Leadership Development Archives - Page 21 of 32

We run the rule over his reflections at the recent Leaders Sport Business Summit in Abu Dhabi to detail the leadership qualities to which Palace have since returned.

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.

Ioan Cunningham, the Head Coach of Wales Women, explores the continuous development of his newly professional squad ahead of the 2023 Six Nations.

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.

Members of the Leaders Performance Institute spoke at length about a topic pertinent to us all in this recent Virtual Roundtable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

In the first part of our interview, the Former Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans explains that a leader needs the right inputs.

By John Portch

How does a leader in sport make sure they are choosing the right ownership group?

“That’s a very tough question to answer because you don’t always know everything about what everyone’s doing,” says Jack Easterby, the Former Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans.

“It becomes important to look at wide windows of decision-making patterns. Most of these owners have other businesses. You can study some of their investment strategies or their potential investments in those businesses.”

Easterby, who also worked with Bill Belichick, the General Manager and Head Coach at the New England Patriots, believes a prospective leader can learn from studying how the owners structured their C-suite and delegated responsibilities.

He does, however, issue a caveat. “It’s not good to do that based on the media because the media doesn’t always tell the story of what owners are really about,” he continues, “but it is incumbent upon the leader to pick the right place because that alignment is key, from jump street”.

In the first part of this interview with the Leaders Performance Institute, Easterby explores the art of the inquisitor, the questions he thinks should be asked by the leader, and the questions he wished he’d asked in the past.

Jack, what is the risk to the leader in failing to ask the right questions?

JE: People are going to give you information, and when you have whatever reporting structure you have set up, people are going to come to you and say: ‘hey, this needs to be done, this needs to be dealt with’; and they’re going to do that based on their tension points. ‘We need a better bathroom for everyone to use’ or ‘we need a better cafeteria’. You don’t just want the inputs you get to be based on their problems. You want the inputs to be based on what’s going to make the program better. Sometimes, if you don’t ask good questions, and you don’t persist in the deep questions that you feel are better for everybody, what happens is that you get a lot of issues – but the issues that you hear about are not the real issues. So you may solve a lot of problems but you’re not actually getting better. As a leader, I think the question is not ‘do you solve problems?’ – every leader has to solve problems – it’s ‘which problems are you solving?’

What are the important questions?

JE: The ones that make the biggest impact on the clubs that I’ve been part of are the ones that solve the big questions; and in order to solve the big questions you’ve got to ask the big questions. ‘How do we function as an overall group? How are you held accountable for your job? How does each individual person feel cared for in their professional and personal existence? How do we create a better version of ourselves year by year? What are the inputs of information and how we receive data from the outside world? And how do we store data on the inside world and how do we communicate with each other?’ Things like that – when you ask those questions you’re going to get systems, past experiences, a lot of stuff that people throw at you. You can go through it and be able to say ‘here’s what we do from here to go to next place as a group’. But if you don’t ask really good questions you’re just going to get a newspaper of today’s problems sent to your desk. That’s good, but that’s not always the long term best information that you want to go through.

What are some of the questions you wish you’d asked in previous roles?

JE: How do we build or how do we digest the multi-phase implementation of a program? Meaning that I think we all want to win, we all want to be great, but that’s a question I would have asked in Houston, maybe even in New England. How does the leadership team or the executive team digest a multi-phase program and how do we make sure that we’re all going to stay on track no matter how many phases it takes? Because when you diagnose a problem and you go from A to B to C to D to E and you’re trying to elevate slowly to get to a place of prominence, you know that’s going to take some time and phases. It’s going to take some iterations. You might be at phase two and everyone is like ‘we’ve got to get this done’ and so you’re not really at phase two because everybody is ready to abort the mission. I think that’s something I would have asked going in. ‘How does everybody in here receive the multi-phase vision and how do we keep everybody on track to a multi-phase vision so that we’re not evaluating the ham when it’s only been cooking for 15 minutes?’ You can’t pull it out, you have to leave it in there and let it cook because then you can really push out different challenges along the way and say ‘hey, remember we’re at phase two of six’ versus ‘this is the next thing’ and I probably didn’t do a great job of that. I was just trying to sell that next thing as we all got excited about growing. You’re trying to sell that next version of yourself versus ‘hey, this is version two of our nine-step process to get us to where we can be the best version of who we can be here within the club’.

Perhaps it is not always obvious at the time.

JE: That’s exactly right. Hindsight is 20-20. It’s like the stock market, which tells us every day where we are at the moment. You have forecasting but you also have that daily metric on where you are; up down or whatever. When you’re leading, you need to be able to do both of those. You need to be able to forecast and then come back to today and say ‘this is where we are within that forecast’. If you’re buying a bond or something that’s going to mature over time, you need to be able to know, ‘OK, I’m going to remind you. It’s not going to mature today, it’s going to take a second’. And if you do that, your checkpoints are going to be a little easier because you’re not looking for the best possible result within a short period of time.

In early February, some of the industry’s most respected leaders from across Australia gathered at Collingwood FC in Melbourne to discuss the pressing performance matters of the day.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth and Matthew Stone

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 at Collingwood FC in Melbourne on 7 February 2023. A behind-closed-doors event, the account that follows is a general summary and aimed at presenting the lessons learned from the conversation.

Peer-driven cultural change

Peer-driven cultural change places the responsibility of shaping a team’s culture in the hands of a playing group, letting them drive the desired behaviours while also ensuring that all new team members are onboarded in a suitable fashion.

Key points:

A co-constructed plan has more credibility. Reverse-engineer your team’s culture and vision by engaging the playing group from the outset.
The behaviours and values of a team are more definable and sustainable when they have been devised by the playing group themselves.
Consider placing some of the younger members of your team on a leadership development programme or empower them to lead meetings – this way they can directly influence the culture while focusing on their personal development.

What does winning look like?

It would be disingenuous to suggest that there are not markers that denote a champion team or a medal success, but there are also cultural elements, particularly around communication and connection, that connote a winning team. Therein lies the path to success, where the score starts to take care of itself.

Key points:

Find ways to measure and evaluate the body language of your players. What are they telling you that might be left unsaid?
Similarly, what about your group’s collective energy? How are the players syncing up both verbally and non-verbally with each other?
Winning teams tend to say little, which is not to say that your efforts to communicate effectively should flag. Identify and pick your moments.

The shifting demands of modern sport

The shifting demands in this instance are the increasing individualisation of high performance and the implications for sustaining a team ethos and culture.

Key points:

Be engaging and exciting in your programmes and systems – athletes want to be involved in something that grabs their attention and draws them in.
That is easier to achieve when there is clear alignment across an organisation from top to bottom.
Is a ‘star model’ the way to go? Is there a happy medium where you provide the necessary support for your players to lead the way?

Changing mindsets

It is common for head coaches to assume control at a time when their new team is at a low ebb. When a playing group has lost the winning feeling, the muscle memory of what success looks and feels like, what steps can the head coach take to instil the mindset necessary to kickstart their tenure?

Key points:

Solicit informal player feedback from your coaches and support staff. This means a head coach should accept that they may not be a player’s primary point of contact if they are to acquire the information necessary to proceed.
You can still challenge a player. Ask them: ‘what are you going to sacrifice in order to make the team stronger?’ If they haven’t got a ready answer give them some time to think.
Reward good behaviours and adherence to your team’s values; and then be sure to back it up with evidence, whether through datapoints or some other means.

Managing the moments

The best teams are able to manage the big moments in competition, putting daylight between themselves and the rest. It doesn’t happen by accident and there are steps that all leaders can take to prepare their teams for those clutch moments.

Key points:

Do you consider the mental and emotional in your post-competition debriefs? Beyond skill execution, it is helpful for your players to understand their feelings and responses at key moments, particularly during scenario-training.
Find video clips that support your beliefs in the direction of your team. Be intentional in highlighting when things went well and you will begin to manufacture belief. It may also make conversations about performance gaps a little easier come the time.
If you happen to lose, give your players an opportunity to mull over what went wrong. When they know they will be heard and their coach will listen, it may generate the necessary energy for development.

James King and Greg Newman offer advice from the world of trading.

By John Portch

What traits should sport scrap?

It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute poses to James King shortly after he appeared onstage at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“I think sport needs to maintain a very specific focus on what it takes to win,” says King, an advisor who has counselled government agencies, specialist military units and provides guidance to owners, managers and athletes within elite sport. In 2021, he released a book called Accelerating Excellence: The Principles that Drive Elite Performance.

“One of the popular themes over the past few years has almost been this obsession with culture,” he continues. “And I think in the popular media there’s been some incredible TED talks, great books around the topic, and I think it’s very easy to chase a subject because it’s so interesting and then look to apply it rather than focus very specifically in terms of your specific organisation in sport.

“Where are we leaking progress? Where are we breaking down? Is our culture a problem? If it is then fine, go out and read. But instead of reading and trying to copy-paste from others, really try to spend that time doing the thinking yourself. ‘Where are we leaking progress, what can we do about that?’ and intervening very specifically in that area.”

The concept of ‘leaking progress’ is one that King returns to time and again and one he referenced onstage alongside Greg Newman, the CEO of the Onyx Capital Group, which is a renowned trading firm. Both have joined the Leaders Performance Institute for a further chat. Here are some edited excerpts.

Greg, what is the best way to test your strategies around individual and collective performance?

Greg Newman: It 100% comes down to experimentation. You don’t know if things are going to be successful and you need to have that scientific approach of first hypothesising what it is you think is actually going to happen and being quite specific about that, and then you’re testing it with historical data, and then it goes to actually applying it from a non-risk perspective. So we’ll put on a strategy in live terms but it’s not actually going to make or lose money. So that’s the way you start; and then you refine that and make sure you get the learnings, refine that strategy, and then ultimately go live with it once you’re ready. When you go live, it’s also [implemented in] stages as well, [through] progressive exposure.

What steps do you advise when it’s clear that the strategy isn’t working?

GN: I think the main thing for us is to be clear about what we can control and what we can’t control. If we look at a given strategy, a given area, a given team, and they’re applying the process that we know well, we know we succeed in other areas, we know what we want from people, the skills we want them to have and demonstrate and the processes we want. So they’re doing all of those things and it’s not working, then it’s more likely going to be the market conditions or something external. It’s looking for that answer, but you have to have that ruthless approach when something isn’t working objectively. Is it better just to move on, cut your losses, and pivot somewhere else? Again, it comes down to experimentation. If it’s not working, it’s not too big of a deal, you just keep moving forward and nothing lasts, right? It’s constant adaption and evolution.

James, how do the principles of your book Accelerating Excellence most readily apply to sport?

James King: When you define ‘sport’, one of the defining elements is competition. Therefore, the objective is kind of winning or iterating towards winning more than you might lose. The foundational principles that I discuss in the book are designed with that in mind completely. They all derive from the academic study of outliers, whether that’s an individual or an organisation. So it’s breaking down and examining the causal mechanisms that are truly predictive of superior performance across time. So I think the application to sport couldn’t be neater and tidier in that respect.

In your view, what are the traits of serial winners?

JK: There’s one trait that all elite performers have in common more than anything else and that’s this concept of self-concordance. So there’s three defining themes in that. The first one is that everyone that I’ve seen that excels, and also examining the literature, is very clear that those individuals perform roles where their strengths align very much with the roles they perform, whether that’s a style of play, whether that’s the domain they’re in, full stop. The second component would be their sincere interests. Some might describe it as ‘passion’ but I prefer the word ‘interest’; to me, passion’s a short-term temporary high, whereas an interest is this almost semi-permanent attraction or instinctive attraction to a certain activity or area. And I think that everyone I’ve seen excel has that almost obsession with the craft they’re competing in. Then, finally, it would be this concept of the goals they’ve pursued in sport have aligned with their values and they’ve probably had maybe a little bit of luck here but have been exposed to demonstrating their strengths and interests for an organisation that sincerely aligns with their own values, again whether that links to the style of play or the behaviours that are acceptable in that environment or what that club and organisation stands for. And I think you get this sweet spot when people are able to pursue a role that optimises all their natural strengths in that area where they are sincerely obsessed and for an organisation where their values just align and they’re just so in sync with what that organisation wants to achieve.

If you could both give one piece of advice to coaches here today, what would it be?

GN: Like I was saying onstage, it’s absolutely following a process. I know that’s become embedded in sport now, that’s like the way things are going; really believing in processes even when it comes to wellbeing, people around you and getting the best out them. So your vision, setting that north star, setting that constant improvement. All these things can seem on the face of it very vague and maybe even wishy-washy, but there are processes out there that you can apply. [Being] rigorous and really concentrating on that process, whatever it might be, and sticking to it. If something it’s going to be about you, and that’s not really definable, that’s not really scalable; [you need] a process that you can apply and improve, teach other people, and scale that way.

JK: The one piece of advice I’d give to coaches is to make sure you’re very clear on what it takes to win in the craft you’re coaching in, then, secondly, understand very specifically where the athlete or the performer you’re coaching is in relation to that, where they’re – I use the term again – leaking progress, and then, thirdly, make sure you understand who they are as an individual and how they are optimised. What are their strengths technically? What are their strengths psychologically? What’s their interest on the pitch or in the boardroom, if you’re working outside of sport. Then what’s most important to them? And make sure you create an environment that optimises those things. The question I get commonly asked is: ‘how do you optimise this person’s performance or that person’s performance?’ I think the real question is how do you optimise the conditions so that that person optimises their own performance? And that’s where I think coaches should be focusing because if you understand those things so well, the solutions in terms of what to coach and how to coach just fall in your lap.

The second day featured Google, the Australian Institute of Sport, Rugby Australia, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Wharton People Analytics discussing team cohesion and frameworks of success and more.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the second day.

(Day 1 takeaways here.)

Session 1: The Cohesion of Teams – What Are The Secrets of Effective Collaboration?

Speaker: Benjamin Northey, Principal Conductor in Residence, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Building culture: in the context of an orchestra, the building of the culture has to come from the players – how are they driving that? It is a complex challenge for leaders to navigate.
Proficiency: the proficiency of players to lead is a challenge – if we can create an environment where players or athletes take the lead in driving the internal culture, it can be harnessed in a much more powerful way.
Group psychology: the psychology of the orchestra is the biggest challenge for conductors – understanding personalities, managing energy, focus and harnessing the collective will of the players. They all want it to be great but have all of their own ideas of how to get there.
Communicate clearly: preparation happens incredibly fast, so there is pressure on the leader or conductor in this context to communicate the vision in a very clear way. Ben also talked about a leader having a point of focus that encourages clear alignment.
Problem-solving: create an environment where there is self-correcting led by the players. Too often we see the leader listen or observe and start to provide solutions to the problem. In the orchestra, allow them to play, create a space for reflection as a group and in the second phase of rehearsal, you will see an impact straight away without the leading having to get involved.
Collaboration begins with listening: encourage people to listen to each other and the real time processes of creation. The players have roles to play but they all need the creative intelligence to adjust that role themselves in the moment to the response of what they are hearing around them – the parts that unify them around us.
Elite awareness: the cohesion of the orchestra is to find the understanding of not their own part, but the notes of others. The success of the group relies on connection, shared values and unified work. We are looking to generate elite awareness within the group.
Creative intelligence: use your own creative intelligence. This concept is something that needs to be reinforced all the time or else it disempowers the innate creativity of the individual. The success of an orchestra relies on individual perspectives to work – ‘everyone is an artist’ is a piece of terminology that is used within the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Session 2: Change & Transition – How to Lead When There is a Shift in Behaviours

Speaker: Reb Rebele, Senior Research Fellow, The Wharton People Analytics initiative

Consideration: how do you create sustained performance? Where does behavioural change sit within this?
Behavioural science: studying how to get yourself or others to do something helpful – or to stop doing something harmful.
Typical approach: when thinking about behaviour change, we collect all sorts of techniques and tools such as research and books. We collect nudges, techniques and hacks. In this toolkit we typically find something that works; rinse and repeat. However, contexts are different and it doesn’t tend to happen the same way.
Tap into a goal that someone already has or a core value, connecting the behaviour change to that.
Framework: am I trying to influence ‘temporary’ and ‘enduring’?

Temporary

One-time behaviours.
Context-specific behaviours (particular time and place).
Short-term shifts (some kind of disruption – change of behaviours for a period of time before returning to some form of ‘normality’).
Challenge for leaders: address the proximal cause – immediate goals, environment.

Enduring

Habit formation.
Habit breaking.
Personality change.
Challenge for leaders: address the root cause (beliefs, values and identity).

Motivated

Existing desire (someone who comes to you for help)
Aligned interests / values (clear link between the behaviour change and their goals).
Challenge for leaders: reinforce current goals and values.

Unmotivated

Indifference (lack of interest – doesn’t see any reason to change).
Aversion (active dislike / resistance to the behaviour change).
Challenge for leaders: create new goals and values.

Bringing the Framework to Life

How can I help someone to follow-through on that motivation in a particular instance? (Motivated x Temporary)
How can I help someone be more consistent? (Motivated x Enduring)
How can I help someone stretch outside their comfort zone? (Unmotivated x Temporary)
How can I help someone achieve transformation? (Unmotivated x Enduring)

Session 3: Fostering Googleyness – How to Recruit & Retain for a World Class Culture

Speaker: Tova Angsuwat, Recruiting Lead, Google

Google wanted to figure how to create the highest performing team – one of the hypotheses was if you bring the same people together with the same characteristics together, they would perform well. The second, bringing the best people in the organisation together. Neither yielded the results the organisation expected.
Project Aristotle: great teams can be measured. Google’s research came up with five characteristics:

Psychological safety: comfortable to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. These teams challenged leaders, asked lots of questions and shared lots of things in meetings – it drove innovation and enhanced the ability to collaborate. As a leader, a good question to ask in a meeting or conversation is ‘what is something I might have missed?’
Dependability: getting things done on time to a high standard of excellence.
Structure and clarity: clear roles, plans and goals.
Meaning: work is personally important to team members.
Impact: their work matters and creates change.

Keys to defining culture:

Mission, transparency and voice underpin the Google culture.
Transparency: Google provides access to all of the information, even if you are an intern. Each Friday there was a TGIF with the founders where you can ask any question you like. This aspect of transparency is incredibly powerful. Can you push to be more transparent? It increases people engagement and buy-in to the organisation.
You told us this, so we are doing that – a really powerful line for anyone to consider and use as a leader.
Voice: how do you help everyone in the organisation an aspect of voice? Employee engagement surveys, opportunities for asking questions etc. Every time you do that, thank them for the feedback and share it back with them.

Tips for recruiting and retaining top talent

The most important skills to assess are not role-related: this can be very counterintuitive. Every person that is hired is interviewed against four attributes – role-related knowledge, problem-solving ability, leadership, and values fit.
Your greatest value proposition is meaning and purpose: sense of meaning and purpose is what people want from their jobs. What’s important to them and what can you offer?
Don’t hire people like you: who is going to complement you? In your teams, you need more of what isn’t there or who is going to add to you. Consider ‘culture add’ versus ‘culture fit’.
Share your ‘fungus’: as you think about retaining talent, you want to share what is going on within the organisation because they will see it when they do join.

Session 4: Inclusive Environments – Can High Performance Sport Create a Culture of Belonging?

Speaker: Matti Clements, Acting Director, Australian Institute of Sport

Can ‘belonging’ drive a high performance culture?
If belonging should be considered as a variable or aid of a high performance culture, how much time in a week do you spend actively prioritising it in your leadership role?
Self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and belonging. This theory is about how an individual interacts with and depends on their social environment. It is based on the fundamental humanistic assumption we lean towards growth in ourselves.
Autonomy: have some control over their lives and that they make choices they want to make.
Competence: achievements, knowledge and skills – the need to build competence and mastery over the tasks that are important to them. We need to feel effective in the culture or environment we are in.
Belonging: a sense of connectedness.
Psychological research shows that cultures and environments that show these three needs, that people engage really deeply in the tasks and activities they are asked to commit to, thus enhancing performance. These organisations also have higher psychological health.
‘Belonging allows the individual to regulate and focus their attention on the things they need to thrive. It allows the individual to give more to something greater than their own personal needs.’

Takeaways from the development of strategy: belonging

We often go to a small group of people – made a concerted effort to go wide and broad so everyone had an opportunity to contribute. Constantly asking who might think they don’t belong to this strategy and how do we get them in the room? Who is not represented and how do we make sure they get a voice?
Check and challenge: scenarios were set up with questions such as ‘what won’t work?’ and ‘what’s the challenge?’ The purpose was creating connectedness to the process.
Background work: very intentional on helping people to speak up and those that can dominate where spoken to around letting others speak up.

Vision & core values:

Vision: We win well to inspire Australians.
Core values: excellence / belonging / courage / connection.

HP 2032 and belonging levers:

Connection to country.
Inclusive design.
Win well.

Session 5: The Application of Knowledge – Making Learning a Successful Process

Speaker: Eddie Jones, Head Coach, Rugby Australia

Levers to make a difference: you’ve got to have understanding of how you want to play and become automatic in that. Players can do it when there isn’t any pressure, but when the heat is on and being able to turn it on when it matters is a huge differentiator.
Intent: when you are coaching with a team without long preparation periods, you have to get the intent right. Players will be given a framework with clarity, but then they have to think and work it out.
Environment: give your athletes a good environment. The element that coaches do the worst is belonging – with the younger generation today, belonging is so important for them. Simple best practices such as shaping a room in a ‘U’ shape instead of rows to generate eye contact.
New generation talent: the modern leader also needs to create an environment to generate skills they aren’t experiencing in society as easily anymore. They want a coach they can trust, who will push them to optimise themselves, but who is also loving.
Be context-specific: be specific on taking learnings back to your teams to contextualise.
Specificity of training: after travelling to meet the US Navy SEALs, a key takeaway from Eddie’s visit was the specificity of training towards the harshest moments of ‘the game’. We train our athletes to make the game easier. Free your players so you don’t just stick to tradition.
Power of observation: as a coach, your greatest skill is your observation skills – your players have a pattern of behaviour, so you are looking for those changes. Good coaches observe behaviours and interactions.
Modern head coaching: the role has become much more complex. In elite sport, staffing has doubled, larger playing squads both inside and outside of the environment – leaders need more assistance. Who is your critical friend and set of eyes to challenge what you are doing? If you are starting off as a young coach, keep an experienced coach close to you.
Key learnings: quality of staff, don’t shortcut them or else you get caught. Recruit really well for your staff and have a criteria for what you need. Secondly, teams are much more dynamic than before, you have to be prepared to adapt really quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the first day here.

The first day in Melbourne featured Collingwood FC, EPP and Management Futures, while delving into topics from environment profiling to psychological safety.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the first day.

(Day 2 takeaways here.)

Session 1: Collingwood Training Observation

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood

Profiling the current environment: upon Craig’s appointment, he asked both staff and players for one word to describe the environment – what came out was really clear, those in the building lacked connection. To drive alignment, the group came back to creating a set of fundamentals they could live by that was agreed as a collective.
The aim: ‘to create an environment where we live side by side, acting like winners everyday.’

Magpies training observation questions:

For the first portion of the event, we watched the team train. Attendees were asked to note down observations around three core questions, the answers to which were then fed back to coaches. Those questions were:

What stood out?
What impressed you?
What do you think could be improved?

Feedback:

Question: what was the focus of the pre-training meeting?

Players were asked to analyse and evaluate the specific play versus coaches telling them what is required for the play. The purpose was to build the capacity to adapt out on the oval. The coaches wanted the players to feel it in a live space instead of being inside. The coaches wanted to allow the players to see how their movements help to connect with others. A real aim from a staffing point of view is to create on-field coaches, so creating situations for them to think and solve problems is a key strategy of the team’s training methodology.

Question: how often do you do repeat the same drills?

Collingwood has regular setup on Tuesdays, which is a down day in terms of GPS. A large focus goes into specific roles, with focus and intent. The team talk about the ‘why’ a lot, but an area of improvement for the coaches is how the drills flow and efficiency between them in the nature of their design. A question they are asking is how are you valuing the time versus the efficiency of the time?

Question: talk us through the senior coach and assistant coach relationships – how do you communicate, challenge and collaborate?

Every day, organically. There is a lot of consistency in the vision and plan. In the AFL, as a league, there is a lot of like-mindedness in the sport – Craig shared that he was determined not to have that in the club, instead having a diverse coaching group. It was important to note that the robust discussions that coaching teams often strive for do not happen immediately – a good question to ask is ‘would you tell the coach or other coaches how you are feeling?’ The robust discussions around coaching are easy, but do you spend a lot of time with each other and others’ families in order to take it to the next level?

Question: how do you balance the winning mentality in the vision versus that mentality in training?

Craig shared from prior experiences from winning organisations is that they smelled the same and had the same DNA. The behaviours that correlated to winning are consistent in other environments. Players and staff really felt as part of a team, there was a sense of belonging and value in the staff. We can’t guarantee winning, but we can control behaviours and mantras.

Question: what role or involvement in the training is by the leadership group?

The coaching staff explained that they want them to solve problems, evaluate and come up with solutions. They do some background workshopping off the oval and are asked to come up with solutions on the field. The leadership group are also pushed in terms of leadership development to help lead themselves and others around them.

Session 2 – Performance in Practice: Part 1 – Building a High Performing Team (Selecting the Right Talent)

Speakers: Dave Slemen, Founder, EPP, and Anna Edwards, Managing Director, EPP

It’s important to always come back to the idea that high performance is a collective endeavour.
The quality of connections between people is as important as the quality of individual talents.
With the above in mind, it’s crucial to ensure you have the best possible talent and ensuring the richness of connections between them.

Nine-Step framework:

Cultural fit
Communication
Character
Leadership & followership
Relationships
Strategy & planning
Philosophy
Sporting knowledge
Technical skills.

Communication:

How, when and with whom are you communicating? Board or team? Or both? Internal or external?
This is about understanding the different languages required by different situations
Do you vary your style for different team members? What is the impact of your approach?

Character:

Which of the five types of Emotional intelligence are required for a role?
Do you over, or under, index on one or another?
Do people need to relate to each other in a particular way?
Is there a personality type missing from the team to balance it out?

Leadership / followership:

Followership can be as important as leadership.
Sometimes being effective in a role means taking people on a journey with you.
Inspiring people to follow is a very different style to standing at the front and showing the way.

Relationships:

High performance comes from creating effective relationships at different levels: the board, the media, owners and players.
Increasingly we see roles that require individuals to be able to form relationships quickly across boundaries to get things done.
The ability to play different roles, while staying true to yourself, is an increasingly important attribute in leaders at all levels.
Curiosity about others – their skills and abilities is key to success. This is how we can develop change at pace.

Strategy & planning:

How people create change is important – do they dictate it or show by example?
Are you / your team members strategists, implementers, or both?
Do you have a methodology or a systematic and organised approach?
Do you expect the same in others?

Philosophy:

How do you know you belong?
What creates a sense of belonging in your team?
Is your job to establish a vision?
Does the role need someone with a vision of how they want to play or what they want to create?
Do you know what you stand for?
And can you articulate it? Can others?
How much flexibility is there on where you are going? How adaptable do you need to be?

Sporting knowledge:

Is it important to know the sport? Why? Or is it better not to? Why?
How can you translate knowledge from sport to sport? What’s unique, and what’s transferable?
Who in your team can ask the stupid questions and challenge the ‘always done’?

Technical skills:

The very specific ‘must haves’ usually found on a practitioner brief.
These could be financial acumen, medical skillset, youth development experience or qualifications.
Is specific applied knowledge required?

Traps & Opportunities: Getting the Right Talent in Your Environments

Speakers: Darren Burgess, Director, EPP, and Craig Duncan, Director, EPP

What are the most common traps? Those that purely use gut feel. Existing networks can create a sense of safety, but also create groupthink. Not using process for how you go and think about talent development.
Loyalty over competency: hiring people who are loyal and have your back. Even if they may be loyal, have you checked for competency? If you invest in new people and ideas, they may be more competent and have your back anyway.
How much input do you get from athletes? The best environments seek that input.
Not factoring in culture. How do you want people to respond in certain situations? If something goes wrong, what are the reactions you are looking for? Align to the profile of people you are looking to bring in.

Session 3 – Performance in Practice: Part 2 – Building a High Performing Team (Creating High Performing Teamwork)

Speaker: John Bull, Head of High Performance, Management Futures

Leaders who create high performing teamwork instil a culture of collaboration, galvanising people across silos behind a shared purpose. They create an environment of psychological safety and trust, where people debate ideas and support each other.
High performance is a collective endeavour – so how are you building a culture of teaming?

Four skills of effective collaboration:

Collaborative mindset:

Build trust at pace.
Act ‘as if’ it is there immediately.
Give ‘belonging cues’.
Reach across silos.
Invest time and energy in building relationships.

Speaking up:

Contribute – sharing knowledge, insights and ideas.
Raising issues.
Constructively challenging.

Listening up:

Situational humility (open to what we don’t know).
Proactively seek out and be open to other people’s insights and views.
Lead with questions.

Situational awareness:

Be aware of and take responsibility for how the team is performing.
Help the team to make good use of time.
Diamond thinking: what could we do (option generation)? What should we do? (Evaluate options and make a call.)

Six common inhibitors of effective teamwork:

Unequal contribution: who speaks is determined by personality and / or status.
Groupthink.
Tribal: we are naturally less open with people we see as part of a different group.
Lack of psychological safety: leading people to withhold their thoughts.
Fixed position.
Lack of strategic focus: we don’t use time effectively in meetings.

Psychological safety

Psychological safety is the extent to which people feel that speaking up will be welcomed and not judged negatively.

The conversations we are not having will be some of the most important the neuroscience. When people feel social pain it compromises the brain’s ability to think by up to 30%.

Four types of psychological safety:

Inclusion safety: belonging, valued and safe to be myself.
Learner safety: I feel safe to show gaps in my knowledge and competence. Make mistakes and ask questions.
Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas and be trusted.
Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge status quo.

How can we increase psychological safety?

Put it all on the table.
Building trust and belonging.
Make it easy to speak up.
Model openness and honesty.
Praise it.
Challenge with skilled candour.

Creating conditions for high performing teamwork

Build buy-in to the value of teamwork

Unite people behind a common goal which requires teamwork.
Share your vision of high performing teamwork.
Get clear on how teamwork can add value and what you’re looking for in terms of teaming behaviours, and share this with people.
Create some quick wins that show the value of teamwork.
Build momentum and buy-in by creating some quick win opportunities for effective teamwork to add value.
Use feedback to reinforce collaborative behaviour.
Praise it. Challenge in a supportive way where you want more of it. (i.e. hold people to account on it).

Create the conditions for high quality interactions – inside & outside of meetings

Invest time in building trust and respect. Learning a bit about each other’s stories. Unique strengths each person brings.
Build psychological safety. To enable honest constructive debate, free flow of all ideas and people asking for help.
Agree a set of winning behaviours, you review against regularly. Building collective responsibility.
Review the effectiveness of your meetings Resolve any tensions quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the second day here.

The first Leadership Skills Session of 2023 highlighted the nuances that can make a difference when you have a particularly tricky conversation.

By Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

Why the Key to Successful Leadership Is Now Influence, Not Authority

‘Where the Science Shifts Towards the Art of Coaching and High Performance Leadership’

Three Simple But Important Steps to Earning the Trust of your Athletes

Framing the topic

In our first Leadership Skills Series Session of 2023, we look at how our members can build skills to facilitate great conversations within their teams. We began the session by asking the members to think of times when they have had good and bad conversations. What made them this way? We then went into some stimulus, providing ten top tips in facilitating great conversations. These were aimed at not being some of the obvious things that everyone would think of straight away, but rather the nuances which can make a difference when handling a specific conversation.

1. Clarify your outcomes

Getting your own mindset right before you begin a discussion.
What do you want people to think, feel and do as a result of the discussion?
How do you want to show up yourself, and how do you want to be perceived? What’s the impact you want to have on the discussion?

2. Specify outcomes for each agenda item

For example: ‘Item 1, Project X – We’re looking for fresh ideas.’ This gives you a heading, which allows you to bring the conversation back if it drifts off.

3. Contract – the ‘future pace’ approach

Let’s assume we are going to be successful, it is another part of getting your mindset right for the conversation.
You might begin the discussion saying ‘Let’s imagine we have a great conversation here, I’d like you to put yourself on the edge of this conversation in your mind and look back, what did we do to make it successful?’.
It is then important to get people to write this down, and have them commit to the behaviours they themselves have suggested.
You are not imposing ground rules, but suggesting these come from the group themselves.

4. Build rapport – match pace and lead

If you mismatch the group and get your energy and mood wrong, you are going to lose them right from the start.
One example might be when we go into a group that has low energy, we might go in and try and lift the energy in the group and be a dynamic leader. This can tend to have the opposite effect, and what the group really want is for you to be alongside them energetically, for a while, so they know you’re with them – this is called ‘matching’.
Going along with them for a while is then called ‘pacing’. Once you have been along with the group for a while at the same energetic and mood level, you can then start to lead on something more resourceful, and gradually build up the energy and the pace.

5. Sensory acuity and early intervention

Paying attention to what is going on.
It is better to get in early and deal with something before it gets too big to deal with.
This is about spotting some of the small behaviours which might indicate that somebody is unhappy, disengaged or feeling in opposition to what is being discussed. It may be as small as a shake of a head, an eye movement, a whisper to someone. All of these things have meaning and are part of the group dynamic, and we need to be paying attention to even the minutia and intervening straight away.
You can intervene by asking someone, ‘how are you doing in this conversation?’, ‘Is there something you wanted to say?’
It is about making sure that we acknowledge behaviour early and address it as early as we possibly can.

6. Listen for the unspoken

It is useful to assume what has not been said, it might be a feeling that has not been expressed, a tricky topic that’s too difficult to mention. The elephant in the room.
Some of these things which aren’t given voice, are the agenda.
You could say ‘I’ve noticed, nobody has said how they feel about this subject’ or ‘I notice, when we approach this subject the room gets a bit quiet, I’m just wondering what’s going on here?’
Express it to the group, you may get it wrong, but more often than not, if you feel it and feel there is something not being said, you can do a lot for the group by bringing attention to it.

7. Offer a ‘clean’ summary

This is about making people feel heard, and allowing people to reflect on what they have said.
‘Clean’ means summarising without putting our own thoughts or feelings in the summary. There is no judgement.
Use their language and their terminologies, people then feel deeply heard and not judged or misunderstood.

8. Offer ‘BIFF’ Feedback

BIFF: Behaviour, Impact, Feeling, Future.
When giving feedback, begin by describing someone’s behaviour without judging or interpreting it. Simply describe literally what they have done.
Then say what the impact of this behaviour is.
Proceed to tell them how you then feel about this.
Finally, agree what you will do about this going forward.

9. Acknowledge positive intention

It is useful to assume that any behaviour anyone exhibits in a group at some level has a positive intention. It may not have a positive effect but behind it there is positive intention.
If you acknowledge the positive intention it can allow the person to feel respected and can sometimes take the emotional sting out of what they are trying to say.

10. Silence is not commitment

It might not even mean agreement, let alone commitment.
It is good to check in with them, saying ‘you haven’t said anything about this, I just wanted to check your agreement with it?’

Leaders Performance Advisor Meg Popovic kicks off her three-part Performance Support Series titled ‘The Performance Paradox’

By Sarah Evans

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Framing the topic

This was session one 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 expert Dr Meg Popovic, the aim is to explore the trade-offs, and considerations in the quest to win for staff, athletes, and their wider organization. There are two more sessions to follow.

“Feminine consciousness is concerned with process. It sees the goal as the journey itself and recognizes that the goal is consciousness of the journey. Being is consciousness of becoming.”

Marion Woodman, psychoanalyst and author

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 situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.
‘In a paradox, he has discovered that stepping back from his job has increased the rewards he gleans from it.’

How does paradox connect with transformation and learning?

It is the twilight zone between past and future that is akin to the precarious world of transformation within a chrysalis.
Individuals who consciously accept the chrysalis, whether in analysis or in life experience, have accepted the life/death paradox, a paradox which returns in a different form at each new spiral of growth.
If we accept this paradox, we are not torn to pieces by what seems to be intolerable contradiction. Birth is the death of the life we have known; death is the birth of the life we have yet to live.
We need to hold the tensions and allow our circuit to give way to a larger circumference.

Meg returned to her study of subcultures to further explore the performance paradox. She began with a reminder of what constitutes a subculture:

Commonalities individuals share with one another – guidelines of social B, overarching values that guide and reflect B, symbols and modes of operation that convey meaning to persons in a shared system.
Individuals of a subculture are socialized to adopt cultural definitions and perspectives, assert cultural identity and sense of community and belonging.

Meg then reintroduced the concept of ‘shadow work’, which she also discussed last year. It is the practice of working to illuminate the aspects of yourself that you bury or repress. It comes from ‘depth psychology’, which is defined by Susan Clayton and Gene Meyers as ‘the psychological theory that explores the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as well as the patterns and dynamics of motivation and the mind’.

Why do we bring depth psychology into high performance sport?

Making sense of our workspaces.
Restoring wholeness.
Competitive advantage.

Establishing the known and the unknown:

Conscious – ego

Parts of self or group that are fully aware of and present to the world.
Our values, our thoughts, our goals, our fears, our strengths.
Includes the negative qualities that we own/take responsibility for (are conscious of).

Unconscious – shadow

Not presently conscious of, or within our awareness, or suppressed for some reason.
Impact emotions and actions, whether we are aware of it or not.
The part of the ego we repress; what we cannot acknowledge about ourselves.
Often thought of as dark parts of self or group, but not accurate – neither good nor bad, just is.

Example: snowboard culture vs Olympics culture

Snowboard culture

Conscious – ego:

Creative
Freedom
Grunge and punk
Rebelliousness
Youth
Community/camaraderie
Individualistic
Push boundaries
Clothing Style

Unconscious – shadow:

Conformity
Simplicity
Mischievousness
Intelligence
Judgemental of outsiders
Exclusive
Groupthink
Maturation
Rigidity

IOC/Olympic Culture:

Conscious – ego:

Faster, higher, stronger
Winning: gold, silver, bronze
Discipline
Ritual
Hierarchy
Global/universal
Sacred/holy/oath
Symbolism
Omnipotent

Unconscious – shadow:

Achievement
Creativity
Freedom
Inner and Outer Beauty
Intelligence
Control
Power
Corruption
The Show
Arrogance
Dominance

Task 1: Spend some time on your own, think of an example within your environments of the known and the unknown, the conscious and unconscious, the contradictory tensions that exist. Within small groups, share your insights with your team.

“The Miracle of Paradox” – from Owning the Shadow by Robert Johnson

To transfer our energy from opposition to paradox is a very large leap in evolution.
To engage in opposition is to be ground to bits by the insolubility of life’s problems and events. Most people spend their life energy supporting this warfare within themselves.
A huge amount of energy is wasted by modern people in opposing their own situation. Opposition is something like a short circuit; it also drains our energy away like a haemorrhage.
To transform opposition into paradox is to allow both sides of an issue, both pairs of opposites to exist in equal dignity and worth.
If you can stay with conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce and insight that serves them both.
This is not compromise but a depth of understanding that puts life in perspective and allows you to know with certainty what to do.
That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to humankind.
The solution must rise from the dynamics of the opposing energies that are facing each other.

Task 2: owning the shadow

Think of a challenging situation you would like certainty on.
What are the opposing energies that face each other?
How are you doing in this time of holding these energies?

Challenge between task 1 and 2:

In a challenging problem to solve, strive to hold the tension of opposing energies. See what emerges.

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