By John Portch

As Tom Kelley once asked, if you blew up all the systems at your organisation, what would you keep and what would you change?

Kelley, a partner at global design firm IDEO, was an inspiration for Lachlan Penfold when he was appointed Head of Performance at the Melbourne Storm in 2017. The team were reigning NRL premiers and keen to build on that success.

“That was a challenge that I put forward to all of our football staff, coaches, performance staff, football ops,” Penfold told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2024. “If we blew this up, what would we keep and what would we change?”

It was a necessary question because, as he explained, “sometimes when you have a lot of success, you don’t want to change things because you think that there’s only one way to do it.” Instead, he is a firm believer that there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, which is central to Kelley’s argument. “That was a really refreshing approach of how to go about it.”

Penfold’s approach both encouraged collaboration across the Storm’s performance team and harnessed the expertise in the room as the group sought to provide the best possible performance support to their players.

Below, we return to a selection of our most insightful conversations with performance directors to discuss their approach to balancing the need for integration with excellence and pose the reader five questions.

1. Are your team’s efforts coordinated or are you just busy?

Daily meetings are a must, even for those who admit they’re “not a big meetings guy” such as Michael Italiano, the Head of Athletic Performance at the Rajasthan Royals.

For all that, he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins, as he told the Leaders Performance Institute last year.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

At daily 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.” That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything.

From the IPL to the NBA, where Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, uses structured check-ins to establish communication loops on athlete priorities.

“We want to try and distil it from one to three points in each of those areas. We then meet as a larger group, all of health and performance, so we can go through each player,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2025. “What the other clinicians are doing is really important in my view. Whatever issues I’ve seen here it is very rare, almost never, that things get missed.”

2. How do you preserve expertise in an interdisciplinary system?

Shared goals do not mean a dilution of the expertise within a performance team, they merely indicate that specialists are contributors to the holistic performance picture.

As Rice said of the Sixers, “we can have the best strength coaches, the best nutritionist – and that’s really important – we have excellent clinicians, but the context is really what underpins it. It doesn’t really matter how good that rehabilitation plan is if we don’t understand the context”. Once that context is understood, “that allows us to put the pieces around them to support the athlete.”

“I need to think like a football coach,” said Penfold of his work at the Storm. “In my role as a head of performance, often there’s a physical element to what we do but I also need to think like a football coach; how is this going to make them a better football player versus just a fitter, faster, stronger football player?”

It is a shared performance team goal. “Are they prepared to put developing a better football player first and having a growth mindset around that versus just staying in their little bubble and just working on their area?” Penfold continued. “So there’s a lot of parts that that go into making up a successful team or a great team outside of just the wins and losses.”

3. How do you approach trade-offs?

The pursuit of trade-offs is all about balancing competing tensions in performance.

Jack Nayler, for one, is convinced that control has its limits. ‘The more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term,’ the Head of Sport Science at Everton wrote in an article for the Leaders Performance Institute. He added: ‘we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future; all decisions are essentially gambles.’

Penfold is of a similar mindset. “If you’ve got 35 players, they’re 35 different players with different responses,” he said. “There’s always a lot of different decisions you’ve got to make and hopefully you get more right than wrong.”

You certainly don’t want to duplicate the work. “If we have three people doing five lots, all of a sudden we’ve got 15 sets instead of five,” said Rice, before outlining his true concern. “It’s very rarely missing things – it’s everyone trying to do the right thing.”

4. Do you and your team have a shared mental model of performance?

Simplification is key to Rice’s approach at the Sixers; and he admitted that the team’s small roster size (15 players) helps.

“It allows us to distil the focus areas which become the priorities in each area for each player; and then we have that in a spreadsheet,” he said. “The flow on from there is reasonably straightforward to see what programmes need to be implemented for this player and who’s going to drive them.”

This is easier with a shared mental model, which is also something Nayler explored. ‘The first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation,’ he wrote.

5. Does your culture enable or inhibit collaboration?

Collaborative structures are critical, but “have you created an environment that encourages people to want to get better, that allows them to thrive?”

The question was posed by Penfold, who described how his department adapted its approach ahead of the 2024 NRL season. “One of the things I believe we did well this year, was to create an environment of joy in which people want to immerse themselves in getting better.”

When there is that level of commitment in a psychologically safe environment, “it becomes the ‘mastery’ environment” that all performance directors crave.

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

By John Portch

‘Peace-time plans are of no particular value but peace-time planning is indispensable.’

Former US President Dwight D Eisenhower wrote that line in a letter to a US diplomat in 1950 and repeated the sentiment throughout his eight years in the White House.

The line was quoted by Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, at a presentation to Leaders Performance Institute members in 2025.

“The idea behind this quote is that high-performance teams don’t necessarily have a static plan,” said Mannix.

“The plan is constantly evolving as new information comes to light, whether that’s in relation to the tournament that we’re playing in, the players that we’re working with, and a variety of other contexts that are relevant to the world of international soccer.”

With a considered plan, a leader can align their people and allocate their resources effectively. With a structured review process, improvements can be sustained.

That is the message at the heart of a forthcoming case study virtual roundtable hosted by Mannix’s US Soccer colleague, Teena Murray, who will speak in her capacity as the organisation’s Director of Performance and from her experience of leading performance programmes at the NBA and NHL.

Here, we foreground Murray’s presentation with a selection of five best practice insights in the realms of planning and reviewing delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

1. The VMOST framework

‘The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less,’ wrote James Thomas. ‘They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.’

Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club, wrote these words in February.

He argued that while planning is often perceived as control, he believes it to be the opposite:

When the direction is clear, planning is decentralised. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

Thomas then introduced business strategist Rakesh Sondhi’s VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics) framework, which ‘provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there’: 

‘The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity,’ Thomas continued. ‘In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation.’

Finally, ‘when applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame’.

2. Find the right time for athlete education

Paul Ford, the outgoing Head of Performance at the British Olympic Association, explained in a recent article that an Olympic Games environment ‘is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities’. He wrote:

Athletes are compacted into a brand-new village of more than 16,000 people who are all subject to a constrained competition schedule in what amounts to 52 world championships in 17 days, all in the same city.

It’s almost like they are being set up to fail when they’re expected to deliver the best performance of their lives.

The key, he argued, is tapping into the bits of the Olympic experience that build you up and not the elements that can detract from your performance. Athlete education is a critical element of the BOA’s fixed Games plan and comes in the form of discussions. ‘When to land these discussions is the next question,’ wrote Ford, before adding:

[Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics] some sports, such as sailing and canoeing, will know their Olympians as early as September 2027; others, such as track and field, won’t select until May 2028. So the education journey we go on with the sailors and canoeists is long; we can plan out and get that right and drip feed it at the right times. Whereas the track and field athletes don’t want to hear anything about the Games because they’re not necessarily going. We must be smart in making the education bespoke and fit for purpose for each sport. Equally, some will want us to sit down and talk it through while others just want those short videos and podcasts. It’s finding out how the different cohort of athletes’ best digest information.

3. It is critical to learn from failure

In October, Everton’s Head of Sport Science, Jack Nayler, penned his thoughts on what it takes to look at a failure and ensure lessons are learned (primarily in the context of complexity in sports high-performance systems).

He shared his reflections on the late Richard Cook of the University of Chicago, specifically his treatise entitled How Complex Systems Fail.

Nayler wrote:

Around this time, I was challenged by a friend in the industry to put together my thoughts on building a performance department for a sports team. I found it challenging just to make an org chart and list positions without giving the background and rationale for why and how the department existed in that structure as well as its philosophical construct. This exercise of transferring ideas from my head on to paper forced me to critically confront my assumptions and crystallised my thoughts on how I believe we need to operate in the complex environment of elite professional team sports (specifically football as this has been my professional experience).

4. Embed review mechanisms

Mannix and his colleagues at US Soccer continually face the club vs country balance. In his aforementioned presentation, he spoke of the process that takes place when American players report for international duty.

“Building rapport and trust with those clubs is massively important because that helps us drive a lot of the exchange of information,” he said. “We need to know when our equipment and staff are arriving and where our players are coming from.”

Some may be in better shape than others, which underlines the need to review ahead of a session. Mannix said:

When a coach is trying to build out the session plan, the right hand is a good sports scientist or a performance coach, and the left hand is the first assistant, and those three individuals are working very closely to ensure that there’s a good plan in place for every training session. There’s good understanding as to what the availability of the players is going to be, particularly in the first two days of training, because what we’ve found through communication with clubs is we sometimes have to be flexible when players are coming into our environment simply because although Europe observes FIFA windows, we have to work with our partners in MLS on when players are released to come and join our environment.

Mannix and his colleagues understand the range of fixed and dynamic constraints they face. They use that understanding to find ‘optimization indicators’:

5. Pursue collaborative planning where possible

Where can you pool your resources with others for the collective good?

In 2024, the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand formed the Global Alliance, which enables them to share sports science research and best practice when it comes to their female athletes.

The Global Alliance is a case study in what can be achieved in time and resource-limited environments when organisations collaborate in areas with little impact on competition itself (they still want to beat each other).

The Alliance’s main objectives, as explained on a Leaders Community Call in November 2024, include…

• Sharing best practices and resources: By pooling their collective knowledge, Alliance members can develop and implement the most effective health initiatives and signpost others towards the best practice or research already implemented by their colleagues in different regions.
• Benchmarking and baselining efforts: The goal, as Helen Fulcher, the Athlete Performance Support Lead at HPSNZ explained, is to “create a baseline that is higher”. Members of the Alliance will regularly assess and combine their efforts to ensure continuous improvement which, in theory, should result in healthier female athletes and higher levels of competition.
• Addressing misinformation: The group are passionate about making sure that the information available would be representative of the global athlete population, and therefore diverse, whilst being evidence-based. You want to be able to say “‘as of now, this is the best way to treat X’,” said Amber Donaldson, the VP of Sports Medicine at the USPOC. Athletes from different nations will also help spread accurate information about health topics, such as menstrual cycles and nutrition, through their platforms.
• Speeding up progress: As a collective the alliance can move practices along more quickly, be that through raising baseline levels faster, or by being able to increase sample sizes.
• Conducting collaborative research: Richard Burden,  who leads the Female Athlete Performance Programme at the UKSI, said: “If you can combine multicentre research, with those multicentre being in different countries around the globe, then you are naturally going to get a more diverse, rich database and, therefore, the insights that we’re going to be able to get from that are going to be just way more valuable for everybody”.

Additional reporting by Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland and Lottie Wright.

By John Portch

“I’m the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that’s an answer in and of itself,” said Eileen Gu.

The Chinese-American star, who had just won silver medals in the slopestyle and big air at the Milano Cortina Olympics, had been asked at a press conference if she saw those medals as “silvers earned” or “golds lost”.

She chastised the journalist for his “ridiculous perspective” but her wider comments were more telling.

“How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right?” she said.

“I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before. So, I think that is more than good enough, but thank you.”

It called to mind the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was similarly exasperated in a press conference when he was asked about the Bucks’ ‘failure’ upon their elimination from the 2023 NBA Playoffs.

“There’s no failure in sports,” he responded. “There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better.”

Gu, it must be said, won gold in the halfpipe just days later (making it three golds and three silvers in two Olympics) but she and Antetokounmpo (who won the NBA Cup with the Bucks in 2024) hinted at how unhelpful it is to frame high performance as anything less than first place or a gold medal.

Setbacks are inevitable, but as Gu and Antetokounmpo show, athletes, coaches and programmes can choose how they meet the moment. Those that prepare smartly, with the right focus and guidance, can give themselves improved chances of success.

These ideas came up time and again at the Leaders Performance Institute in February. Here is a flavour of what was said.

Insight of the month

The Winter Olympics are on the agenda across the Performance Hub, with high-performance specialist Richard Young telling us what happens when teams stray from their mission:

As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Read more here.

Quote of the month

This month its Peter Hodgkinson, who wrote of his time working as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team during the 37^th America’s Cup.

Given the youth and inexperience of his build team, psychological safety and intent-based leadership were the order of the day. He wrote:

Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news. 

INEOS Britannia in action at the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall

Good to know

Pressure doesn’t make you better, but it does reveal what is already here.

That is according to high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery, who led a virtual roundtable for members looking at how they can reduce their athletes and coaches’ allostatic load – that is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold.

The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).

Crucially, as Vickery explained, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”

Read more here.

Coach wellbeing

Though often neglected, members of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to share ideas on how they can better support their coaches.

In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.

This, their former manager explained, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.

Read more here.

Aussie rules

In early February we welcomed many of you to Brisbane for Leaders Meet: Australia, where organisations including the Brisbane Lions, Cricket Australia and World Rugby tackled the challenges of the day.

Chief amongst those was the ever-pressing need for alignment.

The Lions’ Senior Coach Chris Fagan favoured strong relationships with senior management; Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry espoused the value of psychological safety in cricket; and World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson, as an executive, emphasised trust built on clarity from the top.

We picked out five elements for your consideration.

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

One you might have missed

Ben Ashdown and Dr Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University pondered the behavioural elements of resilience in young players at football academies in this exclusive interview.

Their research has identified six resilience behaviours:

Their hope is to use these six to fashion a tool to help academy staff identify and develop resilience behaviours in their young athletes.

Read more here.

What’s coming up for members

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy

By James Thomas

Strategy does not have a great reputation in high-performance sport.

Often the word elicits a raised eyebrow amidst busy training and competition schedules or it alludes to scarce downtime for coaches and practitioners.

It is also associated with corporate language, long documents and theoretical discussions that feel disconnected from the daily reality of training, selection and competition. In high-pressure environments, planning (reviewing and learning) can be seen as a luxury, something to revisit once results improve or uncertainty settles.

My experience has been the opposite. I’m passionate about helping raise awareness of the importance and performance impact of great strategic planning.

Strategy: a precursor to performance

After more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I have come to believe that performance strategy and planning are not distractions from performance, they are precursors to it. In environments often defined by pressure, volatility and constant change, strategy provides something invaluable: direction, connection and a level of continuity.

High-performance sport is inherently unstable. Calendars shift, athletes get injured, form fluctuates, staff move on, leaders change and external demands arrive without warning. In that context, the absence of a clear performance strategy does not create freedom. It creates noise. Decisions become reactive, alignment erodes, and short-term fixes quietly undermine decision-making rooted in the agreed long-term ambition.

The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less. They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.

Planned Olympic success

One of the clearest demonstrations of the value of performance strategy in my career came during my time as Performance Director at British Gymnastics in the build-up to, and during, the delayed Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.

This period was defined by disruption. The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how athletes trained, competed and lived. Lockdowns restricted facility access. Competition schedules collapsed and re-emerged unpredictably. Athlete preparation was fragmented, and long-term planning was constantly challenged.

At the same time, the organisation was navigating a significant cultural crisis. The Whyte Review had been co-commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England in 2020 following allegations of abuse and mistreatment within gymnastics in Britain. Trust had been damaged, scrutiny was intense and the responsibility to rebuild confidence, both internally and externally, sat alongside the imperative to perform on the world’s biggest stage, the Olympic Games.

In that environment, strategy became an anchor.

It provided stability when circumstances were anything but stable. Performance strategy gave athletes, coaches and staff a clear sense of direction at a time when certainty was scarce. It reminded us of our five principles of high performance, our data informed team strategies for qualifications and finals, and created a shared understanding of what mattered most, even as day-to-day plans shifted repeatedly. This anchor also supported me during really challenging times when key staff behaviours or direction of travel didn’t align to our beliefs and approach. It gave me confidence to hold the line and make the tough decisions that leaders are so often faced with.

Rather than attempting to predict an uncertain future, the strategy focused on the team, the people, the data and practitioner-informed principles that we talked about for over three years. It established how decisions would be made, what trade-offs we were prepared to accept and those ‘what if’ scenarios that can always catch you off guard. One of these being the Head Coach breaking their leg 48 hours before heading to Tokyo. We actually had a plan for this!

This allowed the system to adapt without losing its identity.

That experience was one of the most challenging of my career, but always hugely exciting and rewarding. Three planned, but hard-earned medals secured for Team GB reinforced a core belief: strategy is not about certainty. It is about people, collaboration and coherence.

Different sports, same principles for high performance

The same principle holds true in professional football, albeit at a different scale.

During my time as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, operating within the City Football Group, I saw first-hand how long-term strategic planning can drive sustained performance improvement across an entire ecosystem.

At Manchester City, consistent performance progression was not the product of isolated excellence or short-term cycles. It was anchored in a clear long-term plan that connected the Academy, Women’s and Men’s first teams through shared principles, aligned methodologies and a common performance language.

That plan did not seek to eliminate fluctuation. Ebb and flow were expected. Injuries, form, competition demands, squad evolution and commercial demands were all recognised as natural parts of elite sport. What mattered was that the long-term vision, the direction of travel remained consistent, even as tactics and personnel changed.

Crucially, this strategic clarity extended beyond a single team or season. It flowed across the wider City Football Group model, creating a level of coherence across clubs operating in different countries, cultures and competitive contexts. While local adaptation was encouraged, the underlying performance philosophy remained aligned.

The level of consistent on-pitch success at Manchester City over the last 5-7 years, in many ways, is unparalleled, from Academy player progression and sales to the Men’s first team treble in 2023. Long-term business and performance strategy has a lot to do with this, in my opinion.

Good performance strategy increases speed

Modern high-performance environments are defined by complexity. Multiple competitions, condensed calendars, overlapping priorities and increasingly specialised roles place constant strain on alignment. Planning in these environments is often misunderstood as control. In reality, it is the opposite.

When direction is clear, decisions decentralise. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

The VMOST model

At this point, structures and frameworks matter.

One of the most effective ways I have seen performance strategy articulated in high-performance sport is through clear, simple models that translate long-term ambition into day-to-day action.

One such model is VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics).

VMOST was created by business strategist Rakesh Sondhi and first proposed in 1999 book Total Strategy. The framework provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there.

The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity.

In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation. In my last two roles as a performance director, my VMOST strategy was etched onto a big wall, one which staff members and athletes walked passed regularly. And when curious conversations or even debates took place, we often found ourselves standing around the visual, challenging whether a new idea could really help us achieve a strategy or the mission, or was it something that could derail us and divert energy, with no clear route to helping us win. This is definitely something I am taking into my new role in professional cricket.

When applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame.

A new era in professional cricket

In cricket, this strategic clarity is particularly valuable and I’m living this right now as Performance Director at Warwickshire and the Birmingham Phoenix.

Across a single season, players move between formats that demand entirely different physical, technical and psychological outputs. Red-ball cricket rewards patience, control and endurance. Short-form formats demand clarity, aggression and adaptability. Players are selected for specific skill sets, yet all must contribute to a collective performance.

Without a clear strategic framework, these transitions become chaotic. Workloads conflict, roles blur and development stalls. With strategy, complexity becomes more manageable. Individuals understand their role, how it evolves across formats, and how their contribution supports the team’s wider ambition.

At its best, performance strategy connects people.

High-performance sport is full of specialists. Coaches, analysts, medics, strength staff and operations teams all operate in defined roles, and rightly so. The risk is not a lack of expertise, but fragmentation. Excellent work happening in isolation without a clear line of sight to the bigger picture, is one of the biggest risks leaders can face.

A well-articulated strategy creates connection. It allows people to see how their work links through to the final mission and vision of the organisation. Daily decisions gain meaning. Trade-offs become easier to navigate. Autonomy increases because intent is understood.

When people understand why their work matters, they can make better decisions.

Strategy also provides continuity in environments where turnover is inevitable.

Athletes move on. Coaches change. Support staff rotate. In some organisations, meaningful personnel change happens every season. Culture alone cannot carry performance identity through that level of churn.

Strategy creates continuity of thought.

It anchors philosophy, ambition and non-negotiable principles beyond any individual. It allows new people to arrive and quickly understand how performance is built, what standards matter and what success really means in that environment.

In my experience, the strongest systems are those where people can come and go without the performance identity being lost. That does not happen by accident. It happens because strategy has been made explicit, shared and lived.

This requires leadership discipline.

Performance strategy only creates connection and continuity if leaders reference it consistently, use it to explain decisions and hold themselves accountable to it under pressure. When strategy is visible in how leaders talk, select, invest and prioritise, it stops being a document and becomes a shared language.

That language matters when pressure rises.

Under stress, people revert to what they understand. Strategy provides a common frame of reference. It reduces anxiety, accelerates alignment and allows honest conversations about performance without personalising every decision.

Planning also helps organisations say ‘no’.

In elite sport, opportunity is constant. New competitions, new technologies, new interventions and new ideas arrive relentlessly. Without strategy, everything feels urgent, and every new opportunity feels like one we can’t miss out on. With strategy, priorities are clear. Resources are allocated intentionally. Energy is focused where it matters most.

Importantly, you need to find ways to stay flexible, and not become rigid, bound to a strategy you developed years ago.

The best strategies are not scripts. They are frameworks. They define principles, priorities and trade-offs rather than fixed answers. They allow adaptation without drift.

Good performance strategy answers simple but powerful questions:

1. What are we optimising for right now?
2. What are we willing to trade?
3. What will we not compromise on?

The human impact of planning is often underestimated.

Clear strategy can reduce uncertainty. It gives people confidence in decision-making. Applied well, it creates psychological safety by replacing ambiguity with intent. Athletes and staff perform better when they understand direction, expectations and how success is defined.

This is particularly important in high-performance environments where accountability is high and pressure is constant.

For leaders looking to build effective performance strategy, a few principles matter.

Competitive advantage

Across Olympic and professional sport, one belief has remained constant for me: strategy is a competitive advantage if organisations are willing to treat it as such and invest in the people who are delivering it.

In high-performance sport, change and uncertainty is guaranteed. Strategy does not eliminate it, but it determines whether change becomes a threat or can be used as an advantage.

When planning for performance connects people, aligns ambition, creates continuity and promotes curiosity, performance shifts from reactive winning to sustainable success.

James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

More from James Thomas

Olympic Champions Often Begin Their Journey in Modest Circumstances, But it’s Not About What Those Environments Lack – it’s About What they Have in Abundance

By John Portch

At Leaders Meet: Australia a pair of self-proclaimed “professional idiots” took to the stage.

The Shepmates – Australian identical twin brothers Archie and Miles Shepherd – have become internet stars due to their viral videos depicting their high-energy and comedic reinterpretations of dramatic moments of sports commentary.

“I’m not going to pretend like we probably should be offering you guys advice. You’re the best at what you guys do,” Miles told a room of Leaders Performance Institute members at Rivershed in Brisbane. “But hopefully we can inspire you guys, or you take something from our story.”

Their dedication to their art and their fans has taken them to places they never expected. “We’ve found ourselves in a pretty niche part of the internet,” said Archie.

On top of it all, the brothers’ obvious chemistry, as well as their ability to finish each other’s sentences, hinted at the theme of alignment that ran through both days down on the River Brisbane (and it’s a performance trend we’ve tracked for some time).

They were not alone. Others who took to the stage, including the Brisbane Lions, World Rugby and the Queensland Ambulance Service, spoke of their efforts to ensure everyone within their walls is on the same page.

Based on the insights shared onstage across both days, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights how alignment shows up in the work of high-performing teams in at least five ways.

1. Smart coaches who can manage up

In sporting terms, there has never been a better moment for the city of Brisbane, with the Lions defending their AFL premiership and the Broncos winning the NRL in 2025.

Lions Senior Coach Chris Fagan and Broncos Head Coach Michael Maguire have built winning machines in this corner of Queensland, and both were on hand to tell Leaders Performance Institute members how it was done.

Key to their approach is an ability to manage the executives within their organisations. As Fagan said, “I always said to myself, if I was going to be a head coach, that I would make sure I would manage up to that group of people.”

Over the past nine years, Fagan tried to dine once a week with Lions’ CEO Greg Matthews as well as the team’s senior-coach-turned-executive Leigh Matthews.

“It’s been incredibly invaluable because I’ve got two allies that have always been able to tell my story and tell the story of the team to those who needed to know it.”

Chris Fagan

Maguire has adopted a similar approach to prevent any noise or confusion emanating from above.

“When people above you understand the journey of where you’re going and what you’re trying to do then everyone is held to account because if they don’t agree upon things, get that flushed out… [and] if they don’t understand your goal they can sometimes make it up; and that’s why I say it always starts at the top.”

Michael Maguire

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

2. They seek ‘spine alignment’ too

While coaches can do what they can to ensure information is flowing in all directions, there is a role for both board members and heads of performance on the sports science side too.

Onstage, Peter Horne, the Performance Director at Rugby Australia, made the case for “spine alignment”, of which he said, “if we get true spine alignment of what we’re trying to achieve from a strategy, business and the deliverables [perspective] then we’re more likely to be able to execute.”

Crucially, as he admitted, it is not about agreement on every decision.

“I don’t always agree with the decisions, but ultimately if we all agree on the outcome where we’re heading, then we’re more likely to do that.”

Peter Horne

“For the spine to work, you need everyone operating at the right level,” said Brett Robinson, the Chair of World Rugby, who joined Horne for the session. He included himself in that assessment.

“You have to be trustworthy, empathetic, listen, communicate all the time and be systematic about it.”

Brett Robinson

Peter Horne (right) makes his point onstage with Brett Robinson (centre) and Leaders’ Laura McQueen. Photo: Albert Perez

3. They bring their frontline people onboard

Few individuals are as well placed to discuss the concept of a culture driven by a shared purpose than Dr Stephen Rashford, the Medical Director of the Queensland Ambulance Service.

He is proud of his team’s “no excuses” approach too. “When we do our audits, everyone’s in the room, and there’s no making fun of anyone, there’s no bullying. We have honest, open discussions because we all just want to get better.”

Critically, their culture starts with their paramedics.

“It actually starts as close to the patient as possible. If our ‘players’ don’t want to be involved, then there’s no point progressing because we actually need to get everyone bought-in.”

Dr Stephen Rashford

Dr Stephen Rashford mid presentation. Photo: Albert Perez

4. They have leaders who give their people psychological safety

Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry is one of the greatest female cricketers of all time (then there’s her career as an international football player to consider). Her career has been underpinned by psychological safety. “When there’s a lot of support around that and real alignment on wanting to grow and improve, that makes a big difference,” she said.

“Consistency in leadership and how the vision and what you’re trying to achieve is conveyed [is so important]. People know what they get, they’re not guessing today how you’re going to respond to something.”

Ellyse Perry

“No matter the position you hold, you don’t know everything, so be open-minded to learning,” said Anna Meares, the double Olympic gold medal-winning track cyclist who served as the Chef de Mission for the Australian Olympic Committee at the Paris Games. She spoke onstage alongside Perry and fellow Olympic gold medallist, the BMX cyclist Saya Sakakibara.

As Chef, Meares decided that open displays of vulnerability from early in the cycle would help to bring athletes and their coaches onboard.

“I had to go and learn from them because that information helps me set the environment and culture for when they come in.”

Anna Meares

Psychological safety is just as important in individual sports, as Sakakibara told the audience. The Red Bull athlete won gold in Paris but recounted the story of her awful crash three years earlier in Tokyo and how it encouraged her to start placing her trust in others.

“I started to rebuild my own support network and really started to believe in the systems rather than believing that I have to do everything.”

Saya Sakakibara

Anna Meares (second from left) makes her point to session moderator Fabio Serpiello in the company of Ellyse Perry (second from right) and Saya Sakakibara (first on the right). Photo: Albert Perez

5. They use process as a tool of alignment

In his presentation, Scott McLean, an associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, explained that leaders must be aware of how things are connected in the complex systems of sports performance.

“If you want to intervene somewhere, just be aware it’s likely there’s going to be impacts elsewhere in the system.”

Scott McLean 

Scott McLean from stage right. Photo: Albert Perez

Interventions should be governed by the performance need rather than results, according to James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, who made this case when he spoke onstage.

“I go back to the process; what we’re trying to do as a team, what we’re trying to do in the short term, what we’re trying to do for the longer term, and some of the trade-offs we’re going to face on that journey and realistic expectations  too.”

James Thomas

James Thomas onsite at Leaders Meet: Australia. Photo: Albert Perez

Where we’re going next

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy

By John Portch

The Australian children’s cartoon Bluey has inspired at least one international cricket team to greater heights.

“We used an episode to bring to life our ‘embrace change’ value,” said the team’s performance lead at a recent virtual roundtable.

It made sense. For one thing, the eponymous character, an Australian cattle dog (known colloquially as a Blue Heeler) puppy, is cute; secondly, the show’s themes of self-development and selflessness resemble the values often espoused in dressing rooms.

With his fellow Leaders Performance Institute members smiling, the performance lead explained that his playing group had gone as far as creating a ‘Rusty Award’, which is named in honour of Bluey’s friend Rusty, an Australian kelpie, to celebrate teammates.

He continued: “At the end of each camp, the players pass the Rusty Award to whoever they think has either embodied our values or has been a real good person around their teammates over that camp or weekend.”

That insight set the scene for a conversation on how members believe their own team cultures are evolving; what is working well and where the opportunities lie.

This is a snapshot of what they shared.

Firstly, there are five things that most teams on the call tend to do well:

1. Articulate their values in a resonant way

Values have to be more than words on a wall.

“Having consistent language has worked well for us,” said the aforementioned performance lead. “We have three values or pillars – ‘embrace challenge’, ‘evolve yourself’ and ‘enjoy the ride’ – and the coaches and support staff have been forthright in using that language within sessions so that the players can always draw back to that.”

A performance support specialist from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of her organisation’s renewed emphasis on transparency.

“We’re trying to communicate to athletes as frequently as we can to drive that connection,” she said. “If they feel like they’re well informed and they’re part of the planning, they can also hear reflected back to them things that they have potentially asked for in our feedback mechanisms.”

“We can’t leave any of this for chance,” added a head of coaching and development from the British system. “How intentional can we be with spending time on it? To start to label things so they aren’t subject to misinterpretation?”

2. Inspire personal accountability

It is a question of the standards you walk past being the standards you’re prepared to accept, whoever you are.

“That starts with leading yourself,” said the performance support specialist. “You’ve got to be able to look after yourself before you can look after your teammates.”

“When are we nudging?” said the head of coaching and development. “When are we realigning and checking and challenging the behaviours that we do not want to see or may not be in line with our desired options?”

3. Make their people feel safe

Whether you encounter resistance from long-tenured staff or you are dealing with rapid turnover, your people must feel that you are listening to them.

“Listen to the system and the system will tell you what it needs,” said the performance support specialist, adding, “I think a large part of where culture can get derailed is where people don’t feel heard and valued.”

In response, a sports scientist spoke of their institute’s desire to engender a collective sense of belonging in the pursuit of innovations.

“It’s allowed people to feel like they can make another level of contribution,” she said. “It opened the door in ways where some of our different support team members and our coaches have been given an opportunity to talk about their ‘why’ and talk about their own attachment to our values.”

From that place of interpersonal safety, teams and team members are ready to tackle the issues of the day, even if they end up down “rabbit holes” as an athlete support officer working in the UK system put it.

The first step is to establish the performance question. “That enables us to have challenging conversations without it feeling personal”. Then you must “make sure your people have the ability to express themselves, bring new ideas, problem-solve and make decisions and add their own flavour.”

3. Try new things in low-risk settings

Comfort in risk-taking cannot be separated from notions of accountability, belonging and safety.

“We have benefited from a strong, overt, and repeatedly iterated attitude from our new director and leadership team to take on and try new things,” said one long-tenured attendee presently adapting to new management at a new practice facility. “There’s a sense that we’re not writing a new story but a new chapter.”

4. Celebrate their people

The Rusty Award is a prime example, but gestures can be just as important.

“A lot of people probably perceive working on your culture as a grand gesture moment,” said one attendee, “whereas the little gestures and the little interactions matter way more because they stack and pound over time”.

On top of these encouraging signs of progress, there are three areas where teams can further strengthen their culture with simple tweaks:

1. Celebrate progress, not perfection

“I like to celebrate our imperfections and reframe expectations to give the team belief in its potential,” said a performance support specialist based in Australia. “We say pressure is a privilege, but expectation can sometimes make culture deteriorate because of the pressure and expectation to perform or to behave in a certain way.”

2. Focus on the small interactions

“Corridor conversations are key,” said the athlete support officer, “and I think we forget the impact that they can have.”

3. Keep challenging your assumptions and biases

One attendee suggested red-teaming, which is the practice of stress-testing ideas. He said: “How do we check our blind spots? How do we identify them? How do we systemise those processes?” Doing so is important because “what don’t know what we don’t know”.

What to read next

The Leader’s Paradox: the Closer you Get to the Centre of a Complex System, the More Difficult it Is to See the Whole

By John Portch

“Why might alignment seem more significant in sport?”

The question is posed by Mo Bobat, the Director of Cricket at the 2025 India Premier League champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru. He also serves as Director of Cricket at London Spirit.

“We don’t know that it is more significant in sport,” he continues, “in fact it’s probably the same in other industries”.

Still, the Leaders Performance Institute knows from our Trend Report that more than a quarter of practitioners believe that alignment (or misalignment) has the single greatest impact on the quality of leadership at their team.

So why might alignment seem more significant in sport?

“In a lot of other industries you may have to wait a quarter before you get that ripple effect of trends and feedback,” says Bobat, who also spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute for the report.

“In sport, there’s actually feedback every week; and it’s pretty open and transparent feedback too. It isn’t the way that someone interprets a board report or a set of accounts, it’s ‘one-nil’, ‘two-nil’, it’s ‘lost by an innings’. “That means there’s a lot of judgement attached to how things are going and, therefore, I think any misalignment is highlighted quite quickly.”

For Bobat, this raises another question: who actually needs to be aligned?

“When you think about alignment, you can almost convince yourself that everyone in the building needs to be aligned,” he says. “Of course, that’s true to a degree, but not every single person in the system has the same proportional impact when it comes to alignment.”

The most important is alignment between your executives, board and key performance decision makers.

“You can add the captain in cricket just because of the role they play,” he continues, “and if you’ve got those four or five people aligned you can almost guarantee that everyone else will be.”

The flipside is true as well. “If that core is misaligned, it doesn’t matter if everyone else is aligned to something.” He repeats his second question: “So who needs to be aligned? I think it’s worthy of debate.”

In sport, the immediacy of the feedback and, therefore, the judgement, has implications for how a performance director seeks alignment within their team.

“You’ve almost got to approach it like a psychologist,” says Bobat, who explains that sport is full of practitioners and coaches exhibiting protective tendencies in the workplace.

These people can protect for different perceived threats. An owner, for example, might be trying to protect the value of the team, a CEO may also have financial concerns. If that were the case, then it stands to reason that the CEO may have a different level of appetite for transfer/trade risk to the head coach, who will perceive threats of their own.

Bobat says: “If you’re protecting for a different threat, you’re going to value different things, and you’re going to have slightly different emphases. That’s misalignment already.”

His solution is easy to say but potentially much harder to deliver, as he freely admits.

“What you need to create – and this is hard in a high-judgement environment – is everybody having exactly the same purpose and intent, with nothing going unsaid.”

If the performance director or head coach perceives differences in key stakeholders then it is incumbent on them to find ways of managing in all directions.

Bobat says the leader has to “bring people back to the same North Star and try not to let the things they’re protecting for drive the behaviour” of other key stakeholders because when highly functional people are unshackled from protecting for things, you tend to see the best results. When they are dysfunctional, it tends to be the opposite.

Is psychological safety the answer?

“Yes, although that’s quite idealistic,” says Bobat. “People talk about ‘psychological safety’ like its dead-easy. Ideally, you want to feel safe enough so that you’re not reacting to those threats, but it’s unrealistic to think that those threats are going to go away. They’re not.”

The true answer, he believes, is “to try and create a culture where you can at least call it out. That’s what you’ve got to aim for.”

Another variable is your stature within an organisation. “Your ability to influence events, as optimistic as anyone is, is a little bit contingent on your own level of authority as well.

“So it’s tricky. It’s not straightforward. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy.”

What to read next

There Is a Fine Line Between Protecting your Team from Excessive Workload and Delivering the Required Work. Here Are Five Considerations for any Leader in a High-Performance Environment

By John Portch

“I tried planning out my days then I realised there was no point,” says Michael Italiano.

The Head of Athletic Performance at the Royal Sports Group is telling the Leaders Performance Institute about his first season working with the Rajasthan Royals in cricket’s most prestigious Twenty20 competition the India Premier League. The year was 2024.

“Every day was different,” he continues. “The IPL is so dynamic, there’s always something going on, whether it’s some sort of virus that’s hit the team or there’s some underlying niggling issue.” Throw in the compressed nature of the league (75 matches between mid-March and the end of May), plus the travel demands in a country the size of India, and minor problems can quickly escalate.

In Italiano’s first season, the Royals reached the play-offs and played 16 matches in just 62 days and travelled more than 10,000 km (6,214 miles) in fulfilling their schedule.

High player and coach turnover is baked into the format too. Ahead of the 2025 season, the Royals released 17 players and bought 14 in the IPL auction. Just six players were retained from 2024. Rahul Dravid was appointed Head Coach in the off-season and, 12 months on, has departed. His successor is yet to be appointed.

As for Italiano, during the course of an IPL campaign itself, he rises at 7am to prepare for the day ahead. He is often the first at the breakfast table and meets with his staff daily at 9:30am. The players tend to wake up at 10:30 or 11am and, during the course of the afternoon, they begin to trickle in for prehab, conditioning and recovery work before training begins at 6pm (to match the rhythm of the league’s evening-based playing schedule).

“It’s a pretty crazy tournament, I won’t lie,” says Italiano with a smile. “You spend the first two weeks back at home just catching up on sleep.”

Which is not to say that Italiano and his colleagues work without structure. Their morning meetings are designed to bring together the disparate elements of the performance team. “We run through any data and we run through all the players just to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

This intense schedule goes someway to explaining why our interview was necessarily postponed until the off-season. As we speak, it is mid-summer in the UK. Italiano has just completed a “review week” in London with his colleagues at the invitation of the Royal Sports Group’s majority owner Manoj Badale.

In a rare quiet moment, he tells the Leaders Performance Institute how he works to ensure everyone in the performance team is on the same page.

‘I felt like I was going back to school’

Italiano arrived in Jaipur having spent six years working as a high-performance coach for McLaren F1. He had no prior experience of cricket when he was appointed the Royal Sports Group’s first Head of Athletic Performance in 2023. “I had to get up to speed on bowling loads and the other physical demands of cricket,” he says. “I felt like I was going back to school.”

Performance systems, at least, can be transferrable. Italiano wanted to replicate the effective interdisciplinary communication he enjoyed at McLaren.

“We had 85 people travel to a race weekend and everyone is just so aligned and everyone knows what the driver’s saying in the press conference, everyone knows what the car upgrades are”.

It would not be the same in Jaipur. “That was something I noticed straight away at the Royal Sports Group: a very clear cultural sensitivity in the Asian culture where people feel they’re not allowed to make a mistake and, if you do, then you don’t say anything.”

Italiano felt an instant lack of trust, from both colleagues and sceptical players. “I felt I had a really low level of compliance on a personal level, which I wasn’t used to.”

Yet from day one he used his inexperience of cricket to build bridges. “I told them: ‘you know what, I don’t have the answers right now and I need you guys to help me because you’ve been in this culture and environment way longer than I have and so I’m sitting here asking you for help’; and that was a big shift in our team because I could see them thinking ‘oh wow, he’s asking for my help’ and it got the ball rolling.”

Honesty and transparency underpinned all of the good work Italiano’s performance team did in that first pre-season.

‘You should make it safe to fail, with the right intention’

Italiano admits he had a lot of ideas of how things could be improved, but also realised he couldn’t change too much in one go.

“I just went for feedback,” he says. “I spoke to all of the players, all of my staff, I spoke to my coaches. I collated themes and then I prioritised them based on impact and execution. So what’s the simplicity of the execution? How relevant is it now and can it be done at a feasible cost?”

He compiled a list of 12 “parameters”, some physical metrics, others more structural in nature, and “brought them across to the leaders for discussion”.

Together, they decided on three or four elements that could be implemented in the first six months and a further four to be implemented over the next 12 to 18 months. “You could almost say we unintentionally came up with a three-year strategy just based on trying to fine-tune how we operate.”

Sometimes the performance team will take risks. Italiano candidly reveals that their new interventions have enjoyed no more than a 50 per cent success rate. “It never turns out the way you think it’s going to turn out no matter how much input you have.” He cites cultural, environmental and performance-based reasons. However, as he says, “once the execution phase goes on, there’s always learnings.”

Under his stewardship the Royals embrace these lessons. “When certain elements didn’t work you’d go back to the drawing board and that happens in business all the time. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of this role and you should make it safe to fail, with the right intention.”

‘You can’t be perky in every meeting’

Italiano admits he’s “not a big meetings guy”, but he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

As for those 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.”

That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything. In fact, ‘stay curious’ is one of a series of daily reminders that Italiano has noted on his personal “cheat sheet”. The others are ‘bring empathy’, ‘listen first’, ‘be self-aware’, ‘be transparent and vulnerable’, ‘bring my authentic self’, ‘check-in first’ and ‘do the one percent’.

All of these are important during the course of an IPL season. “It’s an emotional rollercoaster so, as you can imagine, we’re not all rocking up to every meeting perky. There’s about 75 meetings in 75 days and I can’t expect everyone to always be smiling and greeting me in the best place.”

The potential monotony is a risk that Italiano understands well. “When I feel there’s been a tense week, I may start a meeting by going around the room and asking ‘what pissed you off yesterday?’ and just let them go to town. You’d be surprised what they say.” Italiano will always help them if he can.

“Other times we’ll go the opposite way and I’ll say ‘let’s label something that we’re grateful for today’. We’ll also mix up the environment. One day we’ll meet by the pool, another day we might visit our favourite roasting coffee shop in Jaipur. That perks everyone up because they have amazing pistachio croissants.”

Additionally, Italiano gives each of his staff the opportunity to lead a meeting and set the agenda. “Why should I lead when we’re a team? I did that throughout last season and it kept us going. Those meetings were the best times of the day because we’re all like-minded and we have the same goals together.”

While the team strives for success on the field, Italiano is proud of how his performance team have acquitted themselves. “Rajasthan has a clear goal of being one of the leaders in high-performance in cricket,” he says. He retains the excitement that induced him to leave the world of F1.

What about his hopes when next season rolls around? “I’m most excited about sitting down with my staff and actually knuckling out career development pathways for our team.”

He mentions player data too. “How are we showing them data? Why are we tracking what we’re tracking? We haven’t nailed that flow yet but it’s one of our focuses this year. Also making sure that the players understand and buy into the importance of their data.”

Ultimately, his focus is on making the Royals’ performance programme be as good as it can be.

“I’ve had an interesting time in cricket so far, and if anyone has better answers, then I’m all ears.”

What to read next

Adaptability: ‘Change Is Everywhere and Leaders Must Respond All the Time. It’s No Small Ask’

By Luke Whitworth

David Beckham was one of the first athletes in sport to be described as a ‘cultural architect’.

The label was used by sports psychologist Willi Railo, who worked as a consultant in the early 2000s for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England men’s national team Manager at the time.

“He has grown to become a cultural architect,” said Railo of then England captain Beckham in a BBC documentary titled The England Patient, which was broadcast ahead of the 2002 Fifa World Cup.

“[Beckham] has today a very great influence on the attitudes of the other players and he is thinking along the same lines as Sven-Göran Eriksson. So he’s a very good tool for Sven.”

According to Railo, cultural architects are “people that are able to change the mind-set of other people. They’re able to break barriers, they have visions, they are self-confident and they are able to transfer their own self-confidence to a group of people”.

Present day cultural architects include figures such as the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi, Australia men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins, and Chelsea Women captain Millie Bright. The list is endless when you dig down.

Your cultural architects can be coaches or staff members too. They can be anyone who pays enormous attention to culture. Critically, while they are not always the most senior leader, they do have to have the ear of those leading.

The idea that cultural architects can emanate from anywhere gave real impetus to a recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute explored various interventions and the value of adopting a strengths-based approach to building culture.

Current cultural goals

What established goals do you have in your organisations that relate to your wider organisational culture?

One of the trends we’re noticing when it comes to cultural leadership is a focus on one specific aspect of culture at a time. The participants in the session identified a series of culture-strengthening goals that, if achieved, would deliver a competitive advantage:

• Collaboration across functions
• Continuous improvement
• Innovation and creativity
• Belonging, identity and wellbeing
• Psychological safety
• Use of data to inform decisions

When you align behind a goal, progress can be swift.

The six levers needed to lead a cultural change

In the session, we revisited six key levers for leading cultural change.

1. Make the key principles ‘sticky’

A message needs to be heard at least six times for a person to take it in and, if the principles are ‘sticky’, they naturally become easier to remember. Consider your straplines or strategy: do they meet that level of ‘stickiness’? A good example from the Olympic world is the question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ Another is the All Blacks’ ‘leave the jersey in a better place’.

2. Role models

This is the classic example of ‘words on the wall’ versus living the values. If the leaders and cultural leaders really model those behaviours, it’s what people will experience and lead by. Research in the field of inclusive leadership shows that leaders can influence the people, the athletes, the organisation around them by up to 70 per cent with their behaviours.

3. Culture conversations

A team must constantly review their organisation and culture and reflect on their current status. Ask yourself: where are our gaps? Where are our strengths? How can we improve? You can use a system rating scale from 1-4 to guide some of these insights. These system rating scales create an opportunity for those culture conversations to emerge and they provide an insight into the health of the culture at a specific moment in time.

4. Develop skills and processes to support intent

Take psychological safety: it is important to enable people to speak up. If you provide such opportunities it supports the intent to make positive change.

5. Feedback

Feedback is critical, yet people do not always deliver skilful feedback. Too often it can feel personal, it provokes defensiveness and is ultimately counterproductive. It is better to create a feedback loop and a culture of ‘skilled candour’ (a twist on Kim Scott’s ‘radical candour’) so that people are able to deliver feedback in a skilful manner.

6. Get the right people on the bus

When engaging in culture change, do you have the right people in your environment? It may come to a time when you have to make a decision about who needs to be on the bus – and who doesn’t.

The power of AI (appreciative inquiry)

Appreciative inquiry is a social constructivist-informed model that seeks to engage people in self-determined change. The model, which was devised in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is inherently positive. It focuses on discovering and amplifying the best of what already exists (individually and collectively) within a system or organisation. It stands in contrast to most change models, which tend to identify problems and seek to fix them.

What are some of the benefits of appreciative inquiry?

The model:

• Leverages existing strengths, requiring less change and new learning.
• Creates positive energy, building confidence and pride.
• Taps the experience of those on the frontline and fosters ownership for performance.

How we do it:

• Identify and share examples where you have been at your best and forensically unpick those.
• Identify behaviours that stand out and challenge people to be specific.
• Maintain disciplined focus on positive examples.

Here are some reflective questions you can use within your environments when considering what aspects of your culture you want to develop:

• Think of at least one example of where you have seen this behaviour at its best in your culture. A subsequent coaching question could then be: ‘what stands out from these examples?’ The key is to be specific.
• Think of an individual who exemplifies this behaviour in your culture. Here’s an additional coaching question: what specifically do they do? Summarise key behaviours and standards from your discussion within a ‘we are at our best when we…’ framework.

By John Portch

Did you see January as a time for reflection or a time for pushing on towards your goals?

Ideally, you found time for both and, here, we highlight a selection insights from the first month of 2025 that may help you to consider a problem in a different way or enable you to identify the right people to whom you can turn.

We hope to see some of you in Melbourne later this week for the Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

And, whether or not you can make it to the Glasshouse, here are five thoughts for all leaders to ponder.

1. Redefine or reframe the problem with alternative goals

If you can find new ways to consider your problems, it can open up new ways of thinking.

In this article, John Bull of Management Futures used the example of an elevator. Perhaps your goal is to make the elevator go faster, but what if your aim was to make the wait less annoying?

“Most hotels will put a mirror beside the elevator,” he said. “That seems to kill time when we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror.”

Bull suggested we “think of at least three different ways we could define our goal, to help open up new ways of thinking about the problem”.

He also share the STOP process for creative problem-solving:

2. As a leader you’re not bulletproof – don’t try to be

In November, John Longmire called time on his 14 years as Senior Coach of the Sydney Swans. He has taken a new position as the Swans’ Executive Director of Club Performance but, before doing so, he reflected on his tenure as Senior Coach, which brought two AFL flags and four Grand Final appearances in total.

You can read his thoughts here, but here is a snapshot of his desire to remain “connected and relatable” to his players and staff. As he said onstage at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, “the coach is no longer looked upon as being bulletproof” whatever their standing may be within the game.

His final speech to the players and staff as Senior Coach attested to that belief. He weaved in personal stories and his voice cracked at times. He wiped away tears too.

It called to mind the weekly ‘storytelling’ sessions that Longmire made a key feature of the Swans’ environment. He told the Leaders audience that players and staff share stories or complete a series of tasks for discussion each week. Recent examples included writing ‘a letter to your 16-year-old self’. These sessions are popular with players and staff alike.

“Sometimes it’s a photo of something that mattered to you and quite often there’s tears involved,” he said. “The way I looked upon coaching 25 years ago is completely different now – these 18, 19, 20-year-olds need to be able to relate to you. If you can show that you’re human, you get a lot more back.”

3. Performance improves when you match team density, size, and space to the task at hand

The question of team dynamics sits at the heart of The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar. The trio has spent decades observing the worlds of academia, business, and government as they look to better understand the workings of high-performing teams.

Camilleri and Rockey came to the summit in London to discuss how their research has its applications in the world of sport. Decision-making was one such area:

For decisions made at speed, you’ll count on five people.

Five is the number of intimate relationships a person can have. Rockey said: “These are the relationships that protect us, make us thrive, and ensure that we go through life in a joyful way. They protect us from ill-health and from some of the psychological challenges that we might have from feeling insecure.” They, of course, occur in intimate spaces.

For more complex decisions, you’ll count on 15 people (including your original five).

The ‘pain’ comes when you look to insert new thinking into complex decision making in a group space. “We spend about 60 per cent of our social time with just 15 people,” said Rockey. “With the 15 in the workplace, they would have built long-term relationships and loyalty to you over time – that’s how we work as humans – so breaking up those people to bring in new thinking is painful.”

According to Dunbar, the upper limit on the number of social relationships we can enjoy is 150

Dunbar suggests that people can have no more than 150 social relationships at any one time. “It’s a very stable number across all societies and cultures,” said Rockey.

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

4. Athletes crave individual – and team – development

Young athletes are bolder in stating their desire for belonging and connection than their forebears, but this comes with a paradoxical demand for more personalised training and attention. There are clear implications for the time coaches spend on team dynamics in an era where the power has shifted to the athlete. The topic was discussed on a recent virtual roundtable. “Staff and coaches are more vulnerable,” said one participant, who pondered where the balance needs to sit. “Give the athletes a voice and a choice, give them ownership, have the consultation, but there is a line too.”

Another participant with experience of coaching in European football, highlighted that individual work will mean different things to different people and can be dependent on team selection. They argued that there is room for better management of expectations and, more broadly, a consensus for coaches and athletes alike on what constitutes ‘individual’ training.

5. The best performance tools are co-designed

In February 2024, the England & Wales Cricket Board launched its Insight 360 platform, which adopts a data-driven approach to athlete and performance management.

Ahead of the launch, the ECB gathered input from practitioners and coaches across the English game. “This means Insight 360 is bespoke for women’s cricket,” said Anna Warren, the Head of England Women’s Science & Medicine. Players, she said in this article, are happy with an app that allows them to review their own data in as much detail as they like. “This is good for player buy-in, which is always a challenge in relation to athlete monitoring.”

There is also the power of a co-designed project. UK Sports Institute have found as much with their Project Minerva. Dr Richard Burden, the UKSI’s Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance, said: “Get the practitioners involved, get athletes, get the teams and bring them along with it because if they’re onboard you get easier access to them and you’re going to produce something that’s more translatable, meaningful and applicable to them.”

Warren is on the same page with Insight 360. “You can link loads of different data sources together and start to answer some key performance questions – we’re not looking at everything in isolation.”