By Sarah Evans

• Building an effective team takes time

• Adaptability is a key trait in new recruits

• Staff development is an evolutionary process

Evaluate where you are and what you need to implement

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

Don’t just hire the best people

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

Making staff feel invested is key to their development

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

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

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

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

Within that discussion we also touch upon:

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

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

Hope Powell, the First-Team Manager at Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion, has been coaching for almost 25 years.

What makes her a better coach now than she was when she was first appointed England Women’s Head Coach in 1998 – the first full-time appointment to the position – or, say, when she led England to the final of the 2009 European Championships?

“I don’t know that I’m better,” is her candid response. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I think I’m different, I don’t always get it right.” There are times when she admits that she can be intolerant in her interactions with players. “I’m having to adapt myself,” she continues. “I am still learning the art of management and I think it’s important that you keep learning because the game evolves, people evolve, their experiences are different.”

When Powell took the England reins, women’s football in the country was still largely amateur. The players she led to consecutive World Cup quarter-finals in 2007 and 2011 all held other jobs. Now, thanks in no small part to the work Powell did during her 15 years at the Football Association [FA], she is in charge of a fully professional Brighton. She joined the club in 2017.

Here, Powell, who also serves as mentor working with the FA, Premier League, Uefa, and Fifa, reflects on her qualities as a leader and discusses the leadership traits she admires most.

Hope, what do you regard as your biggest strength as a manager?

I think being honest and supportive with staff. I’m sure if you were to ask any member of my staff if they feel supported I think they’d say ‘yes’. I’m fair, honest and supportive. I see being honest as a strength; ‘this is what I think, and I’m saying it how it is’.

What strength do you admire most in others?

Honesty. Being authentic.

What do you mean by ‘authentic’?

I know it has nothing to do with the delivery, but my experience has been interesting. A lot of coaches are copy-cat coaches. They’ll watch you deliver a session and write everything you do down and then just go out and copy what you’ve done without perhaps understanding, without putting some context to it. I’ll ask them ‘if it doesn’t work how are you going to change it? How are you going to be creative?’ I’ve had a lot of that in my career. ‘Hope, have you got any sessions that you can give me?’ No, I can’t give you anything. That’s not coaching. Put yourself out there, design your sessions, have a go, if it doesn’t work, tweak it and do something else. I think authenticity is a big one for me. The coaches of the future, in any sport, will need to be creative, authentic, and be students of their sport; understanding the nuances of their game.

What is the key to strong teamwork?

Strong teamwork is all believing in the vision. All on the same page. I think if everyone buys into that and the team buys into that, it brings that togetherness and that togetherness means that you want to work for your team, your teammates. It’s having that. ‘This is where we want to be, do we all believe in it? Yes we do. Let’s all work in one direction and if we all believe in it collectively then we’re more likely to support each other and work harder for each other and do anything for each other.’ That for me is what teamwork is. Everyone believes in what you’re trying to achieve and everyone wants it because everyone is prepared to work together.

You’re Brighton’s First-Team Manager but you’re not the keeper of the club’s vision.

No, the owner [Tony Bloom] sets the vision for both teams: the men top ten, the women top four; and our job is to try and deliver that with the resources he puts at our disposal. It’s a collective. He set the vision but we’ve all gone ‘great, let’s go for it. Why not?’ And I go: ‘top four? Why not top one?’ That’s good because it gives you some direction. Is it just about staying in the league? The first year I was there, of course it was, because we were new to the WSL. The owner is a fan of the club and as soon as he decided he wanted to make progress in the women’s game he said ‘this is where I want this club to go’ and we said ‘great’ and, for me, it was telling him ‘this is what I think it will take’. We have ownership of that and he’s been very supportive.

Do you enjoy regular conversations with the Brighton board?

We have a men’s board and a women’s board, which is great. I have to present to the board annually. We have a Technical Director [David Weir] who has that direct link with the board. It’s kind of a one-club concept, one-club vision for the men and the women, so you feel heavily involved. And my job as the First-Team Manager is to ensure the team delivers that on and off the pitch, which is a great responsibility and a huge one. It’s what I’m used to. It’s what I like doing.

How will you look to get stronger in your role?

It’s a challenge to bring in the right players and the right staff at a club like ours; and there is always some turnover at the end of the season. But the right players and the right staff make your job so much easier. We’re in a recruitment phase at the moment and we just want to get better and perform better. That’s the idea.

In partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our third Leaders Meet of 2022 was around the dynamics of performance pathways and how to effectively manage the transitions of the athletes throughout. We also highlight the need to ensure psychological safety, particularly the notion of learner safety within your teams and staff throughout the pathway.

Session 1: Performance Pathways Part 1: Creating Effective Transitions

Speakers:

John Alder, Head of Player Development, Welsh Rugby Union

Helen Reesby, Head of National Performance Pathway, Lawn Tennis Association

Transition experiences:

• When have you managed transitions well? When the transition is anticipated, you can prepare and make plans. When you can engage in mentoring, learn from others, and have great support. You have time to understand what you need based on your values, and understand what is right for you.
• When have you not managed a transition well? Dealing with something with that it out of your control, such as a career-ending injury.
• Biggest lesson learnt was the importance of speaking about it. We need to be able to sit, and address the issue. This might not be what you want to do, but it is essential. From an external point of view it might seem as though you have transitioned well, due to looking to what’s next and making plans. However, it is essential to not presume anything. It’s very easy to assume someone is OK based on their exterior, but you won’t truly know until you ask.
• Importance to reflect on both positive and negative and not to stray away from either, as we can take huge value out of both.
• Recognise the ending of one chapter and embracing the start of something new. And the importance of understanding our identity and how that impacts our transitions.
• The role of your support system in helping you cope with transitions. Very important to have key people to support you in processing the emotions around the transitions in order to help manage the phase effectively.

Effective transitions:

• What is a transition? Moving from junior to senior, injuries, changing position, location change, essentially an experience which stretches and requires change. The process of exiting something and entering something new or different and making this, hopefully, as seamless as possible.
• Who is going through the transition, what resources do they have, how does it fit into their learning and where are they heading? What skills are required going into it?
• Having the readiness and ability to meet the demands of the next stage.
• Two elements to a transition: performance-ready. What are the demands of that next stage, do you have the tools to be able to step up? Person-ready: have you got the personal skills, are you ready for the lifestyle change? Are you personally ready? You often see one or the other.
• We prepare them well for the anticipated change especially making them performance-ready. But often what we don’t spend enough time on is preparing them for the unanticipated transitions which inevitably will happen, and these are often the person-ready skills.
• ‘Prepare the child for the path and not the path for the child’.
• Have the athletes got the resources to deal with the new challenges or changing environment?
• Smooth transitions or not? Recognising which transitions might be used as good bumps in the road to aid in their development.
• Team sports: experience transitions together but it might feel different for each person. The importance of understanding how things impact individuals differently and the challenge of the coach to recognise what is best for each player and how they are experiencing that change (identity, curriculum, direction of travel).
• In individual sport, how do you scale? Helen believes in a person-first approach with tennis being a highly individualised sport. There is a scale of transitions – they range from large transitions to small fry. The individualised approach is so important in terms of presuming and assuming.
• Gender-specific in tennis – understanding differences in genders. Still person-first as you can’t just group the genders but what are the general differences to be aware of?
• Parent involvement – in tennis they have to be heavily involved (time and resource). It’s easy to get frustrated by this, but they have a major influence on the transition and the support of the athletes, if you can engage with them and take them on the journey with you, they can be incredibly valuable.
• Social cultural context and how that mediates transitions – what are the dynamics at play in the environment that can impact a transition? In many squad-based teams and sports, you can have 50 people including staff and athletes.
• The importance of role clarity on the field and off the field.

Session 2: Performance Pathways Part 2: The Different Stages of Psychological Safety

Speaker:

Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Psychological safety:

• “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” – Dr Amy C. Edmondson.

Why it matters:

• You want people to be able to think clearly, to make connections, share insights, bring ideas and learn.
• As a leader you want to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction.
• Google Project Aristotle: the number one determinant of team success was psychological safety.
• Wellbeing.

Social pain & the brain:

• Whilst social pain and physical pain can have similar characteristics, they are not the same experience.
• They share some of the same underlying neural substrates.
• The common experiential element is the affective component of pain – the distressing experience associated with these threats motivates individuals to terminate, or escape the negative stimulus.

Four stages of psychological safety:

• Inclusion safety: I feel valued and a sense of belonging. Safe to be myself. This is a pre-condition for the other three.
• Learner safety: I feel safe to ask questions, seek guidance ask for help, admit mistakes, and be vulnerable.
• Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas, and trusted to act on my initiative.
• Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge the status quo.

Inclusion safety – key concepts:

• What it should take to be included – two things:
• Be Human
• Be Harmless
• And yet…
• Sometimes we extend partial or conditional inclusion safety. Sometimes we revoke or withhold it.
• ‘We like to tell ourselves soothing stories to justify our sense of superiority’.

Learner safety – key concepts:

• The moral imperative to grant learner safety is to act first by encouraging and inviting the learner to learn.
• Failure isn’t the exception, it’s the expectation and the way forward.
• The most important signal in granting or withholding learner safety is the leader’s emotional response to dissent and bad news. How are your reacting, because the learner is watching us?
• The prejudiced mind is wilfully blind. Do you genuinely believe they can?
• When the environment punishes rather than teaches, whether through neglect, manipulation of coercion people become defensive, less able to self-diagnose, self-coach and self-correct. That opens people up to the risk of real failure – the failure to keep trying.

Contributor safety – key concepts:

• A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological safety before performance.
• Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team.
• Inviting people to think beyond one’s role expresses greater respect and grants greater permission to contribute.
• It’s the leader’s role to recognise the difference between dissenting and derailing behaviour and manage the boundary between the two.

Challenger safety – key concepts:

• Challenger safety democratises innovation.
• The more unknowns the leader eliminates through transparency the fewer the sources of stress for the individual.
• Nothing shuts curiosity and exploration down faster than a small dose of ridicule administered at just the right time.
• Deprive your team of challenger safety and you dedicate the team to the status quo.
• Assigning permission for dissent from the outset takes away the natural fear associated with challenging status quo.

Six ways we can increase psychological safety:

• Build trust and belonging.
• Put it on the table – discuss it.
• Model openness and honesty.
• Make it easy to speak up.
• Praise it.
• Constructively challenge fixed positions.

Model openness & honesty

• We forget how scary we are. Our power silences people.
• We don’t question our list of whose opinion counts.
• We send ‘shut up’ versus ‘speak up’ signals.
• Watch your language.

Make it easy to speak up

• Ask open questions to seek input, but make them specific e.g. What do people think we should be paying more attention to?
• Red teaming / Brains trust meetings.
• Use small groups or 1:1 conversations.

Session 3: Performance Pathways Part 3: An Insight into the FA’s Approach

Speaker:

Phil Church, Senior Coach Development Lead, The Football Association

• Individualisation: we’ve certainly moved into a landscape where individualisation is key in relation to developing coaches and players. We have what we call a talent map, where we can look at who might have potential. We have boots on the ground, they’re ‘in the trenches’, provide unconditional support and they are not just there when they’re winning. This provides a good idea of the landscape and therefore how we can influence it.
• Create a personalised and connected experience: we know the power to individualised approaches, but to elevate this to the next level, how are you connecting this to the experience players or coaches face? Individual relationships are a key component of this (who, self, how, what).
• The FA’s approach to development: the general rule of thumb for the organisation’s development approach is 70:20:10. As people involved in developing talented coaches or players, you’d expect to see our work somewhere in and around the 20 or 10 section. This is why context and experiences outside of this around important to consider.
• If we are only with them for 10-20% of their time, how can you influence and add value for them in that short space of time? You get trust in consistency and competence. How are you adding value to a player or a coach? ‘Bring a gift’ to add value to them.
• Environmental context: spend time getting a better understanding of the context of the team around the individual. An individualised approach is powerful for development, but the external environment for the individual has potential for large influence.

Attendee takeaways:

• Inclusion requires understanding of team values – learning, challenging, contributing.
• Best practice for psychological safety – new people coming in to be clear of expectations and culture, and to talk about intent around psychological safety within the induction.
• The need to formalise your transition process.
• Think about the best way to train or support psychological safety.
• The need to share the four stages of psychological safety and the six descriptions with the team.
• To have the agreed ways of working threaded through a club or organisation strategy.
• Have best practice embedded into everyday work and life.
• Reflecting on effective transitions.
• It is important to understand where failure fits into psychological safety – should we support failure at the top end of elite level performance?
• As a coach or leader, understand your own transition journey to empathise and support the athletes.
• Identifying your team’s roles and responsibilities to help build the six ways to increase psychological safety – use your super strengths well.
• Psychological safety to give awareness to development pathways.
• A way of changing best practice – at national senior team selection meetings, instead of the chair / senior selector listing their team selection and then asking the room to share theirs and justify the differences, build psychological safety in the room by ‘putting it on the table – discuss it’. All of the selection committee put their teams up simultaneously and then open the discussion.

An article brought to you by our Partners

Interview by Sarah Malone

Dr Conall Murtagh, the First-Team Fitness Coach at Liverpool FC, will soon be celebrating a decade working with the English Premier League club.

Murtagh joined as a sports scientist while studying for his PhD in 2012. He then became the Fitness Coach for the men’s under-18s in 2014, and joined Head Coach Jürgen Klopp’s staff in early 2016. His tenure with the first team coincides with one of the most successful spells in the club’s history.

“When you come through the door each day there is a desire and expectation to be world-class,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Working under this philosophy is the ultimate motivation for me.”

Recipe for success

Liverpool, who won the League Cup and FA Cup this season, have played the maximum number of games possible – 63 in total and the most of all teams in the Premier League – the first time an English team has competed in every possible match in a single season since Liverpool themselves completed the feat during their FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup-winning 2000-2001 campaign.

The Reds ended the season with almost a full complement of players thanks to the work of Klopp and his multidisciplinary staff which includes Murtagh, a former footballer himself and UEFA A Licence-qualified coach. It is a demanding environment. Murtagh’s fascination with sports science and physiology began long before his own playing days.

“I was obsessed with how the human body worked, particularly how it responded to training and games. That led me down the study of physiology and then sport science. When I was playing as a professional, I had no real knowledge of sports science until I started studying and playing semi-professionally. The individual response to training always intrigued me. How the day after the same session, some players would turn up fresh as a daisy, while others arrived feeling sore and stiff. We could also all do the same gym intervention programmes and yet some players’ sprint or jump performance would shoot through the roof, while others’ stayed the same.”

Murtagh believes that different players inherently have different capacities for physiological adaptation from physical workload. Therefore, they require a stimulus tailored to their individual needs in real-time; something that is very difficult to provide consistently in a team sport environment. That is the challenge Murtagh embraces, as he and the wider staff strive to keep all squad members in peak condition.

Zone7 adoption

Liverpool, much like any Premier League club, has an array of player monitoring and intervention tools at their disposal. For the 2021/22 Premier League season they have also enlisted Zone7, a data-driven artificial intelligence risk forecasting system, to support their development of personalised player workload management processes.

The collaboration, amongst many other important cutting-edge processes adopted at Liverpool, has been a success. Under the watch of club practitioners, Liverpool’s first team – according to Premier Injuries – have seen a 33% drop in days lost to injury this season compared to last. When narrowed to ‘substantial’ injuries (long absences marked by 9+ consecutive days lost), this drop increases to 40%. Goalkeeper and illness-related absences are excluded from the breakdown.

In essence, Zone7 empowers human decision-makers who oversee athlete workloads. These professionals are often tasked with making recommendations in highly pressurised situations. By analysing the extensive, disparate datasets generated and collected in elite sporting environments, Zone7 can detect injury risk patterns that may otherwise be invisible. In some instances, it can go a step further by making proactive recommendations to mitigate the identified injury risk. Importantly, Zone7 will often suggest increasing workloads in particular areas to lower risk. Reducing workloads or simply prescribing rest is not always the right solution.

“We know that adaptation for the human body is a dynamic process,” says Murtagh. “Every time the player performs a training stimulus we must reassess their body’s adaptation balance.”

“As a multidisciplinary team, we assess every player every day. Zone7’s AI works alongside our extensive internal monitoring processes by effectively identifying more complex data patterns that could indicate whether a player has good rhythm or has deviated from it. If our monitoring system identifies that the player is not in optimal rhythm, we intervene accordingly from a multidisciplinary perspective.”

The productive use of Zone7 requires pragmatism. No credible AI solution will claim it is correct all the time and periodic false flags are a natural consequence. Murtagh, however, is unfazed.

“You can never say [a Zone7 risk alert] is a false positive when you’re flagging the player,” he says. “Some players do receive flags and we do not detect anything to suggest they are at an elevated risk. There is such a fine line between someone getting injured or not, we try to identify when the player has sub-optimal rhythm and we intervene appropriately.”

Zone7’s data science team has evolved their solution this year by introducing a new ‘Workload-Simulator’ component, which enables practitioners like Murtagh to input projected workloads and simulate players’ future injury risk in advance.

“The thing I like most about Zone7 is that they’re constantly updating the algorithm, constantly evolving, constantly on the front foot in this field,” added Murtagh. “To have the AI working in our environment to support our internal monitoring system gives us a certain sense of safety around our player management recommendations. The simulator is a brilliant feature, which will be used more and more as the system evolves.”

With a full season behind them, and tangible success metrics to point to, Liverpool and Zone7 have extended their working engagement by another two years, a move that also includes Zone7 adoption across the Liverpool Women’s and Under-23 teams. Rich Buchanan, Zone7 Performance Director, says that “working with Murtagh and Liverpool FC is hugely important to Zone7. It shows that our technology, in the hands of progressive and experienced practitioners, can exist and evolve, in one of the world’s most elite sporting environments.”

By Sarah Evans

Real Madrid Head Coach Carlo Ancelotti is the first coach to have won each of Europe’s five major leagues.

On Saturday, he will also attempt to win the Uefa Champions League for the fourth time as a coach (to go with the two he won as a player with AC Milan). His track record is all the more remarkable given his longevity. The La Liga title he won with Real earlier this month comes 18 years after his Serie A triumph with Milan.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores five attributes that explain why Ancelotti is still at the top of his game.

1. Ever the democrat

Ancelotti states that his leadership style stems from his character. He is a democrat that doesn’t like to simply impose his way of being on others. “My style is not to impose,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2015. It is a belief to which he holds firm. “I would like to convince the players of what they are doing”. He believes that this way of operating earns him the buy-in of the players, which means they are more likely to get behind him and give their all, rather than if things were simply forced upon them. This approach also makes the players accountable. Ancelotti will often ask the players tactical questions and opinions on the match strategy, knowing that they will understand the strategy more if they’ve been involved in the decision-making process. He wants the environment to be that of adult to adult, and allows players and staff to have opinions, feel valued, and help in designing both the vision and the strategy of the team.

2. Process over outcome

Win or lose on Saturday, Ancelotti always analyses his methods systematically, and if his team have lost but knows he couldn’t have done anything else to change it, then he is able to compartmentalise the defeat. It is this process, rather than outcome, focus which makes him so consistent. Perhaps his most notable loss was the 2005 Champions League Final against Liverpool in Istanbul. His team at the time, Milan, were leading 3-0 at half-time, but Liverpool pulled off one of the most historic comebacks in football history and eventually won the match on penalties. However, Ancelotti was seen chatting cheerily in the bar later that night. He believed his team had played well and so didn’t dwell on the defeat.

3. A cultural chameleon

Ancelotti – who has coached some of Europe’s most illustrious teams, including Milan, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid (across two spells) – stresses the importance of getting to know the characteristics of players, the culture and traditions of a club, and then integrates his leadership style within that. Even if something has made him very successful at one club, he won’t just come in and assert that style on another. Ancelotti understands that there are many cultural differences from club to club and within different countries, and he has to adapt his style to get the best out of the players and team he is currently at.

4. Humility and professionalism

He has won almost everything as player and coach, yet he still wants to listen to what you have to say. People enjoy talking to him, he values what they say and that helps him build relationships with the athletes. He is the ultimate professional and has an unquestionable desire to win, which makes him so well-respected. He protects the team from the stressors of elite football by not showing the pressure he’s under. He takes the situation – but not himself – seriously, and can often be found telling jokes in the changing rooms before a big game to help diffuse the pressure.

5. A refreshing sense of perspective

Ancelotti has a strong sense of the big picture. He has the ability to take daily updates of physical, mental and emotional energy levels of people and align them with the group’s daily needs, as well as the team’s overall season objectives. By ‘staying in the moment’ with individuals, he is able to prepare for and think about the bigger picture. As he said: “football is the most important of the less important things in the world.”

By John Portch

One thing is clear: diversity is a competitive edge and EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] is an area where all teams can be doing better.

Kevin Yusuf Coleman, the former Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Brentford FC [now the Diversity & Inclusion Lead at the BBC Studios], is speaking at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. The English Premier League club have been noted for their work in delivering upon their EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] goals.

At the top of the conversation, he highlights the findings of some research conducted by management consultancy firm McKinsey. “If you’re in the top quartile of gender and ethnicity you’re about 25-30 percent [more profitable],” says Yusuf Coleman. “Just in terms of pure cash, if you’re a more diverse and inclusive organisation you do better, as well as it being the right thing to do.”

In this chapter, through Yusuf Coleman’s words, we highlight four factors to consider when trying to promote equality, diversity and inclusion.

1. EDI must be intrinsic

Yusuf Coleman emphasises that EDI must be part of your cultural identity, not just some add-on, which is all too common. “I’ve spent most of my life in sport trying to justify why EDI was a good idea and it was really refreshing to come to an organisation where it was already front and centre,” he says of a club situated in one of London’s most diverse areas. “It was already one of our two biggest priorities and it was more how we do it than why.

“It makes logical sense for us to have an understanding of having an inclusive environment for staff to work in, an inclusive offer for our fans and players and wider communities. It makes perfect business sense as well as being the right thing to do.”

2. Accountability is key

As Yusuf Coleman says, every staff appraisal at Brentford includes a section on EDI accountability. “If everyone is accountable then they will make it relevant to them.” Equally, your staff and athletes can play a fundamental role in bringing EDI to life. “You never design a programme, or anything that’s supposed to help any particular community without them being part of it.”

EDI can also be tracked. “It has to be something physically practical that you can measure so it means something to everyone, otherwise it is a slogan and when the next CEO comes in there will be another slogan and another acronym.”

Yusuf Coleman recalls his time as Equality & Diversity Manager at the Football Association [FA]. “We had monthly poll surveys where you had lots of questions around inclusion and belonging and you looked at how much people strongly believed in them or slightly believed in them and how that changed every month. And actually, over a period of two years, you saw the change in how people feel about the organisation. You have to be clever about things you normally can’t measure and it can feel like fluffy clouds, but you have to find a way to try and measure them.”

3. Create experiential learning opportunities for staff

“EDI, to really get it, you have to understand it and feel it,” says Yusuf Coleman. “People from diverse communities, from under-represented communities who might have experienced discrimination, for example, will understand it more because of life experience. And if you’re from the majority, if you’re a white middle-aged man like me, you don’t have those experiences to inform you.”

Experiential learning is a crucial tool. “We all talk about the ‘70:20:10 rule’ where if you experience something it’s much more impactful, especially around EDI,” he continues.

During his time at the FA, Yusuf Coleman arranged for a staff visit to the Neasden Temple, which is about 2km from Wembley Stadium but not a place most staff had visited. “[It’s about] being creative and helping people to experience diversity and inclusion for themselves is going to be more impactful than paying for corporate trainer a lot of money to come in with a white board for a few hours.”

4. You never succeed at EDI

Yusuf Coleman clear on that point. “You never succeed at EDI – no one is ever successful,” he says, adding that organisations should revisit their EDI strategy every two to three years. “You might be more ambitious in three years’ time or you might revisit the same thing. Never think of it as something you’re going to achieve. It’s ‘are our indicators good? Are we ahead of society? Are we leading society? Can we be seen as good practice or are we flagging behind?’ That’s really your only two litmus tests. As businesses, you don’t have to be more diverse than society, you don’t have to hit every target, one thing that’s really key is being humble and knowing where you are.”

By Sarah Evans

Framing the topic

This was session one of our three-part Performance Support Series focusing on the overarching theme of talent development, with the title ‘Synchronising Player & Coach Development’. Across these sessions, which are being hosted by Edd Vahid, Assistant Academy Director at English Premier League club Southampton FC, the aim is to understand the challenges faced during transitions for talent, whether this be players or coaches, and explore a number of interventions to positively influence this in your environments.

Understanding the challenge

• When we say ‘challenge’ within this session, it means the transition of players through the pathway from academy to seniors.
• First and foremost its crucial to understand what these challenges are in relation to transition.
• The challenge of transition is at the heart of most sporting visions.
  • UK Sport – ‘Keep winning and winning well’ places a requirement on young athletes to have an impact on the senior stage.
  • Southampton – ‘Be the Number One Player Developer in Football’

 Aims of the session

1. Provoke thinking on player/athlete transitions
2. Create space(s) to reflect on existing approaches and challenges
3. Explore the utility of several sense-making models
4. Encourage a commitment to action

Discussion points

How effectively is your club / organisation facilitating the transition of an talented academy player to first-team player? Or in turn, how are you facilitating the transition of talent coaches within your environment?

Pre-Mortem: Your highest potential academy player / coach does not transition into the first team / elite environment. What would have contributed to this outcome?

• Opportunity: pathway, lack of bumps in the road, long-term injury.
• Competition: insufficient game time, too much expectation, mentality.
• Assessment: coaches decisions, selector bias, positional decisions.
• Differences between professional sport and Olympic sport, and individual vs team sports.
• Pressure to win games now, focuses on short term rather than a longer term developmental outlook.

Performance = Potential – Interference (Timothy Gallwey)

The reality of transitions is that they’re a zero sum game, meaning that if someone makes the step up into the senior team, someone else will move out of that space.

Challenges in creating effective transitions

• Recognising the landscape or ecosystem you operate in.
• The tension that exists between the first team environment, which naturally prioritises a shorter term focus, than a development environment that has a longer term outlook and possibly greater stability.
• Trust and Empathy: the heart of talent development work is trying to influence the trust that the senior staff have.
• Vision: the aligned vision between the first team and academy. Club’s vision led by board must have buy-in across the organisation.
• Individualised element: everyone’s pathway is so different, so it’s important to create a system that acknowledges that individuality.
• Ensuring there are aligned processes between the various stages of the pathway.

Sense Making Models : Pierre Bourdieu – Habitus, Field, Capital

• Habitus: ‘The Individual’, a product of their history, influenced by a multitude of factors. Their history will influence how they perceive, how they think and ultimately how they behave moving forwards. Are we preparing these individuals to be a ‘fish in water’ in the senior teams?
• Field: e.g. The training complex. A social arena where people compete for resources and demonstrate their power. The new ‘field’ establishes the ‘rules of the game’ and the individual must adapt if they want to succeed. This could be their attitude at training, their image, where they sit in the changing room etc. How well are we preparing them to make a good first impression?
• Capital: The currency that is going to influence success – physical qualities, cultural qualities, reputation you come with.

How well do we know our players’ Habitus? Their History?

How well do we understand the Field, and the Capital required to succeed?

Task: What are the key influences on the First Team ‘Field’? For example, the pressure to win on Saturday?

70% of behaviour is determined by our environment. Therefore if most behaviour is understandable then we need to understand where the behaviour comes from.

Understanding the landscape – O’Sullivan, Bespomoshchnov and Mallett (2021)

• Microsystem: the immediate environment – e.g. an individual playing in the academy.
• Mesosystem: the interconnection of settings – e.g. interconnection of academy and senior team. Things that can influence this are the managerial tenure, which in football on average is 18 months, financial incentives, and the average age of players in the senior team.
• Exosystem: the broader context – e.g. the Premier League, with many players being brought in from overseas, player contract length, and the transfer spend of the club.
• Macrosystem: cultural elements – e.g. the role of the media and social media.

In summary:

1. Successful transitions are critical to our talent development aspirations.
2. Understanding the transition challenge precedes intervention.
3. The transition challenge is influenced by factors that exist on multiple levels.

“There’s a tension there that exists between knowing what you’re going to cover and responding to the humans that are in front of you,” said Iain Brunnschweiler, the Head of Technical Development at English Premier League club Southampton FC.

“We’ve tried to evolve a curriculum, a player development framework, that manages that tension. We want to cover specific topics and we also want to coach the player that’s in front of us.”

Brunnschweiler was speaking onstage at Leaders Meet: Coach & Player Development on the 24 March at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, where he was joined by England Netball Head Coach Jess Thirlby to discuss the progress being made in coach and player development.

During the session, which was moderated by Dan Clements, the Performance Coach Manager at Wales Rugby Union, the duo discussed:

• Why curriculums need to be carefully implemented [3:00];
• The value in playbooks and the implications for creativity [12:00];
• The most meaningful learning experiences they provide [16:00];
• Finding work-life balance [24:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

A Industry Insight brought to you by our partners Science in Sport.

“I always say: everyone is always excited for someone else to change,” says Jeremy Bettle, with a wry smile. “It’s always difficult when you have to deliver that to the person who has to change.”

The Performance Director at MLS champions New York City FC is the first guest on the Science in Sport Industry Insight podcast series, where he joins the Leaders Performance Institute Editor John Portch and Science in Sport’s Director of Performance Solutions James Morton to discuss his first season at the club, which culminated in the championship.

Bettle spoke to the pair about his arrival in the Big Apple, with Morton sharing from his own experiences of working with seven-time Tour de France winners Team Sky/INEOS Grenadiers and in English Premier League football.

Also on the conversational agenda were:

• Why Bettle feels he has not always handled change management well in the past [4:00];
• The difference between comfort and complacency in winning teams [14:00];
• The reasons why people management are often at the centre of innovation [20:00];
• Why enjoyment should be a practitioner’s personal priority [22:00];
• Reflective practice and how different questions can change mindsets [29:00].

James Morton: Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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