to each other is an important part of enabling ourselves to get better, maintaining those training standards, allowing no sloppy behaviours with regards to a meeting. We say when everyone’s in we’re ‘on’ and we don’t want to waste a rep. Those things are huge in our environment and we stay on top of those. Over the last six months, the group have grown immensely to self-police that to a point so that we can just chip in and stay on top of players and then they drive it, especially the senior group.

What do you need to be aware of in terms of the general energy of the group?

IC: We don’t want any negative people, sappers or oxygen thieves. It’s easy enough to look at something they can’t control, whether it’s the weather or timings or equipment, but what they can control is how they react to a situation and that’s still something we work hard on. Selection is a big thing. They can’t control selection. What they can do is control everything in their control to make sure they give themselves the best chance to be selected. It’s moving that energy and that focus onto them first. We had this thing last year in the Six Nations and in the World Cup. It was ‘we before me’. We put the team first before ‘me’. So if I’m thinking of the team first I’m going to do everything I can, first and foremost, to make the team succeed because it’s easy enough to point fingers and say ‘well, she didn’t do that’ or ‘this wasn’t good enough’ or ‘I didn’t have this’. But did you do everything you could?

How carefully do you choose your words? What can you say and what do you prefer to not say?

IC: It depends on the individual, the person, or the type of group that you’re dealing with, but most of the time it’s an approach of an arm around the shoulder but you’re also jabbing them in the rib. I’m coming to players with a care mindset because I want them to get better but I’m also saying it directly sometimes because ‘this is what you need to hear’. I need to check-in to make sure they have heard the message is clear because some people have listened but they don’t hear. Also, within our coaching group, I think we’re at the stage where we’ve worked together for quite a good period where we can actually ask the right questions of each other. For example, I might say to my forwards coach ‘are you looking at everything you can to make sure that we’re operating in our lineout? Can we be more creative? Do we need to go back to our skillset work?’ I might show them examples that I’m seeing and he’ll come back to me and show me examples of what he’s seeing and then we meet at a common place and say ‘this is clearly what we need to work on going forward and let’s be clear on that with the players’. And I’ll be open to him. I’ll say ‘I’ll come to you in the session. I won’t come to the players unless I need to speak to them’. I’ll say ‘keep driving something, you can do that differently, you can check there if they actually learned that’. I’ll just stay on top of that mostly day to day or in the session.

How do you work to provide opportunities for player feedback?

IC: There is a small group setup for meetings, both unit meetings as well as team. I’ve created a group which I call a ‘guidance group’ – I didn’t want to call them a ‘leaders group’, I wanted  to call them a ‘guidance group’ because I want them to guide and support, lead and feed back. Within that, there are four players who are experienced and been around the group and there’s one young player attached. She can learn off everyone else and see the type of conversations we’ll have. And they are the sounding board on the grass for me plus they deliver some of the information I want to be delivered to the team. I believe the environment is a safe one for players to speak out, ask a question. All of our team are very approachable from a management point of view and I think that creates an environment where players come in and are comfortable expressing themselves and that’s what we want.

What can you do to remove as much stress as possible from your playing group?

IC: As a leader, when you step into the building every day I think you’ve got to come in with positive high energy but also a calmness that says everything’s under control. I think that’s really important.  And to show that the messages you are giving are clear, you’re not stressed as a head coach. It’s like the old swan. You’re calm on top of the water and your legs are kicking underneath. That’s the picture and the aura you try to give off, that everything is good, calm and controlled, planned and organised. We’re focusing on the process rather than the outcome. ‘Did we do everything right this week? Yes we did.’ Back it up with confidence; ‘we’ve trained superbly well this week, we’ve done everything we can do’. So giving them that confidence. Even in the middle of games. I remember when we played the Black Ferns [New Zealand] in the quarter-final of the World Cup. We knew we were playing one of the best teams in the world and the girls gave everything in that first half and, at half-time, they were coming in thinking ‘we’re down by 20 points. What’s he going to say?’. And it was all calm and positive. ‘We’ve done superbly well, executed what we wanted to do, just keep doing it. It’s real good work.’ I remember some of the faces were like ‘oh, great’ and when you review that and speak to the players later on when the emotion’s gone a couple of days after. They said ‘we were expecting you to come in and give us a rocket but you didn’t. You backed us and supported us and said the right things’. You get a good response off that. One phrase I’ll say to the players is ‘make it hard not to pick you’. It’s making sure they realise that it’s not just what they do on the training field, it’s not just what they do with the ball in hand; have they done their injury prevention work? Have they checked-in? Have they monitored? Have they ticked everything off to make sure they are ready to go? And that is part of performance. If they have done those things there will still be a conversation in a one-to-one selection feedback meeting, for example, because it’s about habit-forming. If they don’t do these things then something’s going to break later on down the line.

You view the matches as a vehicle for your improvement?

IC: 100%. The next World Cup is in 2025, so it’s about two and a half years away; it’s not that far from the last one. So you’ve one eye on that so you’re like ‘we’ve got to start bringing fresh faces into the group, we’ve got to start exposing more players to Test match rugby to prepare them for 2025. We’ve still got to win the Test matches that are in front of our face, so how do we do that? Looking at the evolution of players as well, as in changing positions or the combination of players playing together. Those are really important. There’s a lot of stuff going into one game or this tournament. And with the Six Nations, it’s so important to start well because it’s only five games and if you don’t start well the momentum can go against you quite quickly. There’s a lot going on and it’s exciting with regards to the different bits of that jigsaw coming together and, before we know it, we’ll be in a World Cup year trying to do better than we did last time.

What would it take for your Six Nations campaign to be considered a success?

IC: Score more points, it’s as simple as that. On average, we’re scoring about 12 points a game, 15. That’s not good enough to win Test matches and to beat the better teams in the world. So our conversion rate in the opposition 22. Once we get in there can we convert more often than we have been? If we can nail those two things then we’ll certainly become a better force. If we nail what we’ve spoken about in our game from an attacking point of view, we’ll create those opportunities and you have to convert them then. I’ll give you an example, we played Canada in August before the World Cup and we had eight entries into the 22 and came away with three points. They had five entries into our 22 and came away with 22 points. It’s just those entries and those conversion rates. If you look at the ‘why’ behind that, why didn’t we convert more from those eight entries? Those are the work-ons we’ve got to nail from an accuracy point of view, players understanding, everyone on the same page, the detail within our structures, and hopefully those entries turn into more points for us.

Ioan Cunningham is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Welsh Rugby Union, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Hockey Ireland. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By Sarah Evans

We often hear about the importance of problem solving within high performing environments, but what is the process of identifying, reviewing and then effecting this problem solving? We looked into the ways in which our members were going about this process within their own environments within a recent Topic Led Virtual Roundtable.

Here are four key themes that we pulled out of our conversation around how to effectively define and solve performance problems.

1. The power of questioning

• It is important to have an inquisitive mind when it comes to problem solving. Our members stressed how important it is to be able to ask ‘why was this data collected?’ ‘What was the context?’ The more we ask questions and tease out more depth before jumping in to solving problems the more effective you will be. As leaders, they explained it is important to continuously challenge the coaches when they come with a solution, break it down and ask what else could you do?
• There is huge value in having multiple, and varied sources. Asking others, ‘we’ve already tried this’ and thinking, ‘what lessons can we learn from it’.
• One of our members highlighted the need to clarify one thing right from the beginning: ‘what is the question we’re going after, is it actually the right question and presented in the right way so people are aligned?’ Therefore as leaders, influencing the narrative is also important, especially when considering the language and then the approach to how you go about this.
• Often the first question is not always right, but you have to start somewhere. Sometimes the original question is needed to prompt discussion and collaboration to get to the better answer. However, often we wait for the perfect question, but actually within that time the problem has changed or evolved.

2. Reframing

•  As mentioned above, huge importance is placed on asking lots of questions to provide context to define the problem to fully understand it. However, it is then imperative to try to reframe the problem to get other perspectives and see it from a different angle to help you come to different solutions in order to solve the problem. Working as multidisciplinary team, pulling in the athlete’s perspective are just two ways to go about gathering different perspectives.
• Do we do enough of getting past the surface level? Part of the problem is where inexperienced coaches within a multidisciplinary team don’t delve into enough detail in terms of framing the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ before they come to the table. But on the other hand, very experienced coaches often feel like they need the answers before they come to the table. Do we allow them to be vulnerable and help frame the problem, to allow them to have more input from others, before sitting down with the whole group?
• It is important to highlight before the meeting, what the purpose of the meeting is. Is it to define the problem or come up with a solution? Setting this out from the outset allows everyone to be aligned and come mentally prepared to the meeting.

3. Diversity of thought and experience

• Spending time in non-traditional environments is a great way to improve problem solving. One member explained about how, every month they intentionally spend time in environment that is left field, and not in sport. Sport organisations are large with cultures and subcultures, and in order to navigate these and keep things moving, you have to look outside the norm.
• Understanding yourself, your blank spots, and then widening this to your team and wider organisation is hugely valuable. If you understand what your blank spots are you can seek out people or environments which complement your weaknesses and make for more well-rounded problem solving. Often the problem lies within the people in the room and their preferred way of thinking, so being able to take a step back, be humble and honest with yourself and the group about the collective shortcomings.
• Engaging with multiple stakeholders is imperative, you need to incorporate the insight from people with different experiences. Don’t just seek out those who are the most engaged, seek out the insights from those that might sit on the periphery or who are not as bought-in.
• Diversity of thought in the coach development team has been a key factor in one member organisation’s team success. This team was very much intentionally put together incorporating their different skills and backgrounds to complement each other. This helps them to constantly reframe the questions and get different inputs.
• The community of practice approach. Social learning is a big part of one of our member’s problem-solving process. Understanding the problem, providing the context and allowing people from different backgrounds to frame it from their perspectives.

4. Symptom vs problem

• There are different kinds of performance problems, those that are reactive and symptom-like which need solutions right away, and those which are fundamental problems. Often teams look to solve the symptoms but miss addressing the fundamentals.
• It is crucial to understand the fundamentals on where the team could have tackled that earlier to understand for next time. Then, form taskforces to ask questions. You have to trust the taskforce, to have the understanding of the structure. If people have a narrow-minded way of seeing structure, it is not fruitful, so building trust and having overview are two key things to have in the taskforce.
• Often teams are brought a lot of problems, but it is most important to think of a way to facilitate an environment in order to fix them. You have to find a way in which you can delve deeper into specific problems whilst maintaining a multidisciplinary approach. One example is where rather than meeting as a multidisciplinary team in order to be collaborative and open, one of our members explained that having the group of physios meet more regularly, really getting into the weeds of the problem and learning from one another, allowed them to problem-solve more easily. They then could set a meeting structure with a process that is conducive to them bringing all their problems to the table and using the network to help solve the problem, then reporting back to the wider team to take it further.

Recommended reading

The Cynefin Framework – Using the Most Appropriate Problem-Solving Process

Design Thinking Defined (IDEO)

Five Tips From IDEO for All Leaders in Sport

Pig Wrestling: Clean Your Thinking to Create the Change you Need (Goodreads)

Procrastinate on Purpose

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Amazon.co.uk)

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Amazon.co.uk)