By John Portch

“High performance doesn’t end with the players,” says Max Lankheit.

The San Jose Earthquakes’ Director of High Performance, who took the role in January this year having previously served as the team’s Head of Athletic Performance, is discussing his thoughts on where ‘high performance’ starts and ends with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“That was one of the things I wanted to change the moment I took charge of a department,” he continues. “High performance affects the entire organisation and it’s something we need to instil – not only in the high-performance department – because I think it’s a misconception that high performance only affects what’s happening on the field and the front office absorbs this just by association.”

The idea of holistic high performance is what drives our conversation around the usefulness of objectives and key results as a goal-setting framework for a sports organisation. “OKRs originated from Intel and Andy Grove (in its original form ‘output-based management’) and the concept was further developed into OKRs by John Doer with Google,” says Lankheit, who has piqued our interest through his work at San Jose.

For over an hour he describes the processes he has introduced to enable effective performance reviews across his high-performance team. His account is detailed, personal and laced with conviction but comes with a caveat.

“It’s important to understand that you cannot just do OKRs,” he says. “I’ve tried it twice in the past and both times I’ve failed miserably. It’s not to say that someone else couldn’t do it the first time but nobody I know has done an OKR implementation right the first time they do it; and I think you need to make those mistakes to understand what you could have done differently.”

Here, we delve further into Lankheit’s approach to performance reviews and the rationale behind his approach.

Results

Lankheit states that measuring staff performance and impact is difficult, but his efforts at San Jose are guided by five “imperatives”. “They are: clear vision, targets and commitments – individually as well as group-based – transparency, meaningful marketing, which translated into our environment means a player-centric approach and, finally, performance-oriented management.”

With those imperatives as the starting point, Lankheit explains that the objectives of an organisation are necessarily influenced by its vision but are not necessarily cascading down into the objectives of each department. He says: “Your department objective may change every 4-6 months, and for us right now, it’s ‘establish a seamlessly integrated player-care system’. This means that for this objective, every individual has certain key results that they need to hit. ‘Individuals’ in this case meaning the staff members of my department.”

Lankheit begins to illustrate his point with the hypothetical target of treatments administered per day by his staff (“a silly example but easy to comprehend”).

“At the beginning we sit together and say, ‘OK, we mutually agree that the result for you is to deliver ten treatments each day’. That’s the key result the staff member is committed to achieve and that’s going to be put into our management system so it can be tracked. It’s tangible and it’s quantitative – not qualitative – the qualitative aspect is the department objective, but the quantitative aspect is what each individual can provide because that is measurable. That’s important to me because either you achieve it or you don’t. You have a direct influence on that that nobody else has.”

The last point about the individual’s agency in delivering upon a key result is important. “Before I took over this department, bonuses were only connected to player availability,” adds Lankheit. “Now, you and I both know that player availability depends on so many factors that it’s out of our hands as a department.” A common enough example is a player selected to play a match against the recommendation of the high-performance department. “That’s why it’s important to me that we find performance measurements that are directly under the sole influence of that individual or department.”

Those measurements also provide the basis for review conversations that should take place in pre-determined timeframes, informally and formally. “And it’s not a perfect world because I currently underdeliver on this,” he admits. “I just had some performance reviews with my staff, and then you talk about, ‘OK. These were the deliverables and did you or did you not get there? If yes, awesome. Maybe the performance goal wasn’t hard enough, so maybe you should have delivered 15 treatments each day’. OK. Does it make sense to raise that or are you like, ‘actually, it didn’t have the impact that we expected, and I think we should focus on something else’?”

Lankheit then further breaks down key results into ‘commit’, ‘target’, and ‘stretch’. Ten treatments per day could be the commit and 12 could be the target. “I could say ‘this commit is the least I expect from you and if you don’t deliver on this then we’re going to have a very hard conversation about it because you committed because you had the resources, you thought hard enough, it can’t be on our end.’

“If you’re able to do the commit goal, the target is what you actually want to achieve but knowing that if you didn’t hit this you can say to me ‘this was the goal but I was unable to do it. I hit the commit but I didn’t do the target because I didn’t have enough resources from you. Or if we had another table, no problem, but the tables were always full’. Now they can come back to me and say there was a problem, which helps me to raise the bar as well.”

He continues: “The stretch goal is kind of a grey area where everything needs to fall into place for you to be able to do 15 treatments, for example”. Stretch goals are beyond an individual’s control. So then if you hit 15, we say ‘this is fantastic, you had a fantastic quarter, but I don’t expect it and the person also doesn’t expect it to happen.’ A coach might say ‘I wasn’t able to deliver more than those 12 treatments because we trained twice a day and there was a gym session in between, so there was no time for me in those two hours to do that’. So you need to change the whole structure to achieve that. Or ‘we had so many injured players that we had to focus on those guys. I couldn’t do treatments for injury prevention’. “Consequently, while ‘commit goals’ are under the sole influence of each individual, ‘target goals’, and ‘stretch goals’ might need contributions from co-workers, disciplines, or even departments.” Hence, by doing so Lankheit embeds cross-functional, interdisciplinary collaboration into his people and performance management.

“That offers me the opportunity to go outside of the department and go, ‘OK, this is what we need to do as an organisation. We have a structure problem here. If we really want to do better then we have to do this’. That helps me to manage upwards and outside of the department.”

Values and traits

Under Lankheit’s Leadership San Jose’s Performance Department also lives by certain values and he assesses how his staff deliver on those values. “Was it ‘sometimes’, was it ‘consistently’, was it ‘most of the time’ or was it ‘always’? I don’t have to give an example for ‘always’ or ‘most of the time’ because then a person knows if they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “But the moment it is just ‘sometimes’ or ‘consistently’ then I will have to give examples where I’ll say ‘look, this is where you didn’t deliver when you had the chance to, but you didn’t’. Or ‘we have six core values in our department and you didn’t deliver on this one’. One aspect is the pure performance side and another is how culturally the person delivered on the promise of ‘this is what we stand for’ from a personal or overall cultural perspective.

Lankheit will also assess his staff based on four traits: problem-solving, execution, thought leadership, and emerging leadership. He says: “It’s the same with the values – ‘never demonstrate it’, ‘sometimes demonstrate it’, ‘consistently demonstrate it’ and so on – that way you do that development right there as people will say ‘this is a companion area I need to improve on’.

“We can say, for example, ‘in this performance review we identified that you are a thought leader but you are not showing emerging leadership skills, meaning you’re a fantastic individual contributor but it’s now on you to lead others’. Two different things. ‘People come to you because they know you’re the best at what you do, but you have to proactively go out there because you are a subject matter expert. Then you need to reach out to others to ask how what I do can make you do your job better?’ That comes from those reviews and then we work on that.

“We essentially take one main goal out of what we identified of those four traits that is the most important to work on in the next four months. It may also be the following four months as well, but that’s how we balance it out to personal development. Now, if emerging leadership is the one thing we want to work on in the next four months, that means I need you to take part ownership of someone else’s results. Now you need to demonstrate that you can support that person.”

At that stage, the conversation may return to commit goals and target goals. “Values and traits work hand in hand with goal setting. That’s also why the constant communication of meeting once a day, even for two minutes, to say something like ‘there was a chance where you could have done that – does it make sense to you? ‘Yes’. ‘Perfect. Next time I want you to jump in on that.’ I am always encouraging my staff to take responsibility. I would like them to do everything they do without me being there. They should be thinking ‘what is Max’s job here anyways?’

“We also have 360 reviews. I get the feedback from my employees. The employees each get one from me and also get to nominate one or two people, depending on how big the department is, that they want to be evaluated by, peer to peer. I don’t like the fact that I, as manager choose a person to evaluate you – I think it’s more helpful if that person nominates somebody that they want to evaluate them. Obviously, if they nominate their brother and I say ‘I don’t want your brother to evaluate you’, they understand, but generally, at least in our department, they would choose somebody who’s not necessarily their closest peer because they want that feedback.”

Removing subjectivity

In concluding his thoughts on how he is working to make staff assessments more effective, Lankheit once again emphasises the value in setting tangible goals. “It takes the subjectivity out of it,” he says. “If there’s tangible goals, I have nothing to argue. If you’ve delivered on a certain result, behaviour, or trait, you did it, so you deserve your bonus. We in pro sport live in a result-driven world. If someone doesn’t reach it the person has to tell me why. There might be a explanation that’s reasonable, but otherwise it’s just me saying ‘I think you should have done more or I think you didn’t deliver on that.’ It leaves room for this discontentment and resentment in your staff because they could always say ‘it’s because you don’t like me’ or ‘it’s just your perception. You never spend time with me, you’re always in the gym or at training. You only see me once a week so how does that make you the judge of the other 200 times I’m in contact with the player?’ With that embedded objectivity you take it out.

“The other thing, the cultural component, is subjective, which is why I need to bring examples. If I don’t bring examples, then there’s no point in me bringing it up in the first place. It also helps to create that feedback loop mindset in your employees as well because they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re not setting me targets but they’re evaluating me as well, so they understand it.”

Lankheit also ensures that staff members are given a copy of their review a day or two ahead of their appointment. “I give them my review 24 to 48 hours beforehand so that they have time to digest and think about my feedback instead of getting it on the fly and potentially reacting out of emotion. They have time to blow off steam if they don’t agree, they have time to reflect and come up with objective objections, if they disagree.”

It is not, however, intended as an exercise in micromanagement. “Everyone’s had micromanagers in the past,” he says with disdain. “It is important to get out of people’s ways and let them do their best work. When something is on my table, there has to be a good reason it ends up there otherwise I trust the fact that you’ll do the best job you can, you’re committed to your key results, so now you execute on them. Then we can have a conversation if you didn’t meet them and then I can jump in if you feel you need help from me. Otherwise, go and do the best job. I hated the micromanagement aspect of it when I was in certain roles and I think that’s why I am trying to be hands off.”

If anyone would like to discuss Max’s approach to OKRs and performance reviews, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

• Are you asking the right questions of candidates? What do you really need to know?

• Do you fully understand the demands placed on the role for which you are hiring?

• Personality traits and potential compatibility are increasingly important.

San Francisco took an agnostic approach

In early 2017, Marathe and the 49ers installed John Lynch as GM and Kyle Shanahan as Head Coach as they sought to return their franchise to prominence. Their approach was unconventional, such as the long-listing of 22 candidates, and they didn’t rush. “We were 26 days in and we hadn’t announced anything,” Marathe told an audience at the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Chicago. “Fans were getting impatient.” San Francisco had adopted what Marathe called an “agnostic” approach and eschewed the usual questions one might ask an aspiring GM or head coach. “We didn’t ask any of those questions because we figured if you’re at that stage where you’re interviewing for a GM or a head coach, you have a successful process that got you to where you are – we want to know what kind of leader you are,” he continues. “What’s your vision? Who are your mentors? How do you respond to failure? How do you deal with accountability? How do you hold yourself accountable? How do you hold your staff accountable? How do you think about the big picture?”

They recognised how demands on GMs and coaches are evolving

The questions the 49ers posed above are still more readily found in a job interview at a Fortune 500 company than in sports, but Marathe argued that the roles of the GM and head coach require different skillsets in the modern era. He said: “In today’s NFL, it’s no longer just about coaching the team or living in a Motel 6 in West Virginia and scouting players for 15 years – it’s about actually being a CEO on the field, a CEO off the field. That’s what running an NFL franchise is all about, so we were very focused on the process about looking for people who are leaders, who have leadership qualities, who hold themselves accountable, who have a certain amount of humility.”

In John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan they sought a partnership of equals

San Francisco prioritised a partnership, with neither GM nor head coach seen as the senior figure but more of a duo. “A lot of times this is an insular industry where people get threatened by one another,” said Marathe. “So we wanted to go in and find a head coach and a GM that were on the same sort of life cycle in their careers.” The hiring group acknowledged that a particular head coach candidate may work better with a subset of GM candidates. “We tried to find the right match that together brought out the best personality traits for the organisation and together had the right vision for leadership and accountability.”

They tested the personalities of their candidates

San Francisco gradually realised that Lynch and Shanahan would potentially be a good match. Such personality insights were delivered through some of the activities they asked their candidates to complete. One included a list of ten skills or responsibilities for a GM. They produced the same lists for a head coach. “For a head coach it might be designing a game plan or coaching your coaches or evaluating your players,” said Marathe, “and we asked them to rank them, one to ten, in terms of not how important they are but how good they are at each one. They had to be the best at something and they had to be the worst at something. And the same with the GM. It was actually interesting, going through these interviews, that some candidates couldn’t make themselves No1o at something. That teaches you something about them. In some of those exercises we did we really felt that John and Kyle would be very complementary working together.”

By John Portch

• Leaders should promote a mindset of curiosity and safe learning.

• Learning and development are the responsibility of both management and the individual themselves.

• Adults learn through reflection and making meaning of experiences whether individual or shared – do not place too much emphasis on formal courses.

It starts with the leaders

The leaders are an obvious but essential place to start. The topic of coach and people development is one that the Leaders Performance Institute discussed with Jon Bartlett, the Elite Basketball Performance & Program Operations Advisor at the NBA, in April 2022. He said: “It’s no good if it just comes from one person and you’ve got 250 people in your organisation because it’s difficult for them to align all the different verticals. Leaders have got to promote this mindset of curiosity and asking questions without feeling threatened because what we want to do is learn together.”

What is learning and development?

“Is there a shared understanding within your organisation of what learning and development is? It sounds like a simple question but it’s actually quite complex when you break it down,” said Bartlett. “The initial thing to recognise is that it’s a shared responsibility between the organisation and the individual staff member. It’s not just the responsibility of the staff member or the responsibility of the organisation. We are responsible for engaging in our own development, but  organisations have to take responsibility for investing time and resource into their staff.”

Too much focus on the 10%

Bartlett highlighted the lack of emphasis on people learning within their current roles and cites the popular ’70:20:10’ model to make his point. The model suggests that 70% of learning is done from experience, experiment and reflection; 20% is learning from working with others; and 10% is learning from formal interventions and planned learning solutions. “Most focus on the 10% and organisations support the 10s and the 20s, but how many processes are set up effectively to support the 70 percent?” he said. “If you shape this in the right way, with the right processes, you can learn and develop in specific areas every day, not just thinking ‘I need to do a course, conference, seminar or webinar to learn – I can learn every single day if I have the right process set up for reflection, review and evaluation.’”

Bake the process into your systems

There are some simple steps that all teams can take. “Organisations can consistently provide opportunities, tailored towards each staff member, and you can visit progress on a frequent cadence. It could be monthly, quarterly or biannually,” said Bartlett. “Often, performance reviews in sport are done on an annual basis. Now, if you’re just going annually, and you’re on a three-year contract, you basically only have two touchpoints on your development. Some contracts only operate on a 12-month cycle. So how can an organisation focused on the development of their people make it more tangible? Bake the whole process into your system on a daily basis. For example, something as simple as after-action reviews. They have a massive part to play in learning and development. They can be as simple as: ‘what were the intended outcomes? What actually happened? What’s the gap between those two? And how can we bridge that?’ You might have one or two outcomes. We’ve learnt what worked well, we learnt what didn’t, and so we can apply those outcomes next time. We know from adult learning pedagogy that learning takes place through reflection and making meaning of experiences, whether that’s individual or shared.”

In Partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our fifth and final Leaders Meet of 2022 was around how to collaborate with the wider interdisciplinary team.

An ongoing thread throughout the conversations across the day was how crucial relationship building is when working within an interdisciplinary team.

Session 1: Session Observation with Loughborough University National Tennis Academy:

Featuring:

Nick Cavaday, Academy Head Coach, Loughborough University National Tennis Academy

Louis Cayer, Coaching Consultant, LTA

Ben Trevor-Jones, Physiotherapist, Loughborough University

Kam Sodha, Strength & Conditioning Coach, Loughborough University

Ranah Stoiber, Tennis Player

For the first session of the day we had an interactive session, observing a live tennis training session at Loughborough University National Training Academy. Nick Cavaday, and the coaching team wore microphones during the session so the attendees were able to see and hear how the team approach their coaching sessions. It was not only Cavaday and the tennis coaches that were on court providing input, they were joined by the S&C and physio for the duration of the session.

Session 2: A Coaching Perspective

Speakers (from the Loughborough University National Tennis Academy):

Nick Cavaday, Academy Head Coach

Alex Bailey, Performance Lifestyle Advisor

Nathan Miller, Academy Manager and Head of Performance Support

Following the session observation, we were able to hear from Nick Cavaday, Alex Bailey and Nathan Miller to get their view in a Q&A style format on what it takes to have a perfectly functioning team around the athlete.

• Is a psychologist also present on court as part of the interdisciplinary team? Yes, we work closely with the psychology team, however they are only contracted for one day per week. When the psychologist is working, she will be on court and listen to the sessions, the coaches’ feedback, and assess how the player reacts to the feedback. The psychologist also feeds into the wellbeing and psych/social team who are full-time practitioners.
• What are the processes around session design, especially for a technical proficiency session? How do you make it the best quality session? The athlete needs to be mentally engaged as there is high learning content and a lot of detail. It shouldn’t be scheduled at the back end of a tiring week, as the athlete needs to be more mentally fresh. These sessions actually have some of the highest load in terms of mental/physical so it’s better to do them in the morning and when the athlete is physically fresh.
• How much are athletes involved in the analysis process? There’s a balance, as they grow there’s a transition period of needing to know more about their opponent but then having information overload and not concentrating on her own game. When they are younger they don’t have analysis and so they just focus on playing, but getting this balance of how much information is needed as she gets older is key. As they get older, the coaches compare key stats against other world top junior players to see if there are any trends or areas of real improvement. Coaches can analyse the stats and use it to look deeper and understand how that can translate into coaching points before they share them with the athlete. Analysis varies so much when they are younger as it is so harder to pick out trends, and they are more focused on the athlete’s understanding of the game when they younger, and as they get older and the trends are more obvious, then you can incorporate the analysis into coaching.
• How do you encourage openness and feedback from the younger athletes? You have to recognise that it’s a huge transition process for the younger athletes, therefore we do a lot around helping the athletes feel a sense of belonging to the programme. We look to build relationships with the staff and players in the first instance, coaches visit their home environment too; and building relationships is a big focus when onboarding new junior players. Pre-match chats and post-match debriefs when on the road also encourage open feedback. These are interactive and collaborative sessions, rather than the coach telling them what they need/don’t need to do, and the athlete always feeds back first.

Session 3: Building Relationship Intelligence

Speaker: Jide Fado, Coach & Trainer, Management Futures

For the third session of the day, we shifted our attentions to exploring a skill that can be hugely impactful in working with others, building relationships. Fado began the session by asking our attendees to discuss in their roundtable groups and think about what skills needed by those who are good at building relationships. The attendees were then asked to make a snapshot wheel of their relationships with the colleagues/departments they work with, and score their relationship with each out of 10. He then invited participants to answer the following questions:

• What strikes you about your wheel?
• What surprises are there?
• Where would you like to focus some energy?
• What score would you like this relationship to be?
• Specifically, what does that relationship need from you?
• How motivated are you to do it?
• What is your first step?
• When will you do it?

Key takeaways:

• Don’t find time; make the time to build relationships.
• Show your appreciation.
• Regularly reflect on the quality of your relationships and take action.

Session 4: A Bird’s Eye View

Speaker: Mo Bobat, Performance Director, England & Wales Cricket Board

Moderator: Edd Vahid, Head of Academy Football Operations, Premier League

For the final session of the day, we had the opportunity to explore the strategic view of the inter-disciplinary teams and hear from the Performance Director of England and Wales Cricket, Mo Bobat. The session format was a Q&A style with Edd Vahid from the Premier League drawing out some learnings around interdisciplinary support.

• What is high performance? It’s important to pay attention to both words, and inevitably it means to be better than everyone else, and to be able to sustain it. I think you need three ingredients to operate at a high performance level: quality of people, alignment to a vision, and to be less dysfunctional to your opposition.
• Interdisciplinary support is all about cohesion. Ultimately you want cohesion so you can add to the player experience.
• When you think about problem solving, often there’s not one problem that is wrong, so why would there only be one solution?
• When you have diverse thinking, you’re more likely to find the best solution.
• Just having more people at the table and more disciplines working with athletes, if they are not aligned then it can create more problems than it solves. They have to work together in a clear, cohesive and simple way.
• We have had healthy disruption recently with a new head coach coming in. There is enough pressure around the first team at the moment that my role is to not add to those pressures. How can you get them to prepare like a professional but play like a kid enjoying the game with no pressure? It is important to do the work off the field to cover scenarios so they don’t have to think on match day, they can just perform.
• Start with the needs of the athlete and getting buy-in from the people that are closest to them such as parents, agent etc., and then collaborating to speak about their performance programme. If you start with the programme you can miss some of the most obvious pieces and solutions, and also lack the buy-in from the athlete.
• Don’t underestimate the value of having the athlete in conversations about their development, with the other practitioners. They need to understand the bigger picture and also the process.
• Managing multi-format players across different schedules is a challenge and so is finding a time to sit down and make a plan for these players with the wider team.
• We are conscious of wanting to make the players feel like they are a part of one programme rather than stretched across different programmes with different outcomes and with different practitioners.
• Is it in the player’s best interest? Practitioners have to be humble enough to be able to recognise whether it is in the players best interest for you not to be a part of their development.
• A skilful generalist who is really adaptable might be more valuable to a team than just simply adding more specialists to a group. Of course, a specialist can be incredibly valuable but if you think the answer is just adding more specialisms, it doesn’t necessarily add more value if they aren’t aligned and don’t work cohesively.
• Player power and player ownership is a key area of work within interdisciplinary teams moving forwards.
• Strategy is all about priority. Therefore you have to be really honest and clear about what the key focuses are. How you then communicate this with the athletes is also key, and you need to have them bought into the strategy.
• If the player is self-aware and clear on their own needs that really helps the wider team. But if not how can you communicate and involve them in the development process. Having the player at the centre is crucial, and you must let them adapt to the different practitioners.
• If you’re struggling to fulfil a need or a role, an adaptable generalist in your team can be invaluable as part of the interdisciplinary team. You don’t want to compromise specialisms but you have to be aligned and cohesive.

By John Portch

There is a common perception in football that if you finish lower in the table than you did the previous season then you have failed.

The truth is not always so simple. Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion finished sixth in 2020-21 and followed that with a seventh-place finish in 2021-22. Last season was their fourth as a WSL team, having received a top-tier licence in 2017, and the first where they were unable to match or better their previous position.

It is a source of frustration for Manager Hope Powell, who shares the view that outcomes are not everything. She says: “We were really disappointed because we should have finished sixth, but it was still a really successful season because of some of the performances we had. The way the team performed, the way the staff performed – we put things in place and we delivered in lots of areas. It’s been a successful season for us and, for me, success is defined in so many different ways on and off the pitch.”

Powell, who also admits that she “cannot ignore the league table”, describes the challenge of taking on the WSL’s wealthier clubs as Brighton’s “greatest opportunity”. “From a football perspective, challenging those bigger, more established clubs that have been in the high end of the game for so many more years than we have is a daily challenge for Brighton, in a good way,” she continues.

The Seagulls are looking to meet that challenge both on and off the field, with Powell discussing player development in the second part of her interview with the Leaders Performance Institute. In the third and final instalment, she reflects on the culture at Brighton and the steps she and her team are taking to develop a high performance environment conducive to challenging for the top four in the WSL. “That’s where we want to be and we have to strive to be better than they are [the clubs who make up the current top four], to shift our club from where we are now to where we want to be.”

A nimble approach

Powell explains that at the end of the WSL season, the team generally holds a review, which is a process led by her psychologist [Beth Yeoman was appointed as Senior Psychologist for Women and Girls in May 2022]. “It’s standard stuff,” says Powell. “What went well, what we want to keep doing, what we want to let go and what new things we want to introduce.”

The most important thing, she continues, is the weekly conversations between Powell and her staff about the environment and the culture. “Is it working? What do we need to do now? What’s important? What isn’t important? I find that to be a weekly conversation so that we don’t just say ‘all the way through the season we’re going to do this’ and then at the end of the season decide if it’s been good or bad. I think it’s just about conversations and setting the tone of where you’d like the environment of the people you’re working with to be. I don’t think it’s too onerous.”

The Leaders Performance Institute suggests to Powell that it sounds like cultural mapping. “You can call it that,” she replies, “I think it’s just about having open and honest conversations. Certainly for me and my team. How does the environment feel? How are the players? What do we need to change? How do we need to engage them more? What about their voices? Is it too much? Too little? If that’s called ‘cultural mapping’ I don’t know, but that’s what we do on a regular basis.”

Powell has learned, during the course of her coaching career, to trust her gut. It served her well in the 15 years she spent as Manager of the England women’s senior team between 1998 and 2013 and so far during her five years at Brighton.

“I really believe that coaches have a gut feeling,” she says. “‘How does this feel today?’ Or during the week I’ll ask myself ‘how is training?’ Maybe it didn’t feel or look right. ‘What’s going on?’ Or, ‘this feels good – what happened? The players seem happy’. It’s those conversations and I get those feelings and so I like to challenge those feelings. ‘Am I missing something? It doesn’t feel right’. Generally my gut tells me ‘stick to it, Hope’ and every time I don’t, it doesn’t quite work out.”

Adding value

Powell speaks fondly of her coaching staff. “I believe I have the right people,” she says. “The most important thing is providing the opportunity for the team to say ‘this is what I think we should do next’. I am not precious about what we do as long as it adds value. If we think that it will work and we try it, that’s where the constant conversation is important. ‘It doesn’t [work]? Well we’ve tried it. I want the staff and, more importantly, the players to own it, be engaged, to have some pride in what they do and add value.

“It’s a chance for the multidisciplinary team to go, ‘this was really good, I didn’t think this worked, I think we need to change it, I don’t think it’s right, Hope.’ ‘What do you think then?’ I’m very much ‘what do you think?’ because even though I’m the leader, I’m not – we’re all leading it, they’re all experts. I manage it and I make the overall decision because if it doesn’t work, I lose my job. I get the input of everybody. My favourite words are ‘what do you think? What are your thoughts?’ That’s how I work. If you can’t trust your team or the people you’re working with then they’re not the right people.”

There is occasional turnover of staff and Powell will pay more attention to the work of new staff. “And then those conversations become less and less,” she says. “‘Just tell me what you are doing so I know’. ‘Is this OK?’ ‘ Yeah, go for it. Let me know when it’s done.’

She also senses when new staff members are keen to make a good impression. “They come in, and try to make an impression, as people do, and I have to say to them ‘don’t just say something because you feel that you have to. You’re not going to be judged because you don’t say something – say something only when you can add value. If there’s nothing to say then you don’t need to say anything’, but people want to make an impression. You make impressions in other ways, don’t you, it’s not all about having the last word. It’s not always copying in everyone in an email, which absolutely drives me crazy. Why do people do that? Because they’re trying to look good. That’s really sad, actually. That’s the world in which we live. I’m just not like that.”

CPD and mentorship

Powell is a big believer in keeping herself fresh and current through presentations, seminars, podcasts and conversations with other coaches. “When you have been on a journey as I have been, everyone thinks that you stop learning,” says Powell, who also serves as a coaching mentor with Fifa, Uefa, the Premier League and the Football Association. “The younger coaches come through and they want to absorb all of the information and quite often forget that you are still on a journey and you are still learning yourself. I think it’s really important as older coaches that we have that capacity and we have the will to do that.”

Of her own mentors, Powell recalls a former coach who, in his day job, was a senior manager at BT. “A lot of people reported into him and that really helped me when I went into management,” she continues. “It wasn’t about football, it was about managing groups of people, having a strategy, having a plan, how you communicate to groups of people, how you share your vision with your team and all of those sorts of things. I think if you can get a mentor outside of your sport, that is really powerful.” What about mentors within football? “I also value the people I talk to and the mentors I had in the sport because they understand it from the sporting context. If you can get a balance of both it’s really helpful.”

Brighton will provide and finance regular CPD opportunities both internally and externally for staff members. “The staff, or ‘coaches’ as we call everybody, have a responsibility to deliver CPD so that it enhances their knowledge, their learning and their development. I think it’s really important,” says Powell. “So all my staff have to deliver whether they’re a junior therapist or a senior practitioner. It’s very important that everyone gets the opportunity to deliver and to lead. It’s not just about the most experienced person in the room giving all the information.”

Diversity as a competitive edge

Powell is a pioneer in English football. She was the youngest-ever Manager of England when she was appointed, aged 31, in 1998. She was also the first woman and first black person to take the position.

Her role at Brighton affords her the opportunity to directly impact the diversity of her staff. “I guess I’m in a good position as I have the responsibility of recruiting and hiring staff,” she says. “You try to get the best players and the best staff possible. I quite like an equal split of male and female.” She points to the fact that she has a female assistant manager [Amy Merricks] and a male goalkeeping coach [Alex Penny].

“I think it’s important to have a diverse group. We have people who are from abroad as well, not just English. We’re down by the south coast and the demographic is very white and middle-class. I’m very happy to recruit from closer to London – I live in London – and I’m quite aware and mindful of that, to make sure the group is diverse, because then you get diverse thought. Otherwise you get everything that’s exactly the same and that just doesn’t work.”

Powell actively tries to provide employment opportunities for women because they are all too often lacking in English football. “I want the best person but I’m also mindful of the diversity in the group and, if I’m honest, I’m a bit biased because of opportunities for women in the game. If there’s a good female, I look at the female first if I think they’re good enough. They’re more likely to get the job simply because the opportunities for women aren’t afforded as much as they are for men, especially in football.”

She prides herself in her honesty but also in her support for her staff. “I think if you were to ask any member of staff if they feel supported they’d all say ‘yes’,” she says, reflecting on  Brighton’s progress on her watch. “Everyone believes in what you’re trying to achieve and everyone is prepared to work together.”

By John Portch

• Combine physical, mental and tactical aims

• What can you ask athletes to do in the ‘other 22 hours’?

• Load manipulation is the last resort

Representative training design

The international footballing environment, as Bryce Cavanagh explained, inevitably limits the amount of time coaches and staff can spend with athletes. With this in mind, Cavanagh, who serves as the Head of Performance at the Football Association, told an audience at 2020’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance that efficiency can be found in representative training design. “Firstly, we look at areas that stretch us on the field,” said Cavanagh, who works primarily with the England men’s senior team. “We tend to look at those denser periods, those peak periods, and we feel they tend to be represented by three things commonly. One is the intensity; generally the intensity goes up during those periods, so you’ve got a physical construct or a physical risk around fatigue; or an opportunity. Clarity, so players needing better decision making, performing under pressure and whatnot. And the other one is execution; execution of skills. That’s where they either break down or you execute them correctly. So there’s a physical, psychological and a tactical, technical construct there.”

Psychological stress under fatigue

Cavanagh recommends recreating the stressful conditions of match play to the greatest possible extent in training drills at both youth and senior levels. “We’re really careful to look at those peak periods and look at those three constructs [intensity, clarity and execution] and try to create opportunities in training where we’re hitting two or three of those in what we call ‘mutualism’ or mutual benefit between them,” he said. “An example might be something that’s got a technical or tactical outcome but we’re doing it under physical stress that you would find in those peak periods in the game. We can obviously feed back live and feed back GPS metrics around what some of those look like from the rolling average research that many practitioners do these days.”

In some ways, such sessions can serve as talent ID opportunities. “All the way down the pathway it’s important for us because we get such limited time with players; and coaches get limited time to assess the players,” Cavanagh continued. “Having more and more representative training is almost like having a talent ID tour in a way because you’re seeing how the players stand up in a game-like situation. If you haven’t seen a lot of a guy who’s come into an England camp, you can get a better indication of how he’s going to perform when he gets to the business end.”

The ‘other 22 hours’

Players arrive at international camps in different physical states. This necessitates an assessment that eschews traditional methods of gap analysis – “we have not got the luxury of 52 weeks of unlimited datasets”. There is, however, good communication with the English Premier League clubs that supply the bulk of England players, which enables the sharing of some metrics, such as GPS data. There is also a lot of relationship-building with the players that come into the squads.

Cavanagh and his colleagues also understand that every activity in training or during a match comes at a cost and, if the gap is too large, it may see a player miss training or even a match, the first thought goes to what can be achieved away from training. “We try to look at other areas to offset that set of scales,” he added, referring to the “other 22 hours”. “So if the cost is X, what can we do to offset that cost? Chronically, you increase the capability of the player and more capable players recover better, handle the cost better, but the more acute stuff we’ve gone after really hard. We’ve got a camp, we’ve got a captive audience, we’ve got them 24-7, so we’ve gone after the sleep, nutrition and recovery stuff.

“What can we do there to offset that cost acutely before the last resort being the load manipulation or training manipulation?”

By Sarah Evans

• Building an effective team takes time

• Adaptability is a key trait in new recruits

• Staff development is an evolutionary process

Evaluate where you are and what you need to implement

“Building a successful team takes time,” David Tenney, High Performance Director at Austin FC, told the Leaders Performance Institute while still serving in the same role at the Orlando Magic. He spoke about how he sees his role as a leader is in developing his team over time to problem-solve better, to become more resilient, and to grow. Tenney then explained how, ultimately, he wants to facilitate a process by which his people, as staff members, are able to say, “we are getting better, making good decisions and continue to grow as people and practitioners.” He also went on to highlight that “there will be a certain point when they can grow and move on and you start the process all over again.” Then, he made clear that it is of critical importance to take time to evaluate where you are and what needs to be implemented or changed. He said: “When new hires come in, everyone doesn’t know each other’s strengths and it takes time to build those relationships. The first three or four months will be messy, but that’s OK.”

Don’t just hire the best people

Tenney spoke about some of they key characteristics he looks for in the practitioners he brings onto his staff, and explained how adaptability was one of the most crucial attributes. He highlighted that he often looks to hire people from outside of the sport as they can bring in fresh new perspectives. “Putting departments together is really hard, as it is a dynamic structure,” he said. One hire can impact on who the other hires might be, therefore, “it’s not always about hiring the best person for each role – it’s really trying to figure out how they’re going to fit together”. Elite sport is exceptionally chaotic, and Tenney highlighted the need to be able to evaluate whether someone coming into the team has the emotional resilience to deal with the pressures of elite sport. He said that many of the practitioners are the first people the athlete will see in the morning, and so they “can set the emotional tone for the building the moment the athletes walk in. So if you’re tired and frustrated, and the athlete walks in and we’ve just lost five games in a row, you’re sending that message to the athletes. Not everyone can do that – it’s a key trait.”

Making staff feel invested is key to their development

Tenney stated that “staff development is an incredibly evolutionary process.” As staff teams get bigger and practitioners that used to be part-time consultants are now becoming full-time hires, there are more interactions. With this in mind, Tenney shared with the Leaders Performance Institute that “the hardest part of my role is to bring people together, make sure information isn’t lost, and make people feel invested.” Often the practitioners are so focused on connecting with the athletes, that they actually miss connecting with the other staff members. Thus, Tenney said: “it is really important to set an environment where we’re collectively acknowledging each other’s individual strengths over a period of time, and I think that makes people feel more invested and committed.”

“Our mission statement is probably a good place to start,” says Phil Church, “and it’s to increase the number of English-qualified leaders, which is managers, coaches and technical directors, working at the highest levels of the game.”

Church is the Senior Professional Game Coach Development Lead at England Football Learning, which oversees the Football Association’s [FA] education pathways for youth and senior coach development and technical director development.

He joined the Leaders Performance Podcast to discuss the FA’s suite of programmes and courses as it works towards fulfilling England Football Learning’s mission statement.

Within that discussion we also touch upon:

• The selection process for the courses [8:00];
• Talent mapping with a view to adding support and value for learners [12:00];
• Programmes for graduates to continue their CPD and to meet the needs of the game [17:40];
• Why diversity and inclusion still needs attention at the FA [28:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

A podcast brought to you by our Partners Elite Performance Partners

“Folks coming into the organisation, whatever their career aspirations may be or their vision of leadership, we want to help them find that, whatever is genuine and authentic to them.”

Ben Baroody, the Director of Leadership Development & Mental Performance at the Texas Rangers of Major League baseball, is discussing career and leadership development opportunities at the club in this latest edition of the Elite Performance Partners Industry [EPP] Insight Series.

EPP are a performance consultancy and search firm highly regarded across sport and, for this episode, EPP’s Founding Partner Dave Slemen and Managing Partner Anna Edwards posed the questions to Ben, who spoke of the Rangers’ processes and practices that enable the advancement of players and staff alike.

Also on the agenda were:

• How Ben and the Rangers make time for those leadership and career development opportunities [8:30];
• The club’s efforts to set people up to succeed by creating a development space [10:30];
• ‘Soft’ skills and the Rangers’ ability to track the development of players and staff [23:00];
• The renewed emphasis on the mental side of performance in the training environment [29:20].

Dave Slemen Twitter | LinkedIn

Anna Edwards LinkedIn

By Luke Whitworth

Recommended reading

Why Debriefs Are Such Effective Tools of Learning at Delta Airlines

Is Your Team a Good Learning Organisation?

How NASA Share Knowledge and Learn Faster

Framing the topic

Applying new learning or ideas continues to be a fascinating theme of discussion across the world of high performance sport, yet it remains a challenge. In this virtual roundtable which was led by Leaders Performance Advisor Bobby Scales II, we explored six points around this theme and then opened up discussions around key considerations and approaches of those on the call.

How to lift ideas off the page

1. Learning with intent: we read articles, listen to podcasts and attend conferences. Curious people acquire tons of information but are we learning for enhancement or are we learning for entertainment? When preparing to engage in a learning opportunity, what is it that you want to learn? It’s extremely important to learn in a purposeful and pragmatic fashion – follow up and make it impactful.
2. Focus: leaving the learning environment (speech, conference etc.) with several pieces that made significant impact. Focus on one or two that you can apply to your organisation. Utilise the flight or train home – that can be a vital period in reviewing what made an impact on you.
3. Process: quickly create a process by which you plan to implement those ideas. Formulating an actionable plan is key to making the knowledge that you acquired ‘sticky’. How can you dig deeper on what stood out to you?
4. Board of directors: share what you have learned and how you plan to implement your ideas with your ‘board of directors’, these are people close to you either in or outside of the organisation. People on your board of directors will hold you accountable because they care about you and your success on a personal level. This is a powerful way to debrief ideas and build them out further.
5. Be aggressive: this is where a lot of the learnings can get lost. Move quickly and decisively with applying the learning in your environment. The more time between information ingestion and action the more likely you will end up seeing the conference as a social gathering.
6. Keep lifting: it’s exceedingly easy for the learning and ideas to never leave the notebooks we write them in. The true test of lifting any idea off the page is to make it real. What you are really seeking is behaviour change, as such you must model the behaviour that you want.

 Discussion points

• Aggression vs. intent: there can be a perception of being too proactive, whereas if you are in the right environment you can just be intentional with the idea or learning.
• External groups: this is hugely beneficial and powerful in their ability to hold you to account. Sometimes there isn’t a ‘bookshelf built for that book’ so how do you tell the story to build the shelf to brew the evolution of the idea into integration or implementation?
• How you are creating connection: when working with other athletes or staff, what are you doing to get on their level? Quality learning amongst peers of people is more impactful with an underlying foundation of connection.
• Desire to action: in high performance sport we have a huge action bias – we have all this information so how do we do this in our organisation? The real question becomes at what point does action become useless or a negative return on investment?
• What is your or our curriculum: how do we teach, learn and guide? What are the metrics that guide that curriculum that let us know there is progress in certain areas? For bigger ideas, create that ‘pilot’ space where we can figure out if it does or doesn’t work. Where is your ‘failure’ location to explore whether we decide to go deeper or not?
• Culture: do you have a clear culture around learning from the tip of the spear? There is only going to be so much you can do if the buy-in is only from a mid-management level. If you have a culture when rubber meets the road that there is fear to try anything or a ‘no safety culture’ where ideas are dismissed by management with the excuse of funds or time – you need an open culture to allow these things to work.
• Context is crucial: we like new and shiny things, there is a recency-effect. Often there can this notion of applying a similar idea into your context but the reality is that it can’t be lifted from one context to another, there are nuances. How do we mitigate the new and shiny? The real learning usually takes place when you bring an idea back and begin throwing it around in a smaller group setting – it begins to be shaped into something that has meaning.
• Power of reflection: don’t rush into things too quickly, give the idea or learning time to ‘marinade’ – a good idea is still a good idea a week down the line. Find the sweet spot between not leaving the idea too long, but giving enough time for you to get back into the environment and review how it might work in practice. Then ask yourself: would this still be impactful? Is it still relevant? Straight after a learning experience you are emotionally positive, so the power of reflection is important as you look to articulate it a more holistic way.
• Learning is a process not an event: this has strong alignment to the discussion point around culture – we want to strive for a sustainable learning journey.
• Individualisation: what is your personal way and process for learning and subsequently putting things into action?
• Create depth to the learning: what can you do to get further down the levels in terms of the idea, topic or theme? Sometimes when seeing some present or share a dynamic idea, it can be hard to replicate without the environmental buy-in as much as it is with the idea itself.
• Multiple processes to implementing ideas: it may be the case that there are multiple processes to implementing ideas as opposed to just one. If there is something that is perhaps more conceptual or theoretical, this process for implementation may look very different to something more structured or content-driven.
• Maximise impact: do your peers present back their learnings and findings after engaging in learning experiences? It creates discussion, room to create more depth and the ability to make learning contextual to your environment. Based on these ideas, notes or takeaways, what do others see, feel or hear? Not just read, see and heard around those ideas. A question you can focus on is ‘what are we going to notice that is different as oppose to what is it that you are going to commit to?’
• Teach & preach: the best way to learn ideas is to teach them. What has a member of the team learnt and, subsequently, how are they teaching and preaching that learning to others? What has been ingrained in the practice?