Recommended reading

Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness

Lessons in The Power of Storytelling & World-Class Communication On Team Performance

Leadership Skills Series: Leading Behavioural Change

High Performance Environments – What the Research is Telling Us

Framing the topic

On our most recent Leadership Skills Series session looking at Leading Behavioural Change, there was some stimulus shared which was apt considering the topic of this particular roundtable: ‘Most efforts to change culture don’t work. We often see a gap between what we want the culture to be and aspire towards versus what people have as a lived experience. Organisations who have sustained high levels of performance over a prolonged period of time take this very seriously.’ The purpose of this virtual roundtable was to explore how we are looking to positively influence our respective cultures.

Discussion points

What are some of the things you are prioritising in relation to your current culture and why?

• A priority has been to gather the expectations of staff first and foremost – what we want the environment to be like, look like, and the behaviours within that before we started working with the players around this. The reason for this approach was because we want a more professional and elite culture within our environment – if we are asking players for certain values, if the staff aren’t doing it, will the players mirror that? That’s why we wanted to set staff expectations as a starting point, but when it came to the players it was more about collaboration and getting their ideas.
• We are going through a renovation and a reset of our values at the minute – previously, we had the same value-set that resonated with players, to coaches and to administrative staff. We realised it didn’t work how we wanted it to work – the way we behaved was a bit different.
• We focus a lot of time talking about values and whether they resonate with everybody. What we’ve found to be most positive in how we use values is when you really dig into the operationalised behaviours that sit behind them – they can be really different from group to group. When we allow people to personalise those behaviours on a daily basis, they become the guiding light to the north star rather than everything people cling onto.
• We used to have a model where we looked to align the staff before the players and it was a disastrous model for us. It was coach-led, dictated and the issue was that it meant nothing because of how dictated it was. We ended up with a player-led value system, which was how we operate as individuals each day – this directly correlated to performance on the field, but also a wider club basis. What does one of your values mean to someone in the ticketing office or marketing team? There was a focus on DNA, behaviour off the field and how that effected on the field.
• The players really feel like they needed to be involved in the process of setting the values and thus the culture – we let them have a say in how and when we trained, how often we trained, when we travel to games. We turned the organisation upside down and it was really important in the players taking ownership of those values.
• We have gone through some change in our environment, and we’ve looked to storytelling to generate some connection around the benefit of people sharing what the values mean to them.
• In terms of storytelling, one thing we are looking at with our athletes and talking to them about is the stories they tell about the athletes and people that came before them. What are the things you grasped about them? From here, you can talk to the current crop of athletes about what stories do you want people in 15 years to be telling about you? What stories are you creating? To really understand culture, you are looking at how people tell stories, what traditions are created from one group to the next.
• A consideration is that the values need to really align to the type of culture you are trying to get to. Bringing them to life and operationalising them remains a huge space for development, as a lot of organisations do just end up with those words being on a wall as opposed to what they really mean and embedding them in practice.
• Storytelling dovetails nicely with the rules of belonging. We can uncover the values, but until we link from a reward perspective the behaviours you want to see more, you can see sub-cultures emerging. It’s important to reward and recognise what we want to see repeated.
• The biggest part of our culture and getting that onto the field to influence results was around relationship building and the language you build. We have ‘Tea Time’ on a Tuesday where people are expected to come for an hour and be present. You find yourself talking a lot about the game and solving problems – it’s even more than just building relationships.
• We are a national governing body in which we have five key values which stretch across the organisation and their respective teams. What was interesting after visiting the teams, we looked at their terminology; and their five cultural values had become more than 35. The values had expanded across different teams with a different focus, they meant different things to different people and teams. Instead, we moved more towards behaviours to simplify it: culture is behaviours and actions on a daily basis.
• Consideration: Change. What is good practice to embed staff in the values that have been set?
• We looked to senior players to help with the communicating of values and behaviours to those transitioning into the environment from the pathway and also educating down the pathway. This is a good way of having your talent readymade for when making those transitions.
• There is a really interesting difference between team and individual sports. From a team sport perspective, if you are serious about the cultural fit of people, that’s how you recruit – do they fit the existing culture? Does the quality of person you bring in outweigh the culture?
• Culture is often about consistent embedding and reinforcement of those values. We have weekly staff meetings where you can cite people who have lived a value or those values – these are what we want to see and be repeated around here.
• We recently hired a head coach – the main reason the individual was hired was that they fully understood and were able to articulate back to us the values we have and what they meant to that person. We want to recruit the person who is already naturally aligned to the values we have got, as best we can.
• We have a pretty heavy induction programme where even the families are involved, so they understand the values as well. It’s important that everyone understands what it means to become part of that wider club family.
• Consideration: renovation vs. transformation. Do you ever really transform a culture or do you just progress or nudge in a certain direction?
• If you think about the word ‘transformation’, it can sometimes align to something not coming back, that is why the language is important depending on your contexts. In terms of renovation, it’s more about working to shift and improve the culture – words like ‘transformation’ can sometimes come across as disrespectful. We want to keep positive influence within the environment.
• So many organisations put a lot of work and energy into building a culture but by the time it comes to live these values, there’s no energy to embed them in practice.

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Enhance Your Environment

Brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser, take a step inside the cultural reset that led Harlequins to the Premiership title with scrum-half Danny Care and Head of Rugby Performance Billy Millard, then explore how the team worked with performance coach Owen Eastwood to place wellbeing at the centre of their performance equation and why this approach is also shared by Google and the Toronto Blue Jays. Finally, discover why equality, diversity and inclusion can be a competitive advantage through the admirable work being done at English Premier League club Brentford FC.

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By John Portch

• Creativity is the generation of ideas, not some dark art – we are all capable of being creative.

• Seek out analogous systems to find new ways of looking at problems.

• Find ways to fail cheaply in pursuit of the good ideas.

Demystify creativity – it is not some dark art

Kirk Vallis, Google’s Global Head of Creative Capability Development, has worked with numerous organisations, including many in sport, who he feels misunderstand creativity. “The biggest challenge we have is that it’s a loaded word,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2019. “Most people have been badged as creative or not at some point in their life. It was probably at school, probably by a teacher, probably an out of date definition of what that word means; and so a lot of the work that I have to do is actually demystify creativity. It’s not this dark art and just this ability and habit of looking at things in different ways and coming up with new options to solve problems.”

Seek analogous systems that inspire curiosity and energise

When Jen Panasik spoke at the 2018 Sport Performance Summit in Chicago, she revealed how her company IDEO, where she serves as Partner and Managing Director, brought together a hospital and a NASCAR pit crew. She said: “When working with a hospital system to improve the functioning of their operating room, we spent time immersed with a NASCAR pit crew to better understand how quick decisions are made in fast-paced high stakes environments. The redundancy, high pressure and time constraints and teamwork were all direct parallels and helped to generate meaningful and sometimes unanticipated insights.” Analogous experiences inspire curiosity and can energise. “It’s a creative exercise that stimulates new thinking,” she added.

Don’t be afraid of rules and tools

Tools such as analogous experiences and imposing a set of rules amplifies creativity rather than suppresses it, according to Panasik. “Define the box before asking others to step outside of it,” she said.

She also explained IDEO’s seven rules for its brainstorming process:

1. Defer judgement – there’s plenty of time for that afterwards.
2. Wild ideas – you want to go really broad.
3. Build on the ideas of others – you’ll often hear someone say in an IDEO brainstorm ‘building on that’.
4. Staying focused on the topic – it gets exciting and people want to venture off into different tangents.
5. Be visual –it helps to bring an idea out of abstraction.
6. One conversation at a time – IDEO clients can get really excited during a brainstorming session.
7. Go for quantity – there’s going to be a lot of throwaway ideas and you never know where the spark is going to come from.

Find your team’s stories and create some metrics to measure creativity

“I never underestimate the power of stories,” said Vallis. “Stories are brilliant for creating legend and culture. ‘This team did this, they tried something a bit different. They went and talked to somebody from totally outside of their context, they totally disrupted the way they looked at the problem’. All of those stories are really good at helping to keep momentum going and role modelling best practice within the organisation. Beyond that, ask: what are we trying to solve for and let’s just agree the metrics.” They don’t need to be ‘hard’ but organisations need something to measure against. “It could be hard cash, it could be performance increase, it could even be as simple as ‘do people leave my team meeting smiling more than they normally do because I’ve changed the way that I think about it?’”

Find ways to fail fast and fail cheaply

“The biggest thing with creativity is there’s no guarantee,” said Vallis. “We can’t just call it ‘creativity’ if it works. As you hear from many artists and creative talent in many different fields, 90 percent of what they create is often rubbish but it’s needed to get 10 percent that’s brilliant.” For Vallis, the ultimate question is: “how do we fail cheaply, fast, and with as little resource as possible so that it’s not costing us lots of time and money?”

Gary Brickley, best known for coaching 17-time Paralympic gold medallist Dame Sarah Storey, believes the balance between wellbeing and performance is tricky to maintain.

By John Portch

“That balance needs to be carefully managed otherwise the person can go down a whole spiral of interventions that might not always be appropriate,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

Brickley is speaking just moments after appearing onstage at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham Stadium.

He acknowledges that athletes often have traits that set them apart. “Athletes work differently,” says Brickley, who is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton and an exercise physiologist. “They might not be well in a general sense but perform absolutely brilliantly. Then you may have a situation where you reduce their training and focus on their wellbeing. You can’t do one without the other.

“It’s a tough area and I don’t know if we’ve got the people trained up to the level needed at the moment.”

How does he see the scene developing in five years’ time? “To be honest, I think we’ll still be way off,” he says with a smile. “We’ve gotten better with things such as nutrition and we’ve moved away from those old-style bullying coaches that put athletes under pressure and we’ve weeded out a lot of the rough things that affect athletes, but there will still be challenges.”

The Leaders Performance Institute sat down with Brickley to briefly run through his reflections on the run-up to Tokyo, where Storey won three Paralympic gold medals, and his thoughts on coaching in general terms.

Gary, how do you seek to combine your coaching and academic knowledge within the performance environment?

GB: It works both ways, as what I learn from the athletes I can pass back to the students. I’m interested in nutrition, environmental physiology and training theory and there’s a lot that I’ve been able to pass on to my athletes. Say, for example, Sarah Storey is getting ready for the Tokyo Games and she wants to do some heat and altitude work. I’ll work out what’s the best procedure, we’ll try it out, I’ll get her feedback, and then take it forward to the next stage and see if we get some performance improvements.

What has been your biggest performance challenge of the last 12 months?

GB: Not going to events has been hard. I couldn’t go to Tokyo, I’d been to all the Games since 2000, it’s been remote coaching from home, which has been a challenge. There was no contact with families and that was pretty tough for athletes. You couldn’t win a gold medal and go and celebrate with your family. There were also athletes who contracted long Covid and did not make it to the Games. Tokyo, success-wise, was great for us but we never knew if it was going to happen until the last minute. Then you need to prepare for things to go wrong. For example, Tokyo was about preparing for the heat and then it poured down with torrential rain during one of the road races.

How important is the feeling of control for a coach?

GB: I give control to the athlete until I feel that something might be going wrong or not in the right direction. Then I would intervene. That could be an injury or it could be a piece of equipment that requires the right innovation team. I have coached in water polo, swimming, triathlon and elite cycling and there’s a process of continual learning and educating yourself, lifting different ideas from different sports. In the past, I’ve had some pretty dodgy coaches and you learn from their errors too.

In what ways do you check the learning and understanding of your athletes?

GB: Onstage, I mentioned being a decent filter as a coach and getting rid of the rubbish, whether that’s rubbish people that are trying to intervene with the athlete or rubbish ideas about the theory of a sport or how you recover. As a coach, I find myself filtering that out so that the athlete hasn’t got to deal with issues like that. They can focus on their race, on their recovery, and have a good, settled situation at home or on the track.

How do you ensure that everyone inside the building feels empowered to speak up and explore performance questions?

GB: I think we talk a lot about collaboration and multidisciplinary work. The coach needs to pull on a lot of different people at different times. Some people you may not talk to for two years, other people you might be talking to them on a daily basis. If you find that people are backing off a little bit you have to ask why they’re not contributing to the team. That could be the nutritionist who hasn’t felt that they’re needed because the person’s nutrition is fine. We’d ask them ‘can you find out a little bit more for us in this area?’ There are always performance questions and ways you can encourage people to feel a greater sense of ownership in their work.

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Enhance Your Environment

Brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser, take a step inside the cultural reset that led Harlequins to the Premiership title with scrum-half Danny Care and Head of Rugby Performance Billy Millard, then explore how the team worked with performance coach Owen Eastwood to place wellbeing at the centre of their performance equation and why this approach is also shared by Google and the Toronto Blue Jays. Finally, discover why equality, diversity and inclusion can be a competitive advantage through the admirable work being done at English Premier League club Brentford FC.

Download Report

This Leaders Performance Podcast is brought to you by our Main Partners

“A few years ago, there was a bigger emphasis on numbers and trying to hit specific targets and outcomes, whereas now, especially with those younger athletes, we spend more time talking about trying to show specific behaviours.”

Dan McPartlan, a Strength & Conditioning Coach with British Cycling, is reflecting on how his work with athletes continues to change in this latest episode of the Leaders Performance Podcast.

Also on today’s show, we discuss:

• The human teaching tools of S&C [4:30];
• Reacting when an athlete has a bad day at the office [10:00];
• Building an athlete’s confidence in their own body [11:30];
• The elements of McPartlan’s work that continue to surprise him [16:10].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

An article brought to you by our Partners

By John Portch

West Ham United Manager David Moyes is adamant that he does not – and cannot – do everything himself at the English Premier League club.

“When you invest in a new job you feel that you have to do everything but, as I’m getting older, I don’t want to have to do everything,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute’s Jimmy Worrall.

The conversation took place in August just as West Ham and Moyes had made a promising start to the current Premier League season. The Scot was still basking in the glow of West Ham’s highest finish since 2001 and their first qualification for European football since 2006. As December arrives, they are again challenging at the top of the table.

At the time of his appointment in December 2019, however, delegation was not a priority. The club was mired in relegation trouble and Moyes’ remit was for a swift turnaround. “I think to get things up and running you need to have your hands on everything. You need to try and get all departments pulling in the right direction,” he continues.

Just three months later, the pandemic brought the 2019-20 Premier League season to a standstill. Moyes relished the opportunity to work closely with his playing group during the enforced hiatus. “We were on the pitch every day and, in a way, I think it helped me,” he says. “It certainly helped the team because I got the chance to do individual work with them every day. We were only allowed one member of staff and that was me at the time. The more I saw it, the more important I thought the individual work was. The players were probably having a closer relationship with the manager and the coaches as well.”

While positive results tend to produce a better atmosphere, and soft skills alone will never produce results, it is clear that Moyes’ players are both happy and receptive to his ideas. “I’ve played in teams here that have fought relegation and been mid-table, but in the last two seasons, what the manager has built for us, and what we’ve bought into as players, has been amazing,” West Ham midfielder Declan Rice told a press conference in September.

Rice, who represented England at the delayed Euro 2020 this summer, reported back for West Ham duty earlier than requested and has maintained his superb form in claret and blue. “It’s a place where you wake up in the morning and you look forward to going in and having breakfast with the lads. You look forward to having a laugh and you look forward to training.”

Rice’s words resonate with Dave Slemen, Founding Partner at Elite Performance Partners [EPP], a performance consultancy and search firm working across elite sport. Slemen says: “Tapping into why players love football and keeping it fun is such an underrated quality in a coach. So much pressure is put on players externally – if you can make it fun, it releases the stress so players are only in that state during games, when it matters.”

Nor has there been unrest from those fringe players with limited game time. Moyes has made every effort to ensure they feel included. “It’s like a big family,” added Rice. “I think the gaffer said it before, we’re all like a bunch of kids. Honestly, it’s such a great place to be around at the moment. With the results and how well we’re doing, that makes it that bit more special.”

“Winning makes a big difference and, in the sport we’re in, it really does change how you feel, how the media perceive you in all things,” Moyes previously told the Leaders Performance Institute. “But I would hope that I would still be treated the same way if we were losing.”

Changing perceptions

Moyes has been more directly involved in player transfers than during his first spell with West Ham. A number of his signings have sparkled including, in January 2020, Tomáš Souček [initially on loan] and Jarrod Bowen. They, along with many who made up the squad Moyes inherited, did their bit to stave off relegation that season.

“Getting a couple of players right was really important for me because suddenly we changed the dynamics, the mentality of the club,” says Moyes of his first weeks back in charge. “Yeah, the manager’s got a lot to do with it but, ultimately, it’s the players. Whether you buy them, whether they’re already in the building, you need them to be the ones to do it for you and, fortunately, we got a couple of players in the January window not by massive design, not by massive scouting networks and watching them for 20-30 games; a bit of simple work, looking at a few stats and you hit the jackpot. Now and again, you hope to be lucky and a couple of Januarys ago I was, we got these boys in.”

First-Team Coach Kevin Nolan – a former West Ham player and the coach with perhaps the strongest links to the playing group – has spoken of the club’s growing preference for younger players with a point to prove. “We can’t match the financial side of a lot of clubs but we can match it by hard work and determination,” he told the Athletic in May. “People will want to come here and work hard and not be seen as a club where players look to finish their careers, or come and enjoy a year in London. That’s not what this club is about. The gaffer wants to make this club better day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year.”

Moyes has also taken a keen interest in the fortunes of West Ham’s youth and under-23s teams, regularly attending matches home and away when his schedule permits. He also tells Worrall of the importance of getting to know the grounds and kitchen staff at West Ham’s Rush Green training ground. “I hope in some ways to start to build the club and show people that you’re trying to build a better and brighter future for all the people who are involved in the club.”

This approach is crucial for alignment. “The team is bigger than just the players,” adds Slemen. “We believe alignment can have a big impact on the behaviours of the group and its sense of identity. It can bring people closer together, especially when things get tough.”

Perhaps this is all circumstantial. Moyes is wary of trying to pinpoint empirical evidence in a conversation of his successes and shies away from attributing his success to any particular cause, but he does highlight the organisational stability and job security he currently enjoys. His tenure has long surpassed his six-month spell in 2017-18 when he first helped West Ham to retain their Premier League status. “Getting the chance to feel that you’ve got a bit of time I think gives you the feeling that there’s stability, you can get a bit of power and you can start to make decisions that you think are correct. I think when you feel as if you’re on a short lead you find that you have to do things quickly, you’re maybe making rash decisions.

“I’ve got to say, though, when we came back in here at West Ham this time, I felt under pressure that we would have to make quick decisions. We had to stay in the Premier League.” Results were required and, when they came, he gained a little more latitude. “Sometimes, people will get jobs that are already nicely prepared for you, all nicely packaged up for you to be a success.” Most managerial appointments, however, follow a poor run of results. The incoming manager is required to firefight. “Quite often the job is that you have to correct things, put things back, and try to start again.”

Moyes is also keenly aware that he, like any manager or head coach, is just a few bad results away from being pilloried. He is familiar with both ends of the spectrum. He built his coaching credentials at third-tier Preston North End, where he began as a player-manager in 1998, and led them to promotion to the second tier in 2000. He further burnished his reputation during an 11-year spell in the Premier League at Everton. Less fondly regarded are his spells at Manchester United, Real Sociedad and Sunderland, which seem like a distant memory at this stage.

He has always backed his ability as a coach, but understands that he had to continue learning and relearning the art of coaching. “To become a better leader, you need good people and staff around you,” he says. “It’s vitally important.” Each of Moyes’ first-team coaches – the aforementioned Nolan, Billy McKinley, Paul Nevin and Stuart Pearce – have been managers in their own right. “Even leaders need to be told ‘well done’ now and again because the leaders make the decisions and, quite often, the decisions are not right. It’s not a bad thing to have people around you to say ‘well done, you’ve done a good job today’.”

“No one gets there on their own – no one,” says Slemen. “You need to be both challenged and supported in any coaching role, this is especially true of the head coach. You would hope they are having the biggest impact so need the most help to get it right. In fact, 55 percent of CEOs in FTSE 100 have executive coaches and it wouldn’t surprise me if that will be the next trend at the top of the game.”

Moyes says: “We’ll all have bad days, it might not go right, but I think that’s when you need the support even more so than when you’re winning. We can be very isolated, very lonely. Yes, you have staff to help you but you still need good mentors in the background, good people that you think you could speak to about something you’ve got a concern about; people who if you’ve got a decision that you’re torn between could maybe clear it for you. I think to have one or two people around you who can help you with that is really key when you’re in the top level in elite sports.”

Slemen suggests that Moyes is onto something. “Everyone needs help – both coaches and mentors – people to talk you through what you do but also people who have been there before that can relate specifically to the challenges you are going through,” he says, adding that during his recent MBA dissertation he interviewed ten elite sports leaders and found that their only common trait was their use of coaches and mentors at different stages of their journey.

East London calling

Moyes famously coined the phrase ‘people’s club’ at his first press conference as Everton Manager in 2002 having been inspired by the Everton jerseys he saw on the streets of Liverpool as he drove to that first media engagement. His inference being that Liverpool Football Club did not seem to be as highly represented amongst the local populace. The sentiment was warmly received at Goodison Park.

He feels West Ham, surrounded by illustrious London neighbours, can occupy a similar space in the east of the city. “I think it’s an area that needs its football team and I think, for so long, we’ve been behind it. I want us to have a new young support, I want us to have new methods of trying to attract more supporters, but I think the biggest attraction to supporters is winning, especially to young supporters. A lot of the dads who maybe want to bring their sons or daughters to the game might have been West Ham supporters but might not feel there’s been enough success to warrant getting a season ticket or coming to the games. But I think, at the moment, there’s quite an exciting young team at West Ham and some really nice young players and the team’s going well.”

Like Merseyside, he also sees east London as a hotbed of young talent. “I’d love to have 30 or 40 scouts all around the East End of London because that was the way we done it at Everton and we pulled up an awful lot of good players at that time.”

Worrall wraps things up by pointing out that Moyes seems to be smiling on the touchline these days. “I’m very much the realist and I still am – but I felt as if the realist bit is not working anymore,” says Moyes, explaining that he has to be softer with the truth. “I find some of it really hard because I only want to speak the truth. Sometimes nowadays it’s very difficult to do that, but these are the things we do as we get older and we learn a bit better.”

Moyes may be a realist but he is also an optimist. “I hope that the best period of my management is still to come, even though I’ve had some pretty good periods. I’m hoping that this period might see me doing even better than I’ve done before.”

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

• At Google, resilience is defined as ‘your ability to respond and recover from stress’

• To be resilient, your protective factors must outweigh your stressors

• It takes an entire organisation, top to bottom, to be intentional about resilience

By John Portch

“As we talk about this, you’re going to hear me say over and over and over that resilience is a skill – it can be built, it can be practised, it can be cultivated,” says Lauren Whitt.

The Head of Global Resilience at Google, appeared at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership to provide an insight into her leadership of the tech giant’s Mental Performance & Resilience Program.

“Sport gives us, as you know, many opportunities to win, to lose, to overcome, to battle, to be in the trenches,” Whitt continues, “but we have choices on how we respond with our attitudes and our behaviours. These skills are built and practised little by little, day by day, over weeks, months and years. So it’s not a quick fix. There are little tidbits and little things that we can put into play.”

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute details how Google “sets the stage”, as Whitt puts it, for the resilience of its employees.

Resilience needs a common language that resonates with your people

Google understood that its research needed to be thorough, but it also needed a simple and easy definition of ‘resilience’ that hit the mark with its employees, its ‘Googlers’. “So we have looked at all of that research and we’ve come together on a definition that resonates with Googlers; it resonates with our culture, it resonates with our population,” says Whitt. “Our common language is critical to our success.” Having pored over decades of research, Google settled on: ‘resilience is your ability to respond and recover from stress’.

A person’s resilience will be determined by their balance of ‘protective factors’ and ‘stressors’

Whitt explains that the relationship between ‘protective factors’ and ‘stressors’ will determine your resilience at any given time. They need constant attention because they remain in a state of flux; and one thing is clear: “We need to have our protective factors that overcome our stressors.”

‘Protective factors’ can be our personalities, personal skills or even our communities, while ‘stressors’ include, as one would expect, adversity, life events, or simple uncertainty. Whitt says: “We are fine at the point that our protective factors overcome our stressors. When our stressors are larger than our ability to protect ourselves or respond, that is when a boom or disruption happens. It could be as easy as the ping of a text or something to distract you while you’re working on a project or having a presentation or meeting with an athlete; or it could be something as large as a health event for a family member. It could be a million different things here, but we have them from small to large.”

Teams and individuals must be intentional in their approach

How you manage your protective factors and stressors will depend on your behaviours and your environment. Whitt says: “Our behaviour is a function both of the individual, the Googler, and the environment. So when we talk about ‘resilience’, we have to be critically intentional that it can’t just be about the player. It can’t just be about the athlete or the coach. It has to be compounded by the entire environment. What are the pieces of the organisation? What are the policies? What are the tools or resources? What does the support look like from top to bottom and inside and out?”

By John Portch

Eddie Jones, the England Rugby men’s Head Coach, likens modern high performance environments to a cycle.

“You start at midnight, then you’ve got 12 hours to get to midday,”  he told an audience at August’s Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments. “By that time your team has to have evolved into a winning team.” Jones, like numerous head coaches in team sports, can feel the clock ticking.

“In Premier League football, you’ve probably got eight games to get to the high performance, in international rugby you’ve probably got two years. Generally, I think it takes a team three years to be really humming when you’ve got all the bits and pieces in place.”

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores what Jones thinks it takes to get a team ‘humming’ and presents five points for consideration.

1. The coach as a chemist

For Jones it starts with the leader’s vision for the team. A high performance environment must support that vision and the leader must be ready to tweak things when necessary. “You’ve got to work backwards,” he says. “Get the structure to support the vision, then you’ve got to get the right people and the right behaviours. You’re like a chemist, you’re pouring little bits and things in there, taking away, and every day you’ve got to check the temperature because every day you get closer to where you are at your best and you’re also a day closer to where you’re not at your best. The cycle of life is more exacerbated in the cycle of sport.”

2. Sports science as a key accelerator

Sports science practitioners, led by the vision, must work to ensure the most efficient application. “I think when sports science came in, they wanted to be Godzilla and beat their chests and show everyone how clever they were; and now they’ve worked out that they’re just part of the package,” says Jones with a smile. “They’ve got that understanding, they’re part of the package, they’re a key accelerator of sport but not a driver; their role has become clearer.” He retells the story of an episode ahead of England’s 2019 Rugby World Cup campaign. “The first four weeks we didn’t let the players wear GPS and the coaches were sweating,” he continues. “The coaches didn’t like it, the players didn’t like it. I just said ‘work out what a good session is’. So we did that and it took away that fixation with GPS.” Keen observers will have noted that GPS technology remained a vital tool in for England throughout the tournament and beyond. Jones simply wanted underline his point. “You’ve got to make sure you manage all of that and make sure it’s in the right direction for the team.”

3. Sports psychology is the future

Jones’ tone is bellicose but he readily admits to his reliance on the high performance team, including those working in performance psychology. He says: “I think the sports psychology area is the biggest growth area of the game of any sport at the moment. If you look at any team now, do they go into the game with the right attitude and how do you get them to be at the right attitude more often than not? If you can get your team with the necessary talent and the right attitude at the start of the game, then you can beat the average, you’re winning in your competition.

“How do you get that? I think the one block that’s got the most area to investigate is performance psychology. When I say that, I mean it’s everything: that’s the relationship when you’re sitting at the table with your staff, the relationship you have between the staff and the players, the players with each other.”

Relationships are crucial given the growth of multidisciplinary teams in high performance. “If you go back 20 years ago in rugby, a player would have to have in a team environment maybe four key relationships: the head coach, maybe the strength & conditioning coach, maybe the manager – maybe three – and now they’re expected to have maybe 15 key relationships. The ability to develop that area and make that really hum and be at the level you want it to be is the key thing.”

4. The forensic psychologist as a cultural architect

Jones continues with a joke: “I reckon now you almost need three psychologists on your team, if you’re a big team I reckon you need one for the players, who are working on their individual mindset, their own individual skills. You need one for the staff – then you probably need one for the sports psychologist!”

On a more serious note, he makes the case for teams hiring a forensic psychologist to help deliver an understanding of what makes people tick. “We’ve been working with this woman who’s a forensic psychologist. I’ve been lucky enough to coach for 30 years and, in the last three weeks, I’ve learnt more about how to be more engaged, more intentional in the way I speak to people.”

5. Guardiola and Klopp as model leaders

Jones has often stated his admiration for Manchester City Manager Coach Pep Guardiola and his Liverpool counterpart Jürgen Klopp, both of whom he thinks understand how to cajole players without letting standards slip and decline. He says: “They’re tough on standards, aren’t they? You see them during the game they’re yelling and screaming but when they come off the field they’re an engaged and loving father that’s embraced the players. Our ability to engage the players is one of the hard things.”

It stems from the high performance environment and the team’s original vision. “The ability to make people work hard and do the really difficult things is getting harder and you’ve got to explore every avenue of how you do that and that’s got to be through having the best psychology and having the best performance staff.”

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

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The Big Interview brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“I think I’m in the best place I’ve been for a long, long time,” says West Ham United Manager David Moyes.

“I’m in the job because I want to be in the job, not because I need to be in the job.”

Moyes, who recently celebrated his 1,000 match as a manager, is enjoying a career renaissance at the London Stadium. He returned to West Ham in December 2019 with the Hammers in danger of relegation and worked to ensure their survival at the end of the Covid-hit 2019-20 season. It was the second time he had achieved that feat following an initial six-month stint in east London in 2017-18.

This time, he remained at the helm for the 2020-21 season and oversaw a transformation of the club – far quicker than anyone had anticipated – from brittle and perennially relegation-threatened to European contenders capable of posing opponents questions from front to back. In May, Moyes steered the club into the Uefa Europa League courtesy of a sixth-place Premier League finish – their highest since 2001.

A new three-year contract for Moyes followed in June and his team has carried their superb form into the current campaign. They sit atop of their Europa League group while again challenging at the upper echelons of the Premier League.

It is a remarkable turnaround for Moyes, who had endured a series of unsuccessful spells at Manchester United, Sunderland and Real Sociedad before again finding stability at West Ham. His reputation has not been as high in nearly a decade.

“I’m personally in a better place and managing in the way that I want to and I’m not having to be miserable because I’m losing games all the time!” he told the Leaders Performance Institute’s Jimmy Worrall in October. “I’ve actually got a team that’s winning.”

Moyes, who was labelled the ‘Moyesiah’ by West Ham supporters for his feats last season, instinctively understands that a manager is never more than a few bad results from being ridiculed, despite the elusive mix of talent and circumstance required to succeed at the highest levels of the sport.

“Winning makes a big difference and, in the sport we’re in, it really does change how you feel, how the media perceive you in all things. But I would hope that I would still be treated the same way if we were losing. We’re in a sport where there is winning and losing, not everyone can win. In fact, there’s very few people who can win. I really enjoy it. I don’t want to step away from it at the moment. I feel good and I hope it’s helping me manage and work better.”

What has changed? “If I’m being honest, I think I’ve changed a lot as well,” says Moyes, who did not manage between leaving West Ham in 2018 and returning to the club a little over a year later. At times during his hiatus he worked as a technical advisor with Uefa, a role he returned to during the delayed Euro 2020 tournament last summer.

“I was out of work, I was doing lots of stuff with Leaders, I was listening to people talking, I was listening to how people were building their clubs or what sports they were in. I did a lot of games for Uefa, I did a lot of speaking at conferences, and I think that, myself, I had to change.

“I said this in some of the conversations I’ve had with Leaders before that I felt communication has become even more important in modern day coaching and managing, whether that be to your players, your owners or the media. I think people do want to hear more and I think they want to see more positivity; the players need it as well.

“I felt as if I had to change a little bit and see if I could alter my approach. I’m not saying that’s the reason for any success, but I’m trying to remain positive in the job where, in recent years, it’s been quite difficult for me because there’s been a lot of negativity around me, around maybe some of the clubs I’ve been at. But overall, I’ve felt if I could be a bit more positive that would be a starting point, so I’ve tried to do that.”

Moyes then elaborates. “I probably looked closer to see how I’ve been doing things and checking if I thought they were right,” he says. “The majority of the things were right, all the basics, all the organisation, all the planning, but I had to look at things differently. I think my communication had to become better. I think that was the biggest thing I found with the players. I think there is a need for much more communication, but even the message you’re giving out to the media now. I felt as if I had to change from where I’ve come from.”

Moyes became player-coach of third-tier Preston North End in 1998 at the age of 34 and was a typically coach of that era: stern, aloof and sparing with praise. It was effective and he led Preston to the second tier in 2000, and later enjoyed a successful 11 years at Everton in the Premier League with largely the same approach. A generation of players has passed through the league since then and it feels like something of a bygone age – a fact not lost on Moyes.

“On days gone by, I think people would tell you, you wouldn’t come to the manager’s door very often,” he continues. “I’ve tried to be in and around the players as much as I can but keeping my distance because they have to understand that I’m still the manager. Nowadays, I’m talking to them more, about their daily lives, whether it be their families, what they’re up to, whether it be what their interests are.”

It might be a stretch to pin this as a direct reason for West Ham’s resurgence, but this approach has perhaps enabled Moyes to do his best work by helping to improve his general wellbeing. “It’s made me feel much better by having a positive outlook as well.”

The last point resonates in particular. “Sometimes people forget about the mental health of the leaders who probably have the decision-making responsibility,” says Moyes, who acknowledges that it is not easy for his players either. “The winning or losing means so much. Quite often, we can sit and listen to a radio show, which will be discussing if you’re getting the sack or not. And that, nowadays, for any other member of the public now would probably be seen as a mental health issue, but for sports coaches or managers, that’s seen as an open forum and it’s allowed to be spoken about. Most people’s lines of work would not be discussed because it would be seen as not right.”

Moyes has not been out of work for long periods during his 23-year coaching career but there have been occasional spells. What went through his mind during those times? “When you’re out of work, you can’t wait to get back in it. When you’re in work, quite often you’re saying ‘I wish I was out of it!’ because of the pressure and stress you get from it,” he says, adding that he can see more and more coaches opting for sabbaticals as a means of staving off burnout.

“Being out of work can sometimes be a good thing for managers. Pep [Guardiola] took a year out where he went to New York and did something different. I think you’ll see more of it. You’ll see some of the top managers really thinking now ‘I don’t want to be under this level of such stress every week and probably 10 or 11 months of the year I’m away from home every weekend or I’m working every weekend.’ So I do think you may see this in the next generation of managers where you might do a couple of years, and then take a year out and try and come back in again. For me, at the moment, I’m enjoying it.”

Few of Moyes’ contemporaries from his time at Preston and Everton are still operating at the highest levels of the game in England or abroad and the man himself believes that continuous learning has improved his chances when he has been out of work.

“Sometimes when you get this job you might think ‘I’ve got a job now, that’s set, I don’t need to look for anything new, I don’t need to hear what other people do’. I think you have to keep trying to find a way of learning. At the moment, I want to update all the football sessions I do; I’m trying to move them on, I’m trying to find other ways. I want to be able to test the players in as many of the football sessions as I can. I’ve got enough library material in my head to put on coaching sessions every day, but I want them to become new, fresh and updated and I’m always trying to challenge myself to find out what else I can do. But I think being out of work, I had to find ways of [working out] how you do that. When you’ve been near the top it’s difficult.

“You’ll know the people I’m going to talk about: David Brailsford, Gareth Southgate; so many of the people I get to hear from, so many great leaders, people who are great in different sports. It’s amazing how many tips you can get off of people and hear little things that complement [what you’re doing].

“I wouldn’t say I’m a great reader but I’ve picked up a couple of books and I’m picking things out of reading. Sometimes it can be enough to give you a little bit of motivation to say something or to encourage yourself to be ready.”

He mentions Guardiola again. “I heard Pep say he used the word ‘football thief’. I think we all have to be football thieves, I think we all need to steal a little bit from wherever you go.” He cites his work covering the Champions League and Euros for Uefa. “[That is] part of understanding what the new trends are and what’s up to date and where the goals are being scored from, what way teams are now lining up. The new flexibility that’s coming into football.

“If you want to stand still you can do so, but I want to try and move on and keep up with the best teams and coaches.”

Recommended reading

Five Tips From IDEO for All Leaders in Sport

Summit Session: Creative Leadership with the Royal College of Art

What Google Can Teach Your Team About Problem-Solving

IDEO Design Thinking Resources

Framing the topic

A popular theme and topic across many of our coaching and coach development conversations over the last two years has alluded to the idea of coach creativity or stretching our coaches in their development. Coaching is an art, and with the increasing popularity of coach development programmes and frameworks, there is a lot of great work being done to enhance the quality of coaching. In this roundtable, we wanted to explore how individuals are looking to influence this process and approach some specific questions from the group.

Discussion points

1. Experienced vs. less experienced coaches: encouraging creativity

• An interesting space is with newer coaches coming into a programme, where they perhaps don’t have a lot to draw on, which can change the role of the coach developer regarding how they either draw out or implement thinking around creativity with them. With more experienced coaches, often the challenge is having the window to put that creativity in and there is also an existence of more pressure to get results.
• There will always be a ‘performance-driven’ element to coaching, so a question in terms of creativity is whether time and the makeup of the environment is made to allow for these sessions to happen. A challenge that follows this is how do you measure this and the impact of them?
• For coach developers or people that support coaches, we should be looking to get across the power of creativity to not just coaches but also the athletes or those they are working with.
• When working with less experienced coaches and providing them space to be creative, we also need to be conscious of ‘consistency of delivery’. With younger talent in particular, we know the importance of a safe and consistent environment, so if our coaches are constantly changing and haven’t yet worked up the knowledge of what is appropriate and when, it can create uncertainty.
• The philosophy of the organisation you are in is key. The philosophy needs to be clear enough that there is direction but broad enough where people can explore things. If the fundamentals aren’t taken care of, the level of creativity can be limited.
• Whether you are a coach, coach developer or just working with coaches, understand the approach your coaches are taking and why – from there, explore whether that is going to be effective in what they are trying to do.
• There is a balance to be found with less experienced coaches in particular – they are more likely and willing to try new things but they don’t have the foundations that underpin their craft at this stage. However, on the opposite side, we don’t want to get into habits of no consistency at all which can stifle development. There is potentially an opportunity to promote and encourage creativity but within parameters. Parameters can provide the guidance around where the creativity sits and how it can still guide outcomes.
• With more experienced coaches, if they have proven results from past experiences and they are in a high performance context, they are less likely to be creative because of tried and true methods. We have tried to challenge the coaches to try different things because it can provide a competitive edge. We ask our athletes to try new things, so the same can be said for our coaches.
• Context really matters. Context determines your ability to allow creativity.
• A good reflection for us is ‘Principles & Parameters’ – what is the activity, why are you doing it, have you picked it up from somewhere else, do you fully understand it and what are you trying to achieve with it?
• Creativity doesn’t just have to be on the pitch. How are we thinking about the development of athletes or other staff around their day-to-day lives? That personal development can have a domino effect on their performance and how they prepare for performance on the pitch.

2. Creativity: for the athlete or us as coaches?

• Sometimes we can change things a bit too often as coaches and it’s either not what the athlete needs or wants. Some athletes don’t need entertaining, they just need to know what they need to perform.
• Are you communicating well to the athlete around what and why you are doing something? The risk is that we can apply creativity because we see our athletes a lot during the week and we as coaches are often the ones that feel the monotony at times with the process.
• With coaches looking to be creative and mix up their interactions with the athlete, the natural tendency is to think that will help the athlete, but this isn’t always accurate. We still need to give the choice and flexibility to the athlete, but it’s important to articulate as a starting point the thinking behind mixing training up etc.
• We’ve sought some feedback from our players on the makeup of training sessions and what they are buying into. It’s seems simple that if the score is high for a session or approach you keep it, but we are still finding that coaches want to change things as part of the planning process. We’re not sure if this is cultural or if they are trying to prove their worth too much.
• We don’t want robots as athletes – we want some flair and creativity and it can be difficult to teach or coach at times, so there is an element of being creative in how you introduce creativity so athletes embrace it. It can often be the education around creativity as opposed to coaching creativity in practice.
• How do you facilitate the abilities for athletes to explore what their capabilities are so they can develop in a creative way and so they can be creative themselves? It’s often not about us as coaches being creative in what we are changing, but instead what we are facilitating from a creative point of view.
• If you are working with younger talent, include the parents around the ‘why’ – they can be a barrier. Young players often want to do what they enjoy doing and get success from, but it’s important they get exposure to different things (positions etc). Education and understanding for both stakeholders in this context is important.
• Effective development plans are useful for athletes and having a purpose around what you are trying to do: why, how and what?
• Creativity: for the athletes or coaches? The coach has to be creative in how they setup the tasks or session but then allow the player to be creative in how they solve that problem / mistakes they make in the way to solving that problem. It’s a balance of understanding what is the output you are looking for from the player.
• Sometimes when you bring in change, the kickback can be that it is a change of thought process for the coach or player and there may be some reticence around that because they have a clear mindset of A, B etc; ‘but this time I’m being asked to do C first.’

3. Creativity: how are we measuring impact?

• Communication: if we are not communicating the ‘why’ to the athlete’s or coaches involved in the practice beforehand, there will be inevitable challenges behind measuring the impact.
• One of the measurements used at the end of national camps are simple feedback forms – we’re looking more at how we can be creative or how to get the same outcomes but with different ways of working. Some of the results are now improving in terms of the outcomes and experience of the athlete.
• We can often get caught up in trying to measure anything and everything, but for athletes: are they laughing, happy and having fun? Can it be just as simple as that and do we often overcomplicate it?
• The impact can often be measured by their discomfort because they are out of their comfort zone and having to think differently. If you are looking to influence the creativity in how they play, you can monitor more formally over a period of time but it comes back to their decision-making – making them uncomfortable to become more comfortable to make decisions when they need to.
• We encourage coaches to outline their philosophy and how they set their teams up, but what are the key metrics to these and show success? When things are going well, what are the players doing well? How is that reflected in your training? In terms of creativity that can provide a numerical measurement, but alongside this, what is the feedback from the person? The feedback is key, have they enjoyed being stretched even though they were uncomfortable?

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

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Speakers

Melisa Clottey, Founding Chair of Diversity Board, Selfridges

Kevin Yusuf, Former Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Brentford FC

Shona Crooks, Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Management Futures

Key Takeaways

1. Reinventing Retail – Selfridges’ vision is focused around how do we make a point of our differences with ED & I? We get different thinking styles that leads to innovation and growth.
2. Idea Generation – Do not discount anything. No right or wrong, and ensure you collaborate together.
3. Selfridges D&I Strategy – It was selected from within the organisation with the inclusion of different ages, experiences and backgrounds. Three pillars emerged: Everyone is Welcome, ‘Yellow Curriculum’ (Education), Product & Supply chain.
4. Meaning – ED&I needs to mean something to everyone in the organisation, you have to feel it.
5. Brentford KPIs – Every member of the organisation at Brentford has objectives and KPIs around ED&I. This makes it relevant to them and creates a level of accountability around the need to take this seriously.
6. Recognise & Responsibility – Everyone needs to recognise and have a responsibility and role.
7. Recruitment – How often when we recruit new people is it focused on the organisations aims and goals as part of the process? There is always an absence of accountability or practicality around ED&I.
8. Be Bottom Up – Start bottom up to hear what team members want. Do people really know what we are talking about?
9. Core Messaging – Selfridges collated demographic data of their workforce to understand the shape of the organisation. There was a feeling of looking diverse on the front, but not the detail that sat behind it. There was a focus on understanding what and how do people feel about ED&I. A cultural assessment was leveraged with quantitative and qualitative data.
10. Behaviours – Work on behaviours with your staff. As an organisation it needs to be top down and bottom up. Make ED&I a priority for everyone. If you want to be inclusive, be bottom up with informed resource.

Thinking Points

1. Observe first: taking a step back to understand what diversity means to everyone in the organisation. It can be daunting but you have to start the conversation.​
2. If we consider diversity as a strength, we need to think about which type of diversity can help us to drive the programme we want to build. Some of the most powerful dimensions of diversity are innovation and creativity.​
3. Diverse groups of problem-solvers consistently outperform the best and brightest. Give your staff autonomy to create their own work spaces and build flexibility into how they work.​
4. When talking about diversity, we need to reflect on which type of diversity can bring the team to the next level whether that is gender, race, age, nationality or educational background? Profiling the environment and organisation is important in identifying those.​
5. Commitment from the top: make sure there is buy in from the leadership and Board. The commitment needs to be there, or you’ll be on the back foot from the start.

Recommended Reading:

Building an Inclusive Organization: Leveraging the Power of a Diverse Workforce, Stephen Frost & Raafi-Karim Alidina

Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed