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By John Portch

How do you turn your setbacks into springboards?

A rich seam of answers ran through both days of this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

We listened to speakers from various sports organisations discuss their responses to setbacks. Teams including Chelsea, Racing 92, Harlequins and the Sydney Swans laid it all on the table. Several explained how they managed to turn things around.

Stephan Lewies, for example, captained a Quins team to victory over Saracens in October; their 17-10 win ending a miserable run of eight consecutive defeats to their Premiership rivals.

“Coming off a record like that,” said the South African lock, “you often look for answers in the wrong place.” Lewies explained that season after season Quins would change their usual approach when facing Saracens. This season they stuck to their guns and it paid off.

“When the pressure came on in this game, [we turned to] something we’d done for the whole season, for years previously, versus something new in the pressured moment.”

Kudos to Quins, but neither they nor anyone in sport has dealt with the difficulty of landing a probe on Mercury or the conundrum of trying to thaw a microscopic strand of ice on the lens of a space telescope 1.5 million km from Earth.

For Carole Mundell, the Director of Science at the European Space Agency [ESA], such stories represent another day at the office. Crisis after celestial crisis is routinely averted on Mundell’s watch by some of the brightest minds in astrophysics.

Of ESA’s triumphant run-in with the intrusive ice, she said: “Data gives you information. Information gives you knowledge. Knowledge only gives you insight and wisdom for action if you really understand what it’s telling you and how to interpret it with your own experience on top of that.”

Mundell feared impostor syndrome when stepping onto the Oval stage but her words instantly resonated with an audience of coaches and practitioners.

They also lead us nicely back to our original question: how do you turn setbacks into springboards? We bring you six interrelated smart tips from across both days of the summit.

1. Find the right skills to help you in a crisis

How does it feel to be under the cosh in your role? What tools do you lack in those moments? Carole Mundell has allowed herself to be shaped both by the crises she’s confronted and the organisation she leads. Instinctively, she’s a creative scientist, a physicist with the urge to investigate independently. Yet her work at ESA requires her to think like an engineer and commit to the team; these newly acquired skills have proven crucial in moments of crisis.

“I’m learning to think like an engineer. All of ESA’s structures and processes and how we operate comes from the mind of an engineer… We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”

Carole Mundell

2. Seek key allies above you

Racing 92 were treading water in France’s Top 14 league when they appointed Stuart Lancaster as Director of Rugby. Lancaster, whose tenure began in 2023, was hired to transform their fortunes, but faced considerable obstacles. Language was one, culture another; he also knew he’d be working under his predecessor, Laurent Travers. Nevertheless, Lancaster felt that he was “pushing on an open door” thanks to the quality of his coaching work with England (2011-2015) and, in particular, Leinster (2016-2023).

The big question he asked himself was: should he tiptoe in or smash down the door? As Racing’s revival required more than a cosmetic makeover, he opted for the latter. With the help of his French coaching staff, Lancaster introduced a new working week, a new playbook, and called time on Racing’s long lunch culture. He could disregard those who labelled him an ignorant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ thanks to the relationships he forged with Travers and the Racing board.

“I spent a lot of time prior to the players arriving getting [the management] to understand my vision, my philosophy and what I wanted to achieve; not taking away the DNA of Racing and trying to replace it with Leinster, but trying to merge the lessons I’d learned with England, the lessons I’d learned from Leinster, and then bringing that structure and detail to a French environment.”

Stuart Lancaster

3. Who are your key influencers?

The Sydney Swans had to dust themselves off following their 2022 AFL Grand Final defeat. John Longmire, who this week stepped down as the Swans’ Senior Coach, led them back to the Grand Final again this year. Since leaving London, he has handed the reins to his assistant Dean Cox, who will renew the team’s fight for a first flag since 2012. The factors that propel a team one season will not necessarily apply the next, but Cox is sure to emulate Longmire in learning and applying the lessons from another painful defeat. In dealing with setbacks, Longmire always leaned heavily on the key influencers in his “ecosystem”.

“The ecosystem includes your team, the board, the CEO, your fans. Your playing group and staff are a living, breathing organism, the whole thing, and it needs to keep moving and shifting. I’ve got certain long-held beliefs close to my heart, but also within that [have] the flexibility to shift and understand that the best cultures are the ones that keep moving and keep adjusting to the ecosystem. Understand the good influencers in your group, the ones that can help you with that.”

John Longmire

4. Don’t be afraid to let the wrong people walk away

When Chelsea won the Champions League in 2021, the club would not have expected to slump to a 12^th-place finish in the Premier League just two years later. Nor would they have predicted the organisation narrowly avoiding oblivion and a subsequent change of ownership. Bryce Cavanagh was hired as Performance Director in the summer of 2023 and, while he has long been considered one of the best in the business, an arduous task awaited him.

He admitted his presence created a sense of risk and vulnerability in some quarters, but he was fair in setting out his stall. Some relished the challenge of staying to help build a fresh performance strategy (a work in progress, he admitted), but others sought roles elsewhere. Cavanagh was willing to let them go.

“First of all, we talked and defined where we were going, what we wanted, the behaviours that we needed, then the performance strategy. We had to really define where we wanted to go and what we wanted the bus to look like because then people ended up self-selecting.”

Bryce Cavanagh

5. Have the difficult conversations quickly

As captain of Harlequins, Stephan Lewies regularly faces difficult conversations. They are of added importance when the chips are down and tempers are frayed. Time and again, as Lewies explained, he has been able to plot a path out of disharmony by being proactive, acting fast and ultimately putting the team first. A leader should also strive to understand multiple points of view without leaping to conclusions.

“That’s the main goal in any tough conversation: you turn a negative into a positive that we can use going forward… When we [avoid] a tough conversation, the problem just becomes bigger and bigger… walking away from that conversation is the easy option, but stepping into that space is so important.”

Stephan Lewies

6. Prioritise your stress and emotional responses

Success and failure both present psychological and emotional challenges. In 2021, the UK Sports Institute introduced its ‘Performance Decompression’ tool to help athletes and support staff transition back to daily life following intense competition periods. The tool consists of four phases: first there’s the post-event ‘hot debrief’ followed by ‘time zero’, which, as the UKSI website explains, focuses on ‘restorative care in a soothing place’; then it’s ‘process the emotion’ and, finally, a ‘performance debrief’.

The tool can be used anywhere. British 1,500m runner Jake Wightman, for example, chose a sofa in a Twickenham café to unpick his underperformance at the Tokyo Olympics. A year later he was world champion and, while there was much more to it, psychologist Sarah Cecil believes the tool helped Wightman to plot his comeback. She and the UKSI’s Head of Performance Psychology, Danielle Adams Norenburg, are also happy to teach their tool to any individual or organisation who may find it useful.

“By the end of this process, Jake had made sense of the experience, he was able to tell his story about where he was, and he was also able to process all the emotions that surrounded his performance and the lead-up to his performance… I don’t need to tell people in the room that lots of factors contribute to performance… but in the same position, with 300m to go, Jake had what he needed to run fast enough to be world champion.”

Sarah Cecil

By John Portch

A personal declaration by three-time Super Bowl winner Patrick Mahomes has been a valuable performance education tool at the Brisbane Lions’ Springfield Central training ground.

The players and staff stand in awe of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterbacks’ postseason exploits, but Google images of a topless Mahomes with a less-than-perfectly-chiselled figure provide conversation-starters on training, performance and nutrition.

“He’s considered the GOAT at the moment and he’s basically got a ‘dad bod’,” said Damien Austin, picking up on the term Mahomes has used to describe his own appearance. As a three-time Super Bowl MVP, Mahomes is clearly doing the right things, and Austin, who is Brisbane’s High Performance Manager, was simply illustrating how highly attuned his athletes are to the demands of their own high performance.

“We educate the players about acute-chronic workload,” he told an audience at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse. “They know about injury management, they know about their programmes and why we do what we do.”

Brisbane are one of the best teams in the AFL; and a premiership, their first since 2003, is a realistic target. It’s a far cry from the mess Austin inherited when he first walked through the door in November 2015. He came from the Sydney Swans with a remit to revamp Brisbane’s high performance setup, but it would prove to be easier said than done. “I came to the harsh reality that we were very different.”

Brisbane rock: not all it’s cracked up to be

In 2016, Chris Fagan was appointed Brisbane’s Senior Coach. He initially focused on the physical, technical, tactical and psychological elements that could give him the biggest bang for his buck.

The team also decided to fake it until they made it; “stealing” ideas from individuals and teams, including Usain Bolt, Eluid Kipchoge and the San Antonio Spurs. Austin said: “These people reminded the players what some teams did and we mirrored [their actions and philosophies] until we could develop our own.”

They even brought a large rock to Springfield Central so that the players could ‘pound the rock’ in the manner talked about at Gregg Popovich’s Spurs, where a rock takes pride of place at the entrance to their practice facility. It brings to life the Spurs’ belief that it is not the final strike that cracks the rock but the hundred blows that came before.

While it makes for a stirring scene in San Antonio, Brisbane’s rock did not hold up its end of the bargain. “Every now and then the players would have a crack at it but the rock wasn’t hard – it kept breaking – we had to get another rock!”

On the field, the team continued to lose most weekends. “We called ourselves ‘the happiest bunch of losers’.” While Fagan’s first two years were characterised by turbulence and continued turnover, the atmosphere gradually improved because the people that stayed (or joined) believed in the direction of travel.

The team had long since resolved that at least no one would outwork them. It was their founding philosophy. Players were pushed out of their comfort zones (Brisbane introduced 3K time trials when 1K or 2K were the league norm) but given all the necessary support to prepare. Additionally, no other team had to train in the oppressive heat of the Brisbane summer (routinely reaching 29˚C/84˚F) but the local climate was reframed as a performance advantage.

The team also began to measure everything they could. “I’ve never been in a programme where strength results or running results from the general running session were put up in team meetings so much,” said Austin.

Little victories were celebrated along the way. “If a rookie player benched 60 kilos for the first time it was a pretty big deal.” The players enjoyed their progress. “It could not be us just harping on and on [otherwise] those early losses could have taken their toll.” Instead, as results turned, it led to a firm bond between the players, many of whom are locals who happily spend their downtime together.

Eight years on from teaming up with Fagan, Austin defines high performance very differently. “In the early days we would say ‘let’s do the basics and get as many gains as we can to attract younger players and hopefully they perform later down the track’. Now we’re looking for the finer edge. How we can improve our weaknesses? If you were to play us, how would you as an opposition coach or stats department play against us? Years ago we would not have looked at that.”

Best foot forward

Under Fagan, Brisbane have become known for their growth mindset and fearless approach. The staff have worked continuously to remove the fear of failure, with sessions that demanded players kick off their weaker foot being a prime example. Such efforts underlined that this was a psychologically safe environment. “Those sessions weren’t pretty, but there was an acceptance that you’re going to fail; but don’t be fearful of it. Learn from it,” said Austin, who also explained that players now routinely run their own training sessions and both give and receive performance feedback. “Leadership is not about being the best. Leadership is about making everyone else better.”

Nevertheless, for all their progress, Brisbane’s major defeats have been frustrating. These include semi-final losses in 2019 and 2021 and preliminary final reverses in 2020 and 2022. They bounced back to make the Grand Final at the MCG in 2023 but their narrow defeat to Collingwood that afternoon still rankles and they are determined to make amends. They have put their belief in a 24/7 approach to high performance to bridge that four-point gap. “You need to live it, endure it, deliver it. You need to do everything off the field, look at how you manage it; be involved and make the best out of it.”

Patrick Mahomes would no doubt approve.

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By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth

“A question to reflect on in your teams is the impact of IQ and EQ,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership consultant was onstage at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse speaking about her book The Leading Edge, in which she proposes a framework for leadership based on notion that when we are able to lead ourselves we are better equipped to steward others through periods of change and development.

An audience of more than 200 Leaders Performance Institute members sat with rapt attention as Ransom joined coaches and leaders from organisations including the Brisbane Lions, San Antonio Spurs and Melbourne Business School, all of whom laid out how they are working to ensure their people can navigate the shifting sands of high performance in years to come.

“Research suggests some of the most in-demand skills by 2030 will be how we work together, connect, and build empathy,” Ransom continued.

Here, in light of those skills, we explore eight ways those who took to the stage are working to future-proof their teams.

1. Winning strategies are co-created, not imposed top-down

The recent renaissance in Australian cricket – the men’s and women’s teams are reigning world champions across four different formats – has not been a happy accident. Andrew McDonald and Shelley Nitschke, the head coaches of the men’s and women’s teams respectively, stressed the need for thorough performance planning, skilful execution and finding the space to pick up lessons along the way.

‘What is high performance? It’s the ability to move quickly and make good decisions.’

Andrew McDonald, Head Coach, Australia men’s cricket team

‘A large focus for us has been trying to create a welcoming and open environment.’

Shelley Nitschke, Head Coach, Australia women’s cricket team

Next steps:

• Bring your athletes onboard by giving them the agency to help shape your performance plan. McDonald sought to do this by shifting the discourse from talk of ‘culture’ to one of ‘environment’ so that players, particularly when on the road, can fashion for themselves safe spaces to share ideas. Whether it’s tactics or using data, Australia’s players are now empowered to make critical in-game decisions.
• Success may not be instant and outcomes may be erratic at first. Use low-consequence preparation matches to trial new tactics and strategies; then re-frame what winning means in those moments.

2. Role-model good leadership

Burnout is a universal problem, with New Zealand and Australia suffering some of the highest rates in the world, according to leadership consultant Holly Ransom. She argues that while stress is inevitable, and can be abated, burnout can be entirely avoided. In her view, the conditions necessary for eradicating burnout stem from empathetic leadership and, when a leader adapts their habits, it gives permission for others to do the same.

‘If we want to see it, we have to be it.’

Holly Ransom on the notion that we can’t sustain leadership, without leading ourselves first.

Next steps:

• Spend time reflecting on whether the habits you’re living by and leading with are still serving you well. Are they supporting you using your energy on the tasks that matter most? Are you getting a return on that energy?
• Ransom suggested three steps for deactivating the nervous system and returning to a state of calm and relaxation:

1) Complete an energy audit – when are our natural highs and lows in a day, and how are we using them?

2) Establish your building blocks – do the little things that help you build momentum.

3) Set your micro-breaks – take time to get mini hits of new energy.

3. Do you promote safe risk taking in the pursuit of innovation?

Kit Wise of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT] and Budi Miller of the Theatre of Others, an innovative performing arts company, were invited onstage to share their approaches to fostering creativity and risk-taking in their environments.

‘Our philosophy is centred around inspiration, aspiration and expectation. Inspiration is liberating, fun, and what gives us desire. Aspiration – the why and our values and purpose. Expectation – have fun and think deeply about what you do so we can hold one another to account.’

Professor Kit Wise, Dean, School of Art, RMIT

‘We talk a lot about play and playfulness in our philosophy. It is a sense of freedom where play and risk exist together. Play and playfulness elevate the speed of curiosity and problem solving.’

Budi Miller, Co-Artistic Director, Theatre of Others

Next steps:

• Risk-taking can be brave. Find ways to build trust and empathy within your team.
• Encourage risk-taking and rule-breaking in the pursuit of innovation. They are fundamental to innovation, not merely in-the-moment flashes.

4. Learning and development is easier when people feel connected and a sense of purpose

The New Zealand All Blacks and San Antonio Spurs are worlds apart in sporting terms but share numerous commonalities when it comes to bringing to life and sustaining a winning culture. Beyond results, both are renowned for creating environments where people and innovation flourish, as the All Blacks’ Mike Anthony and Spurs’ Phil Cullen explained.

‘We want to have teams that you never want to leave. The environment has to be special to keep people there.’

Mike Anthony, High Performance Development Manager, New Zealand Rugby Union

‘When we were planning our new training facility, Coach [Gregg] Popovic had only two requests: take care of the people and take care of the culture.’

Phil Cullen, Senior Director of Basketball Operations and Organizational Development, San Antonio Spurs

Next steps:

New Zealand Rugby have identified five factors that enable their group to flourish:

1) Connection – players take pride in serving their community.

2) Balance – the group looks for learning, stimulation and edge.

3) Fun – a big part of balance.

4) Learning – athletes learn by doing; so what environment will facilitate the best learning?

5) Family – the organisation has worked to bring families in while also helping them to understand the expectations of an athlete in high performance sport.

The Spurs have their three core values:

1) Character, which is based on values.

2) Selflessness, which is culture-focused.

3) ‘Pound the Rock’. A metaphor inspired by 19th Century Danish-American social reformer Jacob Riis. His Stonecutter’s Credo perfectly captures the Spurs’ drive for championships:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

The Stonecutter’s Credo, Jacob Riis

5. Empower athletes in their learning

The Brisbane Lions men’s team, under the stewardship of Senior Coach Chris Fagan, have in recent years returned to prominence for the first time in a generation. Amongst the factors responsible for their rise is their ability to out-learn their opponents, as High Performance Manager Damien Austin explained.

‘Do we do what makes us comfortable or do we do what the athlete needs to do or learn?’

Damien Austin, High Performance Manager, Brisbane Lions

Next steps:

• You have to educate the ‘why’ for athletes and encourage them to take responsibility. Start by gathering their input when shaping your habits and standards. And remember: no one is above the basics, no mater how good they are.
• Consider: what are your athletes taking away from training? Did they retain the requisite knowledge? Are they enjoying your training environment? Do they have any fears or concerns? Find out and iterate. Be sure to check for misunderstanding and guide them in their learning.

6. Dare or challenge your people to change

Models for change are all good and well – change is inevitable, so perhaps they are entirely necessary – but what are some of the so-called ‘soft’ factors that enable a leader to influence change? Professor Jen Overbeck was on hand in Melbourne to dispense some tips for explaining and justifying change to others.

‘We can make people change, or we can persuade them to change. We should choose deliberately, and be clear about what makes them listen to us.’

Jen Overbeck, Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School

Next steps:

• Your capacity to influence – built by your credibility in the eyes of others – must be established well before you need to rely upon it. What gives you credibility and lets you influence others? If you get it right: they will admire, like and trust you. They’ll think they’re in good hands, that you bring success, or access to good things. They’ll think you got to where you are in the right way.
• A leader has to balance their social capital (their membership of ‘the tribe’) and their intellectual capital (their competence). Sometimes you have to simply be part of the tribe. At other times, you can simply demonstrate that you support the values and core identity of the tribe, and that you’re willing to fit in with them instead of challenging or resisting them.

7. No sustained performance without wellbeing

Wellbeing and performance are indivisible, yet there is more we can all be doing to ensure our people can flourish. At the Glasshouse, Emily Downes of High Performance Sport New Zealand and Sonia Boland from the Australian Institute of Sport provided an insight into their work helping people to thrive amidst the challenges presented by high performance sport.

‘A lot of conversations around wellbeing have centred around the duty of care but not touched upon its direct impact on performance. We are now observing a shift and evolution in the system where there is a readiness to have conversations around the benefits of wellbeing.’

Emily Downes, General Manager – Wellbeing & Leadership, High Performance Sport New Zealand

‘We are striving for sustained and repeated performance outcomes. Wellbeing is a performance enabler and opportunity.’

Sonia Boland, National Wellbeing Manager, Australian Institute of Sport

Next steps:

• Language is so important. It is becoming evident that we are all talking about different things when we discuss wellbeing. Find terms that makes sense and have meaning to your people.
• Resource alone is not enough. None of it means anything if those above and below are compounding the problem – it requires integration at an organisational or system level to have a true impact.

8. Better athlete and coach development for women and girls

As women’s sport continues to evolve, the system will need the athletes and the coaches to fill the spaces created. Given the hitherto piecemeal approach to developing women’s sport, and the often misunderstood differences between men and women athletes, this is far from a given. Helene Wilson of High Performance Sport New Zealand and Tarkyn Lockyer of the AFL are two individuals meeting this challenge head on.

‘Athletes aren’t as exposed to women coaching. Could this actually bring a point of difference?’

Helene Wilson, High Performance Sport New Zealand

‘The easy way would be for women and girls’ pathways to mirror the boys and men’s. In terms of resourcing, it is the same. However, feedback collated from the clubs and players shows that girls and women want more education around high performance and knowledge of preparation and recovery. Boys and men prefer more competition and game time. The needs are different so the curriculum needs to match that.’

Tarkyn Lockyer, Australian Football League

Next steps:

• Given the speed of growth in women’s sport, the focus needs to be on creating adaptable and malleable athletes. To do this, focus on the fundamental skills in a high challenge, high support environment.
• For the development of both women coaches and athletes, it’s not just about providing opportunity. We need to wrap support around them as we set them up to be successful.

By John Portch

There is a consensus across sport that teams at their best are defined by a series of recognisable characteristics.

They include the ability to have honest and open conversations, an emphasis on behaviours that build trust, and a belief in the collective before the individual.

As with much of performance, they are often easier said than done but most teams understand their importance and continue to work towards those qualities in their daily work and habits.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute lifts some insights from our vaults that we hope can help you to plot a course with your teams. We are not saying that all the athletes and coaches in the examples cited below have nailed it, but their approaches may help you to stay on track.

‘Great cultures are built on connection’

Adelaide Crows midfielder Rory Sloane served as team captain between 2019 (when he was co-captain alongside Taylor Walker) to 2022 and, with time, learned the skills to handle difficult conversations in a way that put his teammates at ease.

Sloane had fewer concerns about his on-field captaincy than he did his off-field abilities. “Off-field stuff has always been my challenge absolutely – that’s something that I’ve always had to work on massively over the years,” he told an audience at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in 2021. “I wasn’t someone that loved confrontation at all, and that’s where I worked really hard over the years just on my relationships with people to be able to then have those conversations.”

He cited the influence of renowned American leadership specialist Brené Brown. “There was something she said: ‘Sit next to someone when you’re having those conversations rather than across’; because I reckon I used to always come across very aggressively, so sitting next to someone was something that really helped me just have those conversations.”

Sloane’s development as a leader was aided by Dan Jackson, who was appointed the Crows’ Leadership Development Manager in 2020. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about connection, and it’s a theme I keep seeing across elite sport, and also across corporate organisations – great cultures are built on connection,” said Jackson.

Another with a keen sense of the importance of connection was three-time World Series winner and 10-time MLB All-Star David Ortiz.

During this 20-year career in the US, the Dominican helped to transform the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox. During that time, he came across innumerable prospects in Spring Training, each hoping to play alongside a man who would enter the MLB Hall of Fame in 2022 in his first year of eligibility.

One such hopeful was Leaders Performance Advisor Bobby Scales, who joined the Red Sox’s Spring Training at Fort Meyers in Florida in 2007. Having been handed the number 76 (“an awful number”) Scales knew he needed to do everything in his power to impress Manager Terry Francona and the Red Sox’s decision-makers.

“I would arrive at 5:30am for the workouts that typically didn’t get started until 9am because you never know what might happen. Lift, eat, sort equipment, adjust to any changes, whatever needed to be done,” wrote Scales in 2002. “I remember the third or fourth day of camp at about 5:50am. I had just changed into shorts and a t-shirt and, out of the weight room having finished his workout, comes ‘Big Papi’.

“‘Hey, what you doing here? It’s too early,’ he said in a deep voice with a heavy Dominican accent.

“‘Papi’, I said, while pointing to the #76, ‘man, unless you’re early they forget about you!’ Part of me was kidding, part of me was dead serious. His answer was something that I’ll never forget.

“‘Nah, you get invited to this camp, you have a chance to help us win a World Series and we gonna do that. Get your bat… let’s go hit!’

“He didn’t know me from the next guy but I was in that clubhouse and I had the same uniform on. At this point of his career he had been a three time All-Star, a World Series champion and a World Series Most Valuable Player. At 6am he was changing his shirt post-gym workout and heading to the batting cage.

“With his actions he was saying ‘we win things around here, this is how we work and you’re part of it’. This was his routine and he was going to do this whether I was in the building or not. I happened to be there so this was his opportunity to show me the culture in the building without saying a word. Leaders such as ‘Big Papi’ act with intention because they have a vision of where they see themselves and their club and a clear plan of how they can get there.”

‘Without connection, it falls short’

James Thomas, who currently serves as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, told the Leaders Performance Institute how he worked to engender trust in the coaches with whom he has worked as a performance director.

“Unless you spend the time to build the connection with somebody I’ve often found it falls a little bit short,” said Thomas in 2022 while still serving as Performance Director at British Gymnastics.

“I’ve always taken the time to stand next to a coach during training, watch, ask questions, be inquisitive, and give them a sense that I’m interested rather than coming in and make a big change. It might not need a big change, but unless you talk to people and find out, you’ll never really know. It’s probably quite simple, but I just stand, watch and ask questions and try to be humble. I’ve come in, I’m not going to fix everything for anybody, but I’ll happily try and help. But I need to know about what you feel, what you think the issues are, and what you think doesn’t need fixing. What you think is great and really sacred to the sport, what needs to be maintained for the next few years.”

Sometimes, it is not even the head coach who is the prime source of the information needed – a point to which Leaders Performance Advisor Meg Popovic, who previously worked with the Toronto Maple Leafs, makes with reference to equipment staff.

“They’re always connected to the pulse of the players,” she wrote in 2022. “These staff team members know the make, model, year, brand, variability, and functionality of every piece of equipment a player uses or wish to try out. They understand the engineering, while finding delight in the new trends in the market that have the potential to improve performance and evolve the sport. They are applied-historians of the industry and the trusted mechanics whom players rely on to tune up, repair, and remodel themselves as living, breathing, sporting machines.”

They are vital and often put themselves out in long and arduous shifts and, Popovic recommends that coaches demonstrate their appreciation on a regular basis.

“This group wants to be (and should be) acknowledged personally for their long hours and often difficult, unseen efforts,” she continued. “A thank you, a coffee, or helping hand could quickly relieve resentment and amplify the energy flowing in this very important staff group.  Also, as they are of the giving-type, asking equipment staff how they’re doing could go a long way as their innate way of relationship is to be in the service of everyone else’s needs, requests, and demands.”

Such traits can have a profound impact, although they take some work. “Anyone involved in elite sport knows that you can’t get to the elite level without systems,” said Jackson. “I mean building in routines that become habits and then those habits just become natural.”

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By Luke Whitworth

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

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

Here are the key takeaways from the second day.

(Day 1 takeaways here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Temporary

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

2. Enduring

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

3. Motivated

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

4. Unmotivated

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

Bringing the Framework to Life

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

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

Speaker: Tova Angsuwat, Recruiting Lead, Google

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

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

Keys to defining culture:

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

Tips for recruiting and retaining top talent

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

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

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

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

Takeaways from the development of strategy: belonging

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

Vision & core values:

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

HP 2032 and belonging levers:

• Connection to country.
• Inclusive design.
• Win well.

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

Speaker: Eddie Jones, Head Coach, Rugby Australia

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

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the first day here.

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood FC

Moderator: Roger Kneebone, Director of Surgical Education, Imperial College London

The third session of the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium saw Roger pick Craig’s brain around his approach to coaching, how he works with his athletes, and the importance of coach wellbeing.

• Sport is often about survival, and you move from survival mode to living mode, then back to survival mode towards the end of your career.
• We often learn winning behaviours through losing. There is a formula to losing just as there is a formula to winning.
• When you experience something, you then build a level of comfort. So the more you can experience an environment the more you are comfortable in the pressure. Life is about experiences and putting yourself in positions to learn and grow.
• “I don’t actually like the term ‘mastery’ as it alludes to being full and I feel far from full. I’m always learning and wanting to grow,” explained McRae. “I never want to put a ceiling onto what I want to achieve, I learn things from different opportunities, and life takes you in different directions.”
• Craig explained the importance of planting seeds for future careers whilst he was still competing. When it came time to retire, it was then obvious where his passions lay and because of this preparation, it was obvious to him that it was in coaching.
• How do you go from being a master in playing to transitioning to being more of a novice in coaching?

“Having a mentor is key. I would video every session, so I could watch it back and reflect, and constantly look to get better. As coaches we review the game a lot but we very rarely review ourselves and the processes behind the programme.”

• Handling pressure is about the ability to be just present and be at ease with the moment. The inexperienced vs the experienced player is all about managing the moment. Execute and repeat the behaviour so that when you are under pressure, you don’t actually have to think about it, muscle memory takes over and you are able to execute.
• Our ability to stay in the moment and execute the next moment is critical. It’s like a windscreen wiper, you will make mistakes in games and then you have to be present to execute the next moment, wash away the mistakes and fix it for the next one.
• “We have a winners’ mentality – on a Monday morning you won’t know whether we have won or lost, we repeat the same processes over and over and stick to these, not changing things because we have won or lost. If you repeat those behaviours long enough they will be there when you need them.”
• “I don’t like players lying down at the end of the game, you have to do the same processes and go again. We lost but we’re not losers, we get up shake their hands, and get ready for the next game.”
• There are two kinds of pressure to consider: the impact of a mistake, and the impact that the mistake can have on you.
• You can be a winner even if you lose. You can learn from the experience and improve. It is perilously easy to lose that sense of who you are, and having a mentor and the support you need is crucially important.
• McRae highlighted that it’s so important to play in a grateful state. It’s so important to keep that fun element of play and gratitude towards performing.

By Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

Is a Lack of Diversity Holding your Team Back? Here Are Some Steps you Can Take to Create a True Sense of Belonging

How the Brooklyn Nets Put their People at the Heart of their Culture

Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness

Framing the Topic

In this Member Case Study format of our Virtual Roundtables, Dan Jackson, the Head of Leadership and Culture Development at the AFL’s Adelaide Football Club, spoke about the relationship between environmental profiling and evolving team culture. Dan is a former professional AFL player and he explained how his own experiences of the high performance environment as a player has influenced his work to evolve team culture with the Crows.

Dan framed the session by breaking it down into three parts:

1. Assessing culture
2. Changing culture
3. Cultural trends

Assessing culture

What is ‘culture’?

“Culture is both a dynamic phenomenon that surrounds us at all times, being constantly enacted and created by our interactions with others and shaped by leadership behaviour, and a set of structures, routines, rules and norms that guide and constrain behaviour.” (E. Schein, 2004)

Jackson’s definition: “Culture is a reflection of how a consistent group of people behave in a particular environment over time.”

In assessing the culture of a group, there are three cultural pillars:

• Artifacts: the phenomena that one sees, hears, and feels. For example, trophies, medals, kit. Anything you can capture with a photo.
• Exposed beliefs and values: strategies and goals, i.e. Mission. Philosophies and values, i.e. vision. Sometimes these can just go up on a wall and simply be words – how can you bring these to life? It is about people’s behaviour, and something you could see on video.
• Underlying assumptions: unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts and feelings. These are mental models and are the ways that people think.

Changing culture

Unfreeze

• Acknowledge the status of the existing culture by presenting the ‘disconfirming data’ needed to change people’s minds and attitudes.
• Changing leadership doesn’t lend itself to sustainable success, it can simply paper over the cracks in the foundations. It is crucial to first look in the mirror to rebuild a culture.

Cognitive restructure

• Rules and standards of behaviour. This requires rewards and punishments to drive results.
• Vision and values. What are we trying to achieve and what do we stand for.
• Clarity on who we are and what is expected and not expected.

Evolve

• This is continuous.
• People and environments are constantly changing and therefore we need to continuously evolve the team culture, whilst staying in touch with the team’s origin story.

Cultural trends

• Connection and belonging
• Psychological safety
• Strengths over deficits
• What else?

Members’ thoughts on current trends:

• Surveys that are meant to attract employee responses where employees are too scared to be honest.
• Increased awareness of diversity and how this can enhance cultural development
• Radical honesty.
• That culture is a ‘thing’ we work on.
• Leaders aren’t necessarily the most experienced.
• Embracing your role in living and creating the culture
• Breaking psychological safety into the four stages proposed by Timothy Clark so that people understand the difference between creating the level of psychological safety to feel part of the team and the level required to challenge the cultural norms.
• Player empowerment – how much value does this have compared to a coach-led environment?

By John Portch

When Rory Sloane spoke at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021, he delivered a curious insight into the make-up of the Adelaide Football Club’s player leadership group.

The club, which draws its five-player leadership group from a list of 45 decided to give youth a chance in 2020.

“Couple of guys who have been part of the leadership group over the previous four years stepped aside to let some of these young kids develop,” said Sloane.

Adelaide finished bottom of the AFL ladder in 2020 – a fact that left Sloane, as captain, “stung” – and decided to turn to youth to renew their fortunes. In this context, it made sense to empower some of the younger players on the list.

“We’ve still got a lot of leaders without titles,” he continued, “But yeah, five official leaders.”

Sloane is joined onstage by Jarrad Butler, the captain of Connacht Rugby, where their eight-strong leadership group takes responsibility for driving standards and behaviours. Together, they explore the creation of leadership groups at Adelaide and Connacht and the main dynamics involved.

Democracy

Leadership groups tend to be elected by athletes from amongst their peers and neither Adelaide nor Connacht are any different. “At the start of the year there was a questionnaire on who do you think leads by example on the field, who do you think is the best communicator, the guy that holds the most people to account,” said Butler of the process that saw Connacht’s eight-person group appointed for the 2020-2021 season. “We kind of ticked boxes that we thought [represented] values that we wanted to have as a group, as a team, who do you think best kind of ticks that box. And we tried to put a group together that then covers a whole lot of those bases, so we didn’t want just a whole bunch of guys that are all maybe very good at the same areas, so that was important.”

Regular meetings

“What we’ve been trying to do is catch up at least once a fortnight just to get on the same,” said Butler. “I think where we fell short, especially when the seasons for us dragged on, you kind of get caught just going through the motions a little bit and you forget to catch up. “We’ve have a meeting where we all get together and these guys aren’t really on the same page, and you’re seeing that come out in the performances as well and you’re like, well we haven’t got together in four weeks [so] no wonder we’re not on the same page at the moment. So we found one of the first challenges I guess was being diligent and actually catching up with each other, and again it’s one of those things where Andy Friend, our head coach, he was like ‘well it’s up to guys if you want to get together, we’re not going to chuck something in your diaries for you – either you do it or you don’t,’ and we learnt early that if you’re not going to do, then everything else starts slipping by the wayside as well.”

Learning dynamics

Butler explained that leadership groups also have a vital role in ensuring learning and development of understanding because there are times when a coach’s impact can be limited. “It’s one of those things where you’re in a meeting and you’re getting – you know, the defence coach comes up, the head coach, and they’re showing clips and clips and clips – it’s easy for things to get watered down,” said Butler, who discussed the balance of challenge and support with Sloane in more depth here. “For the main session, we [often] get one of the players, usually one of the leaders, early on they would do the review of the session, and they would come up with the clips. This year, it’s been a little harder to have these meetings with Covid, but still, coming up with clips and sending them out because we’ve found that when you’re getting told by your peers, when they’re highlighting something I think it holds more weight than when you’re getting it from a coach for whatever reason.”

Spread the load

Butler also makes the point that their duties extend beyond performance or rugby and it is important that the playing group does not allow a mere handful of individuals manage tasks for the group. “I think the main thing is that we all took on something that wasn’t rugby-related,” he said, “so it wasn’t falling on the same guys. So one guy would link up with the team manager on if there was any issue around travel or things like that, someone else would link up with the kitman, if there were any issues; and it would just mean that we haven’t had the same conversations with a whole bunch of people unnecessarily. So it helped kind of disperse that load as well, so it wasn’t falling on the same blokes. Because imagine, you know, there’s all those guys that are happy to do everything if you ask them to, but it’s not fair to them as well. So it’s all about lightening the load.”

By John Portch

Jarrad Butler, the flanker who captains United Championship Side Connacht Rugby in western Ireland, recalls the time when, as a young professional, his senior teammates left him “rattled”.

He was on the cusp of his 21^st birthday, in 2012, when he joined the Queensland Reds on a short-term contract to help cover for a recent spate of injuries.

Leadership was not on his mind at the time. “When I was at the Reds, early doors, it was kind of hard to say because when you’re just fresh out of school and you’re just kind of getting in there you don’t really see what’s going on behind-the-scenes as much,” Butler told an audience at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021. “You don’t really see the conversations that are being had, you just kind of see what’s happening on the field, and I’m just wondering around trying to do my job, do it really well.”

The Reds had won the Super Rugby title the previous season and the training sessions were an eye-opener for the young Butler. “I remember some guys that were maybe my age now getting into me about something that I might’ve done on the training field and just how much that rattled me a little bit as well,” he continued.

“It’s one of those things where I reflect on it and [tell myself]: ‘actually, I think I did the right thing there, but what could I have done better?’ and then maybe have a conversation after the training session and kind of tease out what happened and get a positive from it.

Butler tries to bring this dynamic to his interactions as Connacht captain, a role he has held since 2018. “It’s one of those things where you don’t really notice at the time until you’re reflecting on it,” he added.

The scenario is familiar to session moderator Dan Jackson, the Leadership Development Manager at the AFL’s Adelaide Football Club. Of Adelaide, he said: “We talk about this model of care and candour, if you criticise people all the time and you’re just ruthless, then, yeah, you’re driving standards but people eventually are just going to turn a shoulder on you because they know that there’s no love there, but [after] showing that care and making sure there’s a standard of love, then you can be as candid as you need, because then it’s a gift rather than a slap.”

Two years later, in 2014, Butler joined the Canberra-based Brumbies, where he briefly played alongside the team’s captain, Ben Mowen. Butler described Mowen as a mentor, someone who was able to drive standards, while also being able to put the proverbial arm around a player’s shoulder.

“He just kind of nailed it somewhere in the middle,” said Butler. “I think that first and foremost, is he was just a really good guy, as he was someone that would come down to Canberra and he would help you move into your place and he would want to have a coffee with you, and, you know, that’s crazy when you’re 21 years old, you’re the new guy there and you have this guy wanting to genuinely meet you and be a friend.

“But then when he got onto the field, he was an animal and he was ruthless on the field, performed at a consistently high level. So being able to find that balance there I think was the most interesting for me, and seeing that there’s not just one way to skin a cat.”

Relationships enable difficult conversations

Joining Butler and Jackson is Adelaide captain and midfielder Rory Sloane. At the time, Sloane was in his third season as captain (including one as joint-captain alongside Taylor Walker) as the Crows embarked on a rebuilding project to restore the club to AFL prominence.

Sloane had fewer concerns about his on-field captaincy than he did his off-field abilities. “Off-field stuff has always been my challenge absolutely – that’s something that I’ve always had to work on massively over the years,” he said. “I wasn’t someone that loved confrontation at all, and that’s where I worked really hard over the years just on my relationships with people to be able to then have those conversations.”

He cites the influence of renowned American leadership specialist Brené Brown. “There was something she said: ‘Sit next to someone when you’re having those conversations rather than across’; because I reckon I used to always come across very aggressively, so sitting next to someone was something that really helped me just have those conversations.”

It is an attitude that Jackson promotes around the Crows’ enviroment. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about connection, and it’s a theme I keep seeing across elite sport, and also across corporate organisations – great cultures are built on connection,” he said.

Sloane readily admitted that results were not good enough at the time, and the Crows remain a work in progress (Sloane himself suffered an ACL injury in April), but he explained to the virtual audience that it was important to get things back on track through building those team bonds.

“We finished on the bottom of the ladder last year [2020], for the first time at the club and, in my first year as captain that stung massively,” he said. “And we got some feedback from guys in our football club, in our leadership, where we [felt we had] lost our way, our identity as a football club, where everyone used to know that we trained hard and we had this ruthless edge as a footy club.”

The players convened, in their own free time during the off-season – Covid restrictions at the time prevented interstate and overseas travel – and trained three or four times per week. It consisted of activities such as practice games, Pilates, and boxing sessions. “We look for opportunities to be together,” he continued. “It’s everything that comes into that connection whether it be [socialising] or something as simple as [listening to] music.”

Jackson sheepishly commended Sloane for his work on himself as a leader, for accepting that he did not automatically know how to manage difficult conversations with teammates. “You’re humble in this space, Rory, and I know you keep accounts of when you’ve chatted to your teammates – and you’re not running an Excel spreadsheet – but you’re checking in with guys you haven’t checked in with in a while, just calling or sending a text and making sure they know that you care so that you can have those hard conversations.”

Butler is of a similar mindset and drew parallels between his time at the Brumbies and his current tenure at Connacht, where he arrived in 2017. Both are clubs based in relatively remote parts of the country, with smaller populations, and founded by their respective federations as ‘development’ teams – a home for players who were not as highly sought after by other teams but who retained significant potential. Yet the Brumbies are Australia’s most successful team in Super Rugby and Connacht were a particularly tough proposition for most opponents long before their 2015-16 PRO12 title.

He said: “You’re usually a bit further away from your family, you get better connection with each other just off the bat because you’re all there for the same reason – you’re there because you’re trying to prove people wrong. Maybe you have a little chip on your shoulder; and I’ve found that being on the other side of that, when you actually know somebody you get a better connection with them. It makes it easier to have those hard conversations.”

Player power

Both Butler and Sloane speak of leadership groups drawn from their playing groups. In Connacht’s case, it consisted of eight players; in Adelaide’s, five. Beyond their responsibilities for driving standards and behaviours, theirs is a vital role in ensuring learning and development of understanding because there are times when a coach’s impact can be limited.

“It’s one of those things where you’re in a meeting and you’re getting – you know, the defence coach comes up, the head coach, and they’re showing clips and clips and clips – it’s easy for things to get watered down,” said Butler.

“For the main session, we [often] get one of the players, usually one of the leaders, early on they would do the review of the session, and they would come up with the clips. This year, it’s been a little harder to have these meetings with Covid, but still, coming up with clips and sending them out because we’ve found that when you’re getting told by your peers, when they’re highlighting something I think it holds more weight than when you’re getting it from a coach for whatever reason.”

The impact of your peers can be multifaceted, as Sloane illustrated when discussing the culture that was developing under Adelaide’s Senior Coach Matthew Nicks, who took the team’s reins in 2020. “His whole philosophy around football is: how can you help someone else there?” said Sloane. “And that’s not just around football, that’s around life as well, and I think that’s the biggest shift in mentality I’ve seen in our players.”

Jackson encouraged the team to celebrate those moments of selflessness, which quickly became part of the Adelaide routine. “It’s literally nothing special,” said Sloane. “We’ve had a couple of sessions this year and, at the end of the year, we might recognise a few guys for what they’ve done to prioritise someone else. It literally just became something that’s picked up by other players now, and we’ve noticed it, and I think it’s something that’s starting to become infectious.

“I’ve spoken to DJ [Jackson] about this, [and the important thing] is actually to just reward someone for something that you’ve seen and making sure you’re still instilling those habits, because, yeah, if it goes unnoticed then at times it may not become engrained, so that’s something that I think goes down incredibly well.”

He asked Jackson to elaborate and the Adelaide Leadership Development Manager provided an apt summary.

“Anyone involved in elite sport knows that you can’t get to the elite level without systems,” he said. “I mean building in routines that become habits and then those habits just become natural, and that’s something that you guys are leading impeccably as a team.”