The question is on the mind of Jeremy Bettle, the Performance Director at New York City FC, who won the MLS Cup in December last year, when the Leaders Performance Institute and Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards of Elite Performance Partners [EPP] sat down with him to discuss the steps performance directors can take to become better leaders.
Joining Bettle in conversation are Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics. The trio work in three different sports and geographies, with systems and structures that vary in their approach, but each brings a sense of vulnerability, self-awareness, and an understanding of the importance of the culture and context they are working within. Their leadership capabilities bind together a great strategy and strong culture, which is essential if teams and organisations are to retain their shape when pressure is applied. Of the expectations and pressure now thrust upon NYCFC, Bettle says: “It’s certainly going to be something new for our club this year.”
Bettle, Burgess and Thomas all have a deep desire to keep learning, which has driven them to the top of their fields and each played a part in a series of ‘firsts’ in 2021. NYCFC’s MLS Cup triumph was the club’s first, while Burgess was serving as Performance Manager of the Melbourne Demons when they won their first AFL Grand Final in 57 years. Also, under Thomas’ stewardship, Great Britain won their first Olympic medal in the women’s gymnastics team event for 93 years.
Thomas tackles the question of pressure from the athletes’ perspective. “It’s been the biggest risk or success factor of the last four years,” he says. “When we look at our gymnasts, they’re phenomenal athletes. They have the ability to execute phenomenal technical skills and they can do it day-in and day-out in the training environment. Where I see the athletes either struggle or excel is that ability to step into a competition environment and deliver it there. With every sport, you’ve got great examples of people who can do it either in a one-off or can do it repeatedly, or they can do it in training and they can’t do it in competition.
“We’ve actually put a lot of time and resource into different pressure environments whether it’s changing training set-ups, whether it’s manipulating timings just to put athletes under more pressure, less warm-up, less time between apparatus, we’ve brought in surprise friends and family to come on the balcony and watch and cheer. We try to exhaust almost all of our coaches and psychologists’ views of manipulating the training environment.” Nevertheless, as Thomas admits, “you can never quite replicate the actual competition environment.”
Burgess, who last year won the AFL Grand Final with Melbourne and previously worked in the English Premier League with Liverpool and Arsenal, finds the same applies to professional team sports. “It’s very hard to simulate pressure, especially with games happening every three or four days in the Premier League, particularly when you’re also competing in European competitions.”
His mind goes back to the two-week period in September before Melbourne took on the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Grand Final. The consensus amongst the fans and media was that Melbourne had the better team but were undermined by the fact that their route through the playoffs meant that they had played one game in 28 days.
“We decided to take the high risk of playing a match simulation,” says Burgess. “It probably cost us a couple of players who were on the fringe of being selected, but in the end, that was how we decided to simulate that pressure as much as we could. We had umpires in, full mouth guards, so it was part of our thought process to try and simulate that as much as we could. We even built up a bit of a rivalry between the ‘possibles’ and ‘probables’ and tried to manufacture that so that the ‘possibles’ put up a good fight.”
Bettle approves of such approaches. “I’m a big believer in exposing people to pressure versus shielding them from it,” he says. “I think there can be a balance there but you’ve got to get used to pressure and have strategies to deal with it. I’m a big believer in process and having done it before; and trying to make these environments a lot more automatic.”
He recalls his time working at the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets between 2011 and 2015 when there were few opportunities to generate pressure because the games came thick and fast. He was struck by the veteran players. “They show very little emotion win, lose or draw. I think because it’s so automatic to them, it really helps them to perform on a nightly basis.” By contrast, however, New York City practised penalties as they progressed through the MLS Playoffs. “Having the guys line up on halfway and having them walk out on their own; and because they’ve gone through it over and over and over again, when we actually get into the scenario, which we did twice in the playoffs, it just felt more normal to us. The guys executed it excellently when it came to it and maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t, but it made me feel better about it anyway!”
The approach is far from universal in soccer, as Slemen points out. Penalties are one of the few closed skills in football that can be practised but the prevailing culture has often been reluctant.
Bettle and New York City Head Coach Ronny Deila also tried to factor an element of fun into the team’s progression through the season and post-season. Though he has often been sceptical of organised fun in a team context, he explains that Deila’s decision to organise team dinners reaped dividends.
“I think the coach did a great job this year of recognising that our team didn’t do well when they didn’t have an opportunity to relax,” says Bettle. “So we started doing team dinners when we go on the road, on match day minus two. They’d have a glass of wine, and we’d have just a really fun night out that felt authentic and not forced. Giving the players an opportunity to enjoy it and not be so disciplined was a bit of a departure from my mindset, but I’ve come to recognise it’s been one of the most valuable things that we did last year, to put a focus on joy and fun and enjoying the experience. I think building that environment, recognising who your players are and how they’re going to respond versus having some really rigid thoughts around ‘this isn’t high performance, we can’t drink wine two days before a game’ it actually helped us.”
Much like in soccer or basketball, Thomas explains that in gymnastics the success of any rituals largely depends on the skill of the coach. He says: “Where I probably see the magic happen it’s been where coaches have managed to really understand the team and the group of athletes they’ve got, where they’re positioned.
“For the men’s gymnastics team, it was very clear in the build-up to Tokyo, they were probably fourth or fifth in the world, and it was very cleverly done by our coach to position them as the underdogs that were going to create the big upset rather than ‘we can’t achieve that’ or ‘we’re world No 1’. It was ‘let’s go on the hunt’. They really put this mindset into the gymnasts that this final 12-week prep was really just about closing the gap. You could see every day that the gymnasts came in with the bit between their teeth about closing the gap. It wasn’t necessarily about winning the medal, it was about ‘how do we get as close as we possibly can?’
“There was a sense of realism, a sense of togetherness towards something and it really pulled them together. It did feel like a team and the feedback that we had from some of the gymnasts who had been to multiple games, said it was the best team environment because they had a really clear purpose and it was really cleverly orchestrated by the coach. That’s where I’ve seen it work its best, through the coach, with a little bit of a framework of what they’re working towards and that purpose.”
Thomas has witnessed scenarios where the use of rituals does not work and puts it down to authenticity, which chimes with Burgess’ views on the matter. “It’s a really risky practice if there’s not authenticity about the ritual, the practice or the theme,” he says. “If there’s not complete buy-in, then you really are in trouble. Let’s say, for example, that your ritual, your belief is ‘selflessness’ and you want everybody to act selflessly throughout everything, the minute that your star No 10 player decides to miss a training session or turn up late or act selfishly in some way, are you going to drop that player? You have to stick to it and then it becomes part of your team’s identity and everybody respects that. Yes, it can work, but it has to work in the right environment and I’ve seen both.”
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The Performance Director of MLS champions New York City FC is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute and Elite Performance Partners [EPP] about his own experience as both a practitioner and a leader.
“In my first leadership roles,” Bettle continues, “I really thought having the best strategy or having the best ideas, that was what was going to make me a great leader, that people would just hear my idea and say ‘this is brilliant! Let’s do it!’ And you very quickly realise that it’s all about the people that you’re going to be leading.”
Bettle speaks from his experience leading performance divisions at teams including the Anaheim Ducks and Toronto Maple Leafs. “Yes, you have to have a strategy but the other side of it is that you need to have empathy for what people are going through, their sense of threat from your new system, and the humility you must have to go into a new environment and take it all in. There’s a huge component of leadership you almost don’t realise until you’re in the job already. Hopefully you ride that storm out where you last and get to take that next step.”
The Leaders Performance Institute and EPP’s Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards are also joined by Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics.
Although the trio offer three different perspectives from three different sports, systems and countries, they hit on the numerous performance principles that EPP, a performance consultancy and search firm, discuss with their clients on a daily basis. One such principle being the need to ensure people are developing a range of ‘human skills’ over and above their technical competence in order to prepare for leadership. Here are some of the other key considerations they identify for performance directors going into new roles.
Cultivating high performance habits
The environment is uppermost in the minds of all three, playing to EPP’s belief that culture and strategy hold equal weight in an organisation – like two strands of a DNA helix, with strong leadership binding the two together and enabling the team to retain its core structure when pressure is inevitably applied. “You don’t have to get it perfectly to succeed at all because talent will probably beat that, but where talent is equal, the environment becomes really important,” says Burgess, who has led high performance teams in the English Premier League at Liverpool and Arsenal, as well as in his native Australia, where he helped Melbourne to win the AFL Grand Final last year.
The dynamics are not quite the same in Olympic sport but the need for a clear performance vision is paramount, as Thomas explains. “I’ve always described culture as turning expectation and beliefs into behaviours, and then behaviours into daily performance habits,” says Thomas, who has previously worked with British Judo, Welsh Boxing and Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby. “The people I’ve seen be successful have had consistently high performance habits in an environment that allows people to express those habits daily, to allow them to be reinforced and celebrated in training and competition.”
It takes time to reach that point, as Bettle points out. “People need to be open-minded and have humility, both me coming into an environment and the people there,” he says. “In a positive environment, there’s a lot of work done to prepare for your entry, but that isn’t always the case and staff can have no clue as to what’s expected and why we’re making a change. You have to spend a significant amount of time on the front end just letting the staff know exactly what the new org chart looks like.” Even when you get there, leaders need to remind their teams of the culture they are trying to build on a daily basis, EPP’s Dave Slemen adds.
Stop, look and listen
That said, it is important not to rush. “I think the most important thing that I’ve done is taking some time to not do anything,” says Bettle. “Really just observing the current culture, the current systems; really taking it all in before you actually start plugging your system into it.” He admits it is an error he has made in the past. “You go in too quick and you’ve got a system that you want to drop on this new culture and you miss things that are being done really well. You lose sight of the fact that this is a big change management project, and so people can’t change as fast as you would like them to if you just go in on day one and start to change systems and processes and reporting lines.
“For 60 days, you should observe and plug in little pieces where you can, and then once you’ve done that evaluation, you can plug in your system to really complement the things that are being done really well; and you can give them small pieces to change over time, and look at it as more of a long-term project than ‘at day one you’ve got to come in and produce results’.”
Burgess concurs: “People need to feel safe and they need to feel appreciated, and they need to feel that just because there’s change that doesn’t mean there will be wholesale change, and that’s a tough balance because, in a lot of clubs, in a lot of situations, you’re brought in for a reason, and they know that and you know that and the players know that, so there is a delicate balance there you have to find.”
The performance director role must begin to engender trust. “Unless you spend the time to build the connection with somebody I’ve often found it falls a little bit short,” says Thomas, who understands the importance of giving his staff a sense of psychological safety. “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.” Burgess points out you also need to speak up when it’s required, which fits with the definition of psychological safety held by EPP. “It’s not just about creating an environment in which everyone can speak up and be heard, it’s about creating one where you have an obligation to if you think something is wrong,” adds Slemen.
Thomas’ inclusive approach proved useful as British Gymnastics devised its plan for the 2024 Paris Olympics. “By the time we’d launched our plan, which was just before Tokyo, everybody had seen it and heard the words, heard the language, and heard the ideas of change, so it felt quite normal,” he says. “It felt like people took and breath and just said ‘onto the next four years’. There’s a few changes and I’m sure people will have to work through that, but we’d taken on such a journey and evolved the team quite early on. There was actually a big sense of togetherness rather than a secret thing that was cooked up in a boardroom that no one had ever seen and all of a sudden now you were putting it on them.”
The importance of a criteria-based approach
As Bettle says: “You want to be clear about your standards and how people are going to be held accountable and, within that, being as supportive as you can.”
To that end, Burgess has adopted a criteria-based approach. “I tend to give the staff a practical job description and say ‘there’s your practical day to day responsibilities’ and then there’s a real clear expectation and they can be as little as ‘you’re putting out the cones for the warm-up’ to as extensive as ‘you’re responsible for delivering the training analysis to the coach’, he says. “Whether that’s a physio, doctor, psychologist, a performance analyst, they all have their practical job description and therefore they know what they’re going to be held accountable for, and that tends to be a little bit more specific and practical than a human resources-designed job description. That’s helped a lot. It’s helped us to get people aligned in what they’re doing, it’s also created its own issues when people fall short because it’s only mine and it’s not HR’s, but within our staff context it works quite well.” Which is perhaps why he’s such a good fit for EPP, who take a similar criteria-based approach to their hires, taking time upfront to ensure all are aligned on the key priorities for any role and why they are hiring, rather than getting blinded by names of prospective candidates or silverware.
For Thomas, it is a question of impact. “I’ll say, ‘where do you, as an analyst, as a physiotherapist, show impact? Can you talk me through where you impacted on performance?’” he says. “And then we move away from KPIs and job descriptions to actually showing me or telling me a story about where they impacted and connect to the team going after world championships and winning four medals; the nutritionist can tell me a story of the six weeks before and you get a real sense that somebody really can give you a great story of where they’re adding value; or if someone can’t quite describe that to you that’s where I start to think where are they? Where are they working? Where are they impacting? Moving forward, is this an area that we might want to change?”
Find your authentic voice
Authenticity is important and, in Edwards’ view, the most important leadership trait, alongside vulnerability. “It’s just what is right for me and what allows me to be my best, draw from my experiences, inspire others, but in a way that suits me,” says Thomas. “I’m not a stand on top of a desk and beat my chest person, I try to inspire through relationships, caring about people, good strategy, but actually allowing other people to feel empowered to do it. So for me it’s been learning about myself, trust myself, but do it the way it feels right for me.”
For his part, Burgess initially noted down the qualities he liked and disliked in his leaders. “I would just come back and check those quite often,” he says. “The big one for me, in every organisation, was that I barely got feedback and that might be a conversation on the pitch or more formalised feedback and those things are really important because most of the staff are just craving some sort of information on how they’re doing.”
Mentors and blind spots
Thomas found a mentor early in his career. “I wanted someone to challenge me outside of the gymnastics space,” he says. “It was a safe space where someone could really push me, get me asking the right questions, and give me feedback about how I was doing and how I was coming across.”
It’s something that I always quite pleased on, my ability to make tough decisions, and someone held the mirror back at me and said ‘you’re great at making tough decisions, but do you have tough conversations before that?’ That’s something different. Making a tough decision and just doing it, that’s one thing, but actually telling people beforehand or getting their views beforehand and having those tough conversations, that was a little bit of a blind spot for me and maybe I’m shying away from the tough discussion but then going straight to the tough decision. That’s something I’ve learnt, that they go hand in hand, but they’re two very different skills.
The importance of mentors came out as a key theme in Slemen’s dissertation for the Executive MBA he completed last summer. In interviewing ten of the UK’s top performance leaders, he found all had leant on mentors throughout their careers, and most highlighted it as the most pressing factor in their success.
Thomas advocates the same for his team. “It was something probably two years in that I pushed really hard with my senior team; ‘get yourself a mentor, get someone who can support you outside of the work environment’. It’s been a massive success for gymnastics in terms of the growth I’ve seen in my team and them enjoying more leadership responsibility. A lot of that has been in seeking feedback from other members of the team.”
Quarterly 360-feedback is now part of British Gymnastics’ programme and Thomas relies upon it. “They might not even be involved in performance, it might be PR or marketing or finance, but tell me how I’m doing, tell me how I’m coming across, what grates on you that I do that I’m not aware of, that I need to think about, where my blind spots are that I’m just not aware of day to day; and it’s that ability to reflect based on other people’s feedback has been really important.”
Bettle agrees. “I’ve worked with a mentor and coach for some time now and I think that that process of self-reflection has been one of the most important things in my career, certainly transitioning into leadership, just general self-awareness, self-reflection and getting to know yourself better, getting to know what my defaults are and what my blind spots are has been really important coming into environments as we try to increase diversity within an organisation; and you just know that you’ve got blind spots that you’ve got no way of knowing how other people are really thinking unless you’re really seeking it out.” Having seen the importance of such guidance in the careers of many of the leaders they work with, Edwards has undertaken a Master’s in Mentoring & Coaching, allowing EPP to offer this as an additional service to those with whom they work.
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Though it might seem like an obvious question, there is not always a consensus within a team or organisation, and even where there is a consensus, astute organisations will seek to continually iterate definitions that everyone in the building can support.
When the Carolina Panthers appointed Tish Guerin as the NFL’s first Director of Player Wellness in September 2018, their aim was to ensure that wellness was built into their team environment.
“Are we making sure that we’re building a culture that subscribes to making sure we’re all in good mental health?” asked Guerin when she spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte in February 2020.
Guerin, who has since departed her role, was firmly at the intersection of mental wellbeing, resilience and training. Elite sport continues to promote wellbeing, it remains at the heart of the discourse, but there is a sense amongst Leaders Performance Institute members that teams can be doing more to promote wellbeing at an organisational level.
The Australian Football League [AFL] took a step in the right direction in 2019 with the publication of its first Mental Health Framework, which views mental wellbeing as the cornerstone of general wellness.
The Leaders Performance Institute discussed the topic with Kate Hall, the AFL’s Head of Mental Health, in 2020, when she spoke of the work being done behind the scenes for their women’s league [ALFW].
“We put together a best practice guide for our player development managers,” said Hall. “They’re a designated development role and they’re not for the development of craft or any on-field aspect. It’s all about the growth of the individual athlete.”
The guide has not just been lifted wholesale from the men’s game either. Hall added: “What we didn’t want to do was just repurpose the pillars of player development that are used in the men’s competition because it’s a very different journey as an athlete and the competition’s very different in terms of it being a part-time competition. After extensive research, we worked with the players and the player development managers to develop a best practice guide to outline pillars of how you should lead player development in the women’s competition. Essentially the things you should focus on when you’re growing the whole person, not just an athlete on the field.”
This encompasses the earlier stages of the talent pathway too. “Our designated wellbeing coordinators are working with our under-18s, who are hoping to be drafted this year. They articulate a curriculum for our young players that illustrates the mechanisms, tools and strategies they can use to build their mental fitness. That’s quite explicit, we measure at baseline on these types of qualities and we measure them at the end of their talent year as well.
“Our concept of mental fitness is get in early. The sooner you get in and empower young athletes to really grow in this space, then their demanding this of their coaching staff and leaders within their club.”
‘Getting in early’ characterises the approach of Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. “Building a robust, systematic, and preventative approach to employee wellness requires that leaders address policies, practices, and perspectives in their organizational culture,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in August.
“Perspective begins with organizational values and addressing if, and how, employee wellbeing is prioritized in the culture. This requires that leaders and staff be intentional and progressive with their language surrounding mental health.”
Brandon added that leaders play a pivotal role in showing that self-care is not selfish. On that note, Gareth Southgate, the Head Coach of the England men’s football team, has set that example to his players.
“What I recognise about myself is that if I feel in a good place, that my own wellbeing is in a good place in terms of sleep, exercise, then in actual fact I feel stronger to take those things on and less affected by it,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in June. “If I’m not sleeping well and I’ve been travelling a lot, if I’m rundown, I’m not physically in as good a place, I find that can affect my mood a little bit more and then I’ve got to be careful with my decision making.
“I’m very aware of my own personal state and [I am] able to control that and react to that a little bit more and put things into perspective better as I get older.”
The hope is that it will rub off on England’s players and support staff. At the Diamondbacks, Brandon advocates a similar approach. He said: “In reality, supporting wellbeing and resilience for your employees is really a competitive advantage, especially with the ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity found in work environments, which often lead to stress. Leaders should aim to install comprehensive prevention strategies within their organizations rather than rely on reactive support as issues arise.”
Both Brandon and Southgate spoke of the notion that wellbeing goes beyond the mental and it was a point picked up by Tom Patrick of the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] during a Case Study Members Virtual Roundtable in August.
Patrick, the RAAF’s Performance Optimisation & Wellbeing Lead, stressed the need to educate each squadron with the understanding that there is more to wellbeing than mental health. To assist in that continuous process, the RAAF is training what Patrick called ‘wellbeing advocates’ to support its proactive approach.
He said: “We are identifying people in the unit and squadron that have that real trust relationship with everyone, who might be the first person to reach out and check-in. We’re focused on developing others to get better in this space, before having to think about more medical-based models around wellbeing.”
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