By Luke Whitworth

On the 26 April, Leaders Performance Institute members met for the inaugural Performance in Practice session hosted in collaboration with the Premier League.

The theme for the afternoon, as indicated by the title, was Leading Innovation & Problem-Solving. The session included a case study and conversation from both inside and outside of sport, as well as exploring the skills and tools to ‘develop the muscle’ of innovation both individually and collectively.

“If the rate of change within an organisation is slower than the pace of change within its external environment – it will die” – Jack Welch, former CEO & Chair of General Electric

Performance in Practice – Part I: Insights on Innovation in Sport

Guest: Scott Drawer, Head of Sport, Millfield School

When do you know you are getting innovation right:

• There will be haters.
• Startup mindset.
• Step change.
• Behaviour change.
• Diversion & deception.

What is creativity, research & innovation?

Creativity:

• Creativity is ‘novelty, utility, surprise’ (US Patent Office).
• ‘An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements and the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships’ (James Webb Young, 1939).
• ‘Creativity is just connecting things… creative people were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesise new things… they’ve had more experiences… they have thought more about their experiences than other people (Steve Jobs, Apple).

The science of creativity (Kaufman 2016):

1. Creativity is often unpredictable. The ten-year rule is NOT a rule.
2. Creative people often have messy processes. Creators rarely receive helpful feedback.
3. Talent is relevant to creative accomplishment. Personality is relevant.
4. Genes are relevant. Environmental experiences matter.
5. Creative people have broad interests. Too much expertise can be detrimental to creative greatness.
6. Outsiders often have a creative advantage. Sometimes the creator needs to create a new path for others to deliberately practise.

Study: what are some of the commonalities of the most successful scientists in the world?

Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members

Innovation = Ideas + Impact

• Innovation is the concept of taking ideas and making a practical difference to the environment you are operating in.
• What are the problems you are trying to solve?

Confusion is often caused by misunderstanding symptoms and causes. Creativity is a symptom of innovation not a cause.

3 necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for innovation:

1. Starvation
2. Pressure
3. Conditions

Designing for innovation:

• Shared problem.
• ‘Under regulation’.
• Leadership appetite for risk.
• Freedom to explore and experiment.
• ‘Rapid prototype’ environments.
• Share and celebrate your failures.

Failing is your first attempt in learning – celebrate the process vs. the outcome. Closing doors is almost as important as opening them.

Learning from Others’ Failures: The Effectiveness of Failure Stories for Managerial Learning

Research:

• The systematic gathering of data, information, and facts + advancement of knowledge (Cost of Federal Regulations).

Where does research fit in the innovation process?

• It is one approach to support innovation but not the only one.
• It can help understand the problem you are trying to solve.
• Helps ask brilliant questions.
• Observation and patterning skills.
• Communication skills.
• It can be slow: speedboats vs. super tankers.

‘Knowledge alone is not impact.’

Conclusions:

• Innovation is shaped by the environment’s design.
• Innovation is about solving real problems that make a practical difference.
• Leadership approach – leader-leader model.
• Organisational maturity – ‘Big Kids’
• Diversity in networks and openness to experience.
• Storytelling to share approaches.
• Create fun as a catalyst for change.

Performance in Practice – Part I: Insights on Innovation, Creativity & Problem-Solving

Guests:

Scott Drawer, Head of Sport, Millfield School

Jonnie Noakes, Director of Teaching & Learning, Eton College

• Innovation challenges in education: the school thinks about innovation in terms of internal and external. Externally, AI is getting teachers both excited and worried. The pupils are way ahead of the teachers, so the school has moved fast to educate its staffing group. Teachers have gone from 0-100 in a short time because outside circumstances have forced them to see what AI can do and how it can support them. Internally, there is a big emphasis on partnerships. There is also a big drive to rethink assessment with the belief that the current ways of assessing have a stranglehold on what and how we teach. The question being explored is: what are schools for and evolving the approach to assessment?
• Balancing innovation and tradition: the model being used at Eton College is having a small group of people whose job it is to innovate. Two-thirds of Jonnie’s time is opened up for innovation work. If you have dedicated people to horizon-scan, you are able to influence things more quickly. Start talking to your colleagues when you can see a practical use that can be applied.
• Required skillsets: there are particular skillsets required to do this type of work, notably logical thinking. To do deep intense thinking is difficult around day-to-day work. Innovation can stem from small things that accumulate over time and having a risk-taking ethos. Create headspace and an approach that does this and give the space to those that have a propensity for these. Prove this stuff works.

How do we create a culture of learning?

• As a starting point 12 months is too short a time for a culture to truly change. The Innovation Centre at Eton College has been open for eight years – it took five years to see a culture of innovation begin to form. Set up a small group of people to test promising ideas. Get others onboard to trial them. Get them to report back to hear from each other. At the point where your colleagues are hearing what is going on, then you are beginning to get traction.
• Organisationally, put everything on the biggest priority and do what you can to make it happen, but identify what is that most critical problem. Put all the eggs in this basket – the process you engage in with a startup mentality will move you along. There is an importance for clarity on what has the greatest room for innovation.

What holds back innovation:

• Habit and comfort in doing and thinking in a certain way. Sometimes it takes external pressure. Days are full with things that need to be done, therefore being asked to do things and find headspace for experimentation is often what is needed. Fear – in education people are scared of what AI is going to mean as there is uncertainty. Show people why things are not to be feared.
• The reality why people want to innovate is because there are solutions in there. There needs to be an acceptance that you need to fail to get there. Fear stops people putting themselves out there. Talk about the process and less about the outcome. Being comfortable with the confusion and not knowing.

Where to put the resource: find people who are innovative or develop their skills to be innovative?

• Curiosity is coachable. In your environment, provide opportunities and a safe space to support people in being innovative. Most environments want to be better, there is an inherent propensity to want to do that – surface it and give people the skills to exploit. The environment is far better than the genetics. If senior people aren’t that open to innovation, they will crush it quite quickly.

Session 2: Leading Innovation & Effective Problem-Solving

Can you develop it and, if so, how can you develop it?

Rivers of thought:

Edward de Bono – when we step into an environment, what we do is absorb quickly and begin to form ideas, developing ‘rivers of thought’.

• Ideas / Knowledge / Experience.
• Streams of consciousness.
• ‘Rivers of thought’, which we accept as reality and cease to challenge.

IDEAL Model for Problem-Solving:

Taking us back to a process of innovation. Can be obsessed with creativity as a concept vs. the process of creativity.

• Identify potential problems and opportunities for improvement.
• Define the problem. Seek to understand it. Gather relevant facts and views.
• Explore its causes and potential impacts. Explore possible solutions. Using creative techniques to generate multiple options.
• Assess these options. Choose the best one, and take it.
• Action with a ‘test & learn’ mindset.
• Look Back and debrief to driving learning and improvement.

Identify problems and opportunities

“The first and most important step towards innovation is identifying the problems you want to try and solve” – James Dyson.

Two types of innovation:

1. Responsive: where we face a problem that is impossible to ignore.
2. Front foot: where we proactively identify an opportunity for improvement, and solve for an issue everyone else is accepting or ignoring.

Traps to watch out for…

1. Operating out of an out of date mental map of the world – who are you speaking to who will challenge our thinking of our current world?
2. Boiled frog: change too gradual for us to notice.
3. Denial: ostrich response – there is an issue which is uncomfortable to talk about.

Define the problem:

• Articulate the gap, why it matters, the causes and your constraints.
• A lot of teams jump too quickly to solving it vs. understanding the problems.

Key traps to avoid at this stage:

• Failing to identify the real issue, root causes.
• Failing to sell the problem effectively and create enough urgency.
• Suggesting or hinting at a solution in your problem statement – narrowing people’s thinking ahead of the Explore stage.

Exploring possible strategies:

The more options you have, the better your chances of coming up with a game-changing idea.

5 Strategies:

1. Redefine or reframe the problem with alternative goals: how can we think about this problem differently? Think of at least three different ways we could define our goal, to help open up new ways of thinking about the problem.
2. Mind mapping: mapping out the different categories of possible solutions, so we don’t narrow in on one type of solution.
3. Step-change thinking: set a very stretching goal, and then think how that could be possible.
4. Ideal world: describe your absolute ideal outcome. Then ask yourself under what circumstances you would get this?
5. Related world: key question – who’s already faced and solved this problem? And what did they do? Learning from others who have addressed a similar challenge. Staying open to insights from outside of our immediate sector.

Questions to help us apply these techniques:

1. Reframing the problem with a different goal: what are at least three different ways to think about the problem and your goal here?
2. Mind mapping: if you were to draw a mind map with the problem at the centre… what are the different types of solution we can think about?
3. Step-change: pick a key area of performance related to this problem – what would be a ‘step change’ goal you could set for that measure? Assuming it is possible, ask yourself ‘what would we need to do to achieve this?’

Group insights: what are the key qualities of those who are good innovators?

• Having time and space.
• Create time to think.
• Environment over personality.
• Invite diverse opinions.
• Accepting of risk.
• Act quickly.
• Live in the future.
• Take people on the journey.
• They do not give up.
• Remove mundane distractions.
• An ability to switch off.
• Encourage creative thinking and supporting of ideas.
• Secure enough to fail.
• Find a different perspective.
• Biased toward strategic not operational – thinking and seeing the bigger picture.
• They know how to take ideas through trial to usable form.
• Believing in the value of innovation.
• Exploratory mindset.
• Open-mindedness – not being attached to existing, familiar ways of doing things.

By Luke Whitworth

The latest iteration of our Leadership Skills Series centred on the theme of managing ego and sought to explore thinking around managing our ego and recognising when it gets in our way. The session also discussed our responses to ego in others and handling egos within a team.

In kicking off this skills session, the group found it useful to revisit definitions of ego: ‘Ego is an individual’s sense of self-esteem or self-worth. The way someone views or perceives themselves – their self-awareness’.

Ego is a spectrum. It’s neither good nor bad per se, it’s a matter of degree or context. Positive aspects include confidence, security of identity and self-belief. Negative aspects are attributed to criticism of self and others, needing approval and the need to feel superior.

With the above in mind, here are some considerations for managing ego, individually and collectively.

Working with your ego

What are some of the ways you can keep your ego in check, healthy and appropriate?

• Support, develop and work with people who won’t feed your ego. Seek them out. Find smart people, with the confidence to speak up, to give you feedback and perspective on yourself and your contribution to the group effort.
• Take a moment to reflect on all the people who were part of making you successful.
• Thank people publicly for their contributions to what you’ve achieved. Humble leaders are often very forward in thanking and appreciating the role of others in their success.

Do you check in on your ego? The ‘Johari Window’ which is a framework for understanding conscious and unconscious bias that can help increase self-awareness and our understanding of others. There are four dimensions of self-knowledge around ego:

1. What we know about ourselves which everybody else knows. This is the ‘open window’ where it is a kind of public knowledge that everybody knows about.
2. What we personally privately know, but other people don’t know. The things we keep to ourselves.
3. The things we don’t know about ourselves but other people do know; ‘the blind spots’.
4. The hidden part of ourselves which we really don’t know and nobody else knows.

Finally, ask people that you trust. What do they know, think about you that you are not self-aware of? Self-disclosure and feedback is the kind of the golden recipe for getting insight into how our ego is manifesting itself, and whether it’s working well for us or not.

What the research says

A piece of research that explored problem players in sports teams with high, inappropriate ego highlights that you can experience the following consequences:

1. Cliques: sides being taken as opposed to having a whole team approach.
2. Reduced effort: people who see the high ego problem performer not being handled well.
3. Question authority: management may lose authority or credibility if high egos are able to have too much influence.
4. Drains energy: the energy it can take to manage high, inappropriate levels of ego in a team. Is your team a ‘radiator’ or a ‘drain’? Who is draining the energy?
5. Younger players impacted: a feeling of not being able to speak up or feeling intimidated.

Working with someone else’s ego

Three ways you as an individual can seek to keep it in check:

1. Be ‘adult to adult’ and assertive. You don’t have to take it just because they give it. For example using this type of language that is clear and direct ‘tell me three things you want. OK, here’s three things I want.’
2. Acknowledge their positive intentions. Whatever their behaviour, even if you don’t like it at some level, there is positive intention. This approach helps us be empathetic. What are they trying to do?
3. Capitalise on appetite for improvement – stretch them. Many high ego people want to succeed, which is something we can capitalise on.

Working with ego in teams

Three ways the team can seek to keep ego healthy:

1. Openly talk about ego. Look to use it as a force for good. We can start to come to a ‘deal’ within our team if we address and talk openly about it.
2. Contract from the outset. Team goals first and focus on purpose that can lead to positive psychological safety.
3. Set ambitious goals that can stretch.

A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

Scott Hann recalls the euphoria and the relief of watching his charge, the artist gymnastics gold medallist Max Whitlock, claim two golds and a bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

“Then, all of a sudden, you get home and you’re hoovering the floor in your living room and it just hit me. What was it all for? What’s happened?” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast.

Whitlock, who won a further gold at the delayed Tokyo Games to make it six Olympic medals in total (he won two bronzes at London 2012), recently went public with his mental health struggles and, here, Scott explains that his mental health has also suffered as a consequence of his work.

“After the Olympics, nobody’s holding you on a pedestal, no one’s coming around and helping you with anything now. It’s done and you’re on your own. It was really hard.”

Scott’s efforts to safeguard his mental health is just one of several topics on the agenda, which is today brough to you by our Main Partners Keiser.

Also up for discussion are:

• What makes an Olympic champion athlete ‘coachable’ [6:30];
• Dealing with big decisions that went wrong in major competitions [23:40];
• Where he goes for self-development as a coach [30:00];
• His role as a technical advisor with British Gymnastics [33:00].

Henry Breckenridge Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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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.

Download Report

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.

Download Report

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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.

In partnership with

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?