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“When you call someone out there are relationship stakes. I might fire you, I might do something at you; there’s going to be something happen versus if I’m calling you in, it can be very direct but I’ve removed the relationship stakes by saying at the beginning of the conversation: ‘I appreciate that you’re here, I see all the hard work.’”
Harris is moderating the latest Keiser Webinar and is joined by Duncan Simpson, the Director of Personal Development at IMG Academy, and Dusty Miller, the Head of People and Culture at British Fencing, as well as a host of Leaders Performance Institute members from across the globe.
The conversation covered a range of topics, including the importance of providing informal learning opportunities, meeting athletes where they are, and the value of applied learning.
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By John Portch
“And the sense of leading or inspiring others to do things they don’t necessarily think they can do.”
Miller is speaking at our latest Keiser Webinar, which was titled ‘Developing the Person and the Practitioner’. He is joined by Duncan Simpson, the Director of Personal Development at IMG Academy and moderator Dehra Harris, who serves as Assistant Director of High Performance Operations at the Toronto Blue Jays.
The trio explored people development on a personal and professional level; what is done well, and what could be done better.
Scaffold your development as you scale
You are perhaps never at a better time to restructure than when you have reached a low ebb. Miller explains that British Fencing currently has just one podium athlete but that he, in his role as Head of People & Culture, is working with the wider team to build elite foundations ahead of the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane. He says: “[We want to] create an environment where people learn from whatever lens they’re viewing the programme through – be it a coach, be it an umpire, be it a parent or stakeholder in the journey – we’re building those world class foundations to grow and scaffolding the learning as we go through without having too much expectation placed on the individual athletes.”
The IMG Academy, which is based in Bradenton, Florida, serves 1,300 student-athletes across eight different sports, and employs over 800 staff. It is more advanced than British Fencing in its efforts to scale and support development but, as Simpson explains, there is a constant process of breaking down the silos that form between subject matter experts. For him, the key lies in its structure where the four facets of student-athlete life – school, campus life, sports and athletic & personal development – are given an almost equal footing. “How organisations are structured actually plays a massive role in the processes and how we see collaboration.”
The power of informal learning opportunities
Structures are important but culture also has a role to play and this informs the thinking around the Toronto Blue Jays’ new training facility, as Harris explains. “If we only meet separately then it doesn’t work,” she says of the staff based at the 65-acre Player Development Complex, which opened in Dunedin, Florida, in February 2021. “Having times where we’re socially together across disciplines helped and not just jumping into meeting structure but having five minutes of shooting the breeze where everybody’s just talking as humans. We recognised that we needed to shift from this relentless productivity of Zoom.”
Performance staff and coaches are also brought together through what Harris calls ‘intentional collisions’, a process that is also popular at Google. She says: “Strength & conditioning sitting down with hitting, we’re going through a bunch of players, we’re looking through an S&C lens and a hitting lens and we’re talking about a specific hitting goal. That’s a place where we’re anchoring a goal but maybe bringing people who aren’t always in the same room together.”
Do with not to the learner
“I need to have a ‘see, feel, hear’ sense of what’s going on so that I can, with the rest of the team, support [the athlete’s] learning in a way commensurate and at a tempo which is good for them,” says Miller. “Hearing, and feeling, and sensing what’s going on with the learner and how we build the learning around them in their context is really important.”
He sums it up with a pithy aphorism: “do with not to the learner.”
At IMG Academy, Simpson tells the virtual audience that learning is divided into three buckets: what the individual prefers to improve in, what they’re required to improve in, and where they are actually improving. He says: “It’s getting an understanding of those three elements. The actual development part is ‘maybe I can have a little impact there’, but it’s also getting them to understand that, ‘yes, you want to develop in this area and that’s fantastic but we can have multiple areas that we’re passionate about but your role may have evolved and changed, or the demands have changed, and you’re required to improve in this area.’”
The open conversation around those three elements, which can be scaled from the individual to the wider team, are the starting point for goal setting each year.
Comfortable being uncomfortable (and curious)
Miller wants people at British Fencing to be comfortable being uncomfortable and, for the audience, draws on his experience serving aboard a nuclear submarine in the Royal Navy. “When people join a submarine they’re walking into a learning environment, which is a high performance learning environment,” he says of an experience he and his shipmates called the ‘fourth dimension’.
“The importance of that is regardless of where you are hierarchically, when you walk into a submarine for the first time you are a learner and the philosophy and the culture inside that submarine is that we need you to be the best version of yourself as soon as possible because you might walk past an incident and you need to know how to deal with it because you’re the first person there. You can’t rely on a subject matter expert to come and bale you out, as it were. That sense of learning, that sense of curiosity, is inculcated in every fabric of every human interaction inside a nuclear submarine.
“Everybody takes responsibility for their individual learning but also their collective learning.”
It is an attitude he has taken into his post-military career with England Rugby, the English Institute of Sport and now British Fencing. “If we can help people to flex their curiosity muscle and encourage people to ask really insightful questions and be curious and want to develop themselves, where we get to is a sense where ‘it’s OK to ask a good question. It’s fine. It’s OK to not have the answer.’ But what we’re encouraging is the ability to be hungry for that learning.”
Making learners feel safe
Harris, who previously worked with medical students, recalls a time when she experienced a safety shift when delivering feedback. “A friend helped me to think about the difference between calling someone out and calling someone in,” she says. “When you call someone out there are relationship stakes. I might fire you, I might do something at you; there’s going to be something happen versus if I’m calling you in, it can be very direct but I’ve removed the relationship stakes by saying at the beginning of the conversation: ‘I appreciate that you’re here, I see all the hard work.’ This is potentially a difficult conversation but there are no stakes. This is us being honest about what is happening. I have to give difficult feedback but I want you to be very clear that we’re working on whatever I say.”
In addressing the question of belonging and psychological safety, Simpson cites American entrepreneur Charlie Munger. “He always talks about how much he underestimates the power of incentives,” he says. “When I sit down with individuals, I may have this picture of how great it is to work here, and we’re all pushing in the same direction, but I also need to understand the individual’s incentives. Why do they come to work, what are they here to do, what are they motivated by?”
Time is another factor, says Miller, who stresses the importance of trust and rapport. “Also with the learner, it’s giving them attainable goals in the short-term so that they feel success for themselves. Harris concurs, adding: “Succeeding is cooler than only failing.”
Tracking growth and development
The panel agree that evaluating learning can be difficult and Miller uses the Kirkpatrick Model, which is widely used for evaluating training and learning programmes, to explain why he feels he has fallen short at times.
“Organisations that plan big learning and development programmes often stop at the reactionary phase, the foundation phase i.e. ‘how did it feel? What was the learning like?’” he says. “The next level to that is how you are transferring that knowledge into your context. Then Kirkpatrick will suggest, actually, it’s a bit deeper than that because it’s how are you applying it? This takes time. Where we want to get to is how has it behaviourally made a difference to the organisation?
“When I think about learning programmes now, I think about how I’m going to evaluate it in the first six to eight weeks after the experience; what does the transfer of knowledge into the context look like? I plan that, six weeks out to three months. Three months out is how they’re applying it in their context and then, finally, in a year’s time, if we review and reflect on that learning experience for those individuals, what does that look like and how does it change the human behaviours inside the organisation?”
