By Luke Whitworth

The Paris Olympics have made history as the first Games where 50 per cent of the medals will go to women.

On top of that, 11-time Olympic medallist Allyson Felix led an initiative to introduce the first-ever nursery for competing mothers and their children at an Olympic village.

These are steps in the right direction at a time when the Games have shown us there is still much work to do to better support female athletes and their health.

One can look at the world records involving the United States’ women swimmers at La Defense Arena in Paris, to name an example close to Leaders Performance Institute hearts, and wonder what potential could be unleashed if the sporting world adopted more female-focused approaches to training, recovery and mental preparation.

On that front, there is some superb work being done by our friends at Sport Wales, who shared insights with Leaders Performance Institute members in early July, and that’s where we begin this edition of the Debrief.

How to increase education around female athlete health

Our Women’s High Performance Sport community group has proven to be a mainstay for the female members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

The community has made it clear that they believe there is a shortfall in education for staff around female athlete health.

With this in mind, we welcomed Dr Natalie Brown, a Research Fellow working as part of a collaboration between Sport Wales and Swansea University with the Welsh Institute of Performance Science [WIPS].

Brown led a rich conversation about her work and suggested some practical ways in which you can make positive inroads when it comes to female athlete health education:

• Invite people external from your female health and the performance team to come in and join the conversations, raising different questions.
• Balance individual needs versus sport specific challenges with whole system support.
• Specialist areas need to consider the female specifics as ‘normal.
• If you’re working as a lone ranger in this space, consider how things are being embedded, knowledge is being passed on, and progress to creating a team is happening.
• Language is a really important area. Don’t exclude anyone, but also correct. Underpinning language with evidence has been effective. Language can also be the key to confidence to talk about the topics and roll it out with athletes.
• Consider behaviour changes and the role of psychology in female health.
• Always provide the evidence of why behind knowledge, advice, support. Especially considering the volume of information, including misinformation, being shared around these topics at the moment.

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

A six-step approach to driving cultural change

Those of you who read last month’s Debrief will know we touched on the theme of cultural leadership courtesy of Dr Edd Vahid, who placed the topic at the heart of his three-part Performance Support Series for Leaders members.

In July, he followed sessions one and two with a specific focus on cultural change and the effective steps that can be taken to create and deliver a new culture. In session three, Vahid shared a six-step approach:

1. Existing status – where are we? Honour the strengths of the existing culture; combine this with data, intelligence and insights, whether that be critical incident reviews, walking the floor, interviews or focus groups. Finally, check in on people’s experience of the four enablers.
2. Move into the idea of vision and purpose and being able to inspire and aspire. This means giving a clear articulation of where you’re going; matching this with the culture and the strategy. Communicate the value of change. Why are we changing, and how do you create a level of urgency and commitment to seeking change?
3. Identify those who align to the target culture. The guardians play a fundamental role. John Cotter talks about the idea of a ‘guiding coalition’ and it has real validity here.
4. Design. What are the short-term wins? Consider the work around removing barriers and instituting change.
5. Behaviour. What are the critical behaviour shifts you want to see? What are you going to recognise and celebrate and be explicit about in terms of the culture? Consistency and regularity are important.
6. Continuously monitor your progress to help reinforce the change.

What role can AI play in coach and people development?

An interesting question was posed in one of our coaching community group conversations: how can or is AI supporting work in the field of coaching and people development?

When it comes to coaching and learning in general, AI can be a divisive topic. It is common to hear that there is an art to coaching that needs to be protected and that a machine or technology can never connect with a human being.

Nevertheless, those on the community call in July agreed that there is value and opportunity for technology to support elements of people development. We tried to establish what those might be, whilst also testing what AI could come up with during the session.

Three things in particular stood out:

1. Efficiencies – many of you who operate in this space will be aware of the amount of time and resource it takes to collate data and identify the best ways to support efficiencies in your teams. AI can smoothen this process and, in some instances, identify trends you might not have thought about.
2. Access to content – this point does tie to the above quite closely. AI-powered virtual assistants can support by providing instant access to information, answering queries and aggregating trends.
3. Personalisation – AI enhances e-learning platforms by personalising the learning experience, adapting content to the learner’s pace and style, and providing interactive and engaging materials.

Why improvisation is an underrated leadership skill

Those of you who have been involved in the Leaders Performance Institute membership for a while and have attended some of our events, you’ll likely remember we have dabbled into the world of comedy to see what we can learn from the likes of the Upright Citizens Brigade who feature in Dan Coyle’s Culture Code and also comedian Stuart Goldsmith who spoke at our London Summit back in 2019.

We returned to the topic of improv comedy in July’s Leaders Skills Series session, which began with a line from renowned improv actor Bob Kulhan: ‘improvisation thrives at the pivotal intersection where planning and strategy meet execution’.

The session used Kulhan’s premise, set out in his 2017 book Getting to ‘Yes, And’ to explore how improvisation can enhance your leadership. Below, we explore some of the elements that emerged during the discourse.

How does the ability to improvise elevate performance in both individuals and teams?

There are three elements:

1. Improvisation develops collaboration skills by raising an individual’s self-awareness of how they interact with others when there is a need for collaboration.
2. It can build people’s confidence and personal impact when they are speaking up and sharing ideas.
3. Listening: improvisation can build people’s openness to different perspectives and strengthen their active listening skills.

Neil Mullarkey is another of the world’s premier improv actors and, in 2023, he released his book In the Moment. In it, he details some practical skills to help leaders demonstrate the behaviours that help create the conditions for teams to be more creative.

We also explored Mullarkey’s LASER model during the session:

• Listen– be curious, notice what is being said and what is not being said.
• Accept– accepting is not the same as agreeing, be aware of your own agenda.
• Send– listen-to-link, build momentum with the other persons idea or perspective.
• Explore– remain curious and explore your ‘filters’ and assumptions.
• Reincorporate… an earlier idea and build on it.

By Luke Whitworth

Too often there is a disparity between what is said and what is done in an organisation.

Angus Gardiner, the General Manager of the New Zealand rugby team the Crusaders, once said: ‘good and bad teams have the same values written on the wall’.

The ‘saying’ is the easy part, the ‘doing’ is quite another and this idea, was the jumping off point for Dr Edd Vahid’s recent project with Management Futures titled A Cultural Hypothesis, which was published in March 2024.

Vahid hypothesised that sustained cultures of success consistently display four features:

1. Purpose
2. Psychological safety
3. Belonging
4. Cultural leadership

As Vahid wrote, ‘an inspiring purpose is essential, a psychologically safe environment is critical, and a sense of belonging exists as a fundamental human need. Coupled with exceptional leadership, these elements distinguish cultures that thrive’.

The fourth has provided the basis of Vahid’s three-part Performance Support Series focusing on culture and change.

The first session invited Leaders Performance Institute members to assess themselves across the four areas; the second focused on cultural leadership as the ‘super enabler’ of culture; the third session further explored the skills needed by cultural leaders.

The three levels of cultural leadership

In A Cultural Hypothesis, Vahid explains that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: those operating at ownership or board level; they give permission to architects and guardians (who have a more active role) to deliver the culture. They are typically one or two people.
2. Architects: those responsible for the design of the culture, ensuring it is set up in a way that can allow people to thrive. They are typically a small number.
3. Guardians: the individuals on the ground, delivering on a daily basis, ensuring alignment to the articulated culture which they can translate to individuals operating in that space. There can be multiple guardians.

The architects and the guardians are more active in their roles and, during the session, Vahid explored the skills required for each.

Cultural architects – what skills are required?

Vahid asked members to reflect on the cultural architects in their environments and their skills. The group suggested the following:

• They have a clear vision of what ‘good’ looks like.
• They have a solid understanding of the current state of the culture.
• They can be what the culture requires them to be.
• They have strong communication skills and the ability and opportunity to lead by example.
• They have the ability to win hearts and minds.
• They are respected in the organisation and have the common skills to bring people along on the journey.
• A resilience to withstand the challenges presented by the journey.
• They set and maintain standards with consistency and genuine care.
• They ‘walk the talk’ themselves and believe in necessary change.

Vahid then shared a series of observations about cultural architects based on his research:

They are often appointed by the sponsors. By contrast, the guardians will mobilise on the ground.

They lead the cultural design. They have the ability to articulate and create the environment; they make others aware of the vision and direction of travel. This needs to be done in a skilled and inspiring fashion, with language that is able to influence the culture.

Their role can also be more literal i.e. they have a role in creating a more optimal physical environment.

They acknowledge the tensions within their team and possess the ability to flex and be agile without losing sight of the purpose.

They understand the importance of stories, which can help to distinguish your culture. As Daniel Coyle asked several organisations in his 2018 book, The Culture Code, ‘tell me a story of something that happens here that doesn’t happen anywhere else?’ They know the answer.

The architect must be effectively monitoring the culture and its current state. That can be checking-in with where the culture is now or, equally, understanding the journey that it is going to go on. It’s important to invite feedback and ‘speak truth to power’. It is crucial for them to be connected to the guardians in staying abreast of goings on; they must also ensure a sense of positivity around the culture.

Architects will take a more ‘global view’ than the guardians.

In light of the ‘radically traditional’ research of Alex Hill and the Centre of High Performance, architects provide what Hill calls the ‘disruptive edge’ while the guardians maintain the ‘stable core’.

Cultural guardians – what are their other traits?

Once again, Vahid turned to members to ask what skills they felt cultural guardians possess. They suggested:

• They have an ability to have courageous conversations with skill.
• They have awareness of their skillset and how to model behaviours and values.
• They are self-aware of their biases.
• They have the ability to advocate for the importance of cultural preservation and to influence others regarding its value.

Vahid outlined what his research had to say on the matter of cultural guardians:

The guardians can provide much-needed support as well as bandwidth, space and capacity for the architects to focus on the things that really matter. It requires insight and intelligence to provide a clear view of the landscape.

They carry a strong purpose; there is a level of awareness, alignment and connectedness. The challenge for the architect is to ensure the guardian remains connected because if the connection is lost, you can lose someone who is a positive advocate and instead they become a disruptive influence.

The guardians can speak truth to power with ‘radical candor’, to cite Kim Scott’s theory; they ‘care personally while challenging directly’.

They are role models. They also need to have a degree of influence as they are the foot soldiers that can carry out the vision effectively.

The guardians are on the ground, taking that more localised view. They can make decisions on the ground for the benefit of and in alignment with the culture. They don’t need to escalate every decision or action.

Finally, guardians are identified or are emerging. Vahid’s use of the term ‘identify’ is deliberate because one of the challenges for cultures is to identify the individuals that are going to have a positive influence. He says teams have to ask the question as to whether they are doing enough to support their guardians and the development of their skillset.

Cultural architects, cultural guardians… and cultural shareholders

While there are cultural sponsors, architects and guardians, these are all cultural shareholders.

Vahid’s research suggests that cultural shareholders can be distinguished by their level of:

• Influence
• Engagement
• Motivation

Those who carry significant positive influence and are highly motivated in alignment with your cultural aspirations could be considered guardians, but they are absolutely your strongest architects.

The challenge of a culture is to get an appropriate balance. Is there sufficient weight towards the guardians – if everyone’s a shareholder, are there sufficient numbers of strong and positive advocates for the culture – or are there people who might be considered countercultural?

How does a shareholder become a cultural guardian?

Vahid invited Leaders Performance Institute members to answer the question. They said that cultural shareholders transition into guardianship because:

• They communicate the ‘why’ well.
• They use rituals to highlight and celebrate their behaviours that support and reinforce the wider cultural aspirations.
• They onboard people into the way things are done with care.
• They give frequent updates and appreciate roles.
• They provide access to the thinking underpinning the culture and mentoring programmes.
• They involve shareholders in governance processes where they can have a say in decisions that affect the company’s culture, possibly through working groups, representation, or advisory roles.

In order to create more cultural guardians, Vahid argues that it is important to:

• Ensure people are onboarded effectively; they must know the why of the culture and be granted access to that thinking.
• Make sure people remain connected during change and transitions. New people and those evolving in their roles – include them in the process.
• Be deliberate and attentive with belonging cues. Just because someone fits today it doesn’t mean they will in six months’ time.
• Invest in people development. Are you doing enough to ensure that people have the skill to operate as and feel valued as a guardian? What development programmes do you have in place?

What are some of the fundamental change principles?

Vahid invited members to reflect on cultural change and the fundamental principles they call upon in those phases of development. Attendees suggested the following:

• Start with ‘unfreezing’ the current culture. Help people to recognise what’s not currently working and why there is a need for change.
• A clear articulation of what it looks like and what is desired.
• A clear direction of the path on which you are heading, whilst acknowledging the past as a springboard for future development (maintaining positive traditions).
• Respect the need for time – change cannot be rushed.

The change starts with observation; the sponsor then gives the architect permission to design, create and deliver what the new culture might look like. With this in mind, Vahid suggests a six-step process:

1. Existing status – where are we? Honour the strengths of the existing culture; combine this with data, intelligence and insights, whether that be critical incident reviews, walking the floor, interviews or focus groups. Finally, check in on people’s experience of the four enablers.
2. Move into the idea of vision and purpose and being able to inspire and aspire. This means giving a clear articulation of where you’re going; matching this with the culture and the strategy. Communicate the value of change. Why are we changing, and how do you create a level of urgency and commitment to seeking change?
3. Identify those who align to the target culture. The guardians play a fundamental role. John Cotter talks about the idea of a ‘guiding coalition’ and it has real validity here.
4. Design. What are the short-term wins? Consider the work around removing barriers and instituting change.
5. Behaviour. What are the critical behaviour shifts you want to see? What are you going to recognise and celebrate and be explicit about in terms of the culture? Consistency and regularity are important.
6. Continuously monitor your progress to help reinforce the change.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

By Luke Whitworth

We want to start this Debrief with a big thank you to those who made it to our Sport Performance Summit in LA last month.

It is always wonderful to see the great and the good of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to discuss the pressing performance challenges of the day.

Speaking of which, the happenings at Red Bull were far from the only opportunities on offer at the Institute in June, with roundtables and community calls packed with members sharing both challenges and best practices on a range of topics.

Many are covered in this month’s Debrief. As ever, do check out our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions, which are designed to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.

Right, let’s get into some reflections on June.

What we learned at the Sport Performance Summit in LA

We had a great couple of days with those of you who made the trip; and there was plenty of thought-provoking content for us to get our teeth stuck into (full account here). Below are a few snippets that particularly caught our attention:

Four tips for avoiding the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen that explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations. It resonated with Jen Allum, from X, the Moonshot Factory and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, who understand they could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Onstage, Allum shared their four top tips for avoiding this scenario:

1. Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
2. Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
3. Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
4. Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

Allum added that X, the Moonshot Factory “rewards project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty” in the work they do.

How to optimise your energy as a leader

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.” Here are her thoughts on how leaders should show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.

• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.

• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?

• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

The biomarkers of a healthy culture

Back to the myriad insights gleaned from our June Virtual Roundtables, starting off with the latest segment of our series of learning centred around culture and change. The sessions highlight findings from a recent research project by the Premier League’s Edd Vahid titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. The project examines the key components of cultures that have been able to sustain themselves.

Vahid posits astute leadership as a ‘super enabler’. Indeed, as Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’

What are some strategies we can consider?

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process.
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like.

Vahid’s also research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
2. Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
3. Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

Four features of a great debrief

Effective debriefing skills was the top of conversation for our latest Leadership Skills Series session. If you are interested to join roundtable sessions centred around developing your own leadership, there are some great topics coming up around strategy and cohesion you can find on the Member’s Area.

To keep this section punchy, a section of our discussion focused on some top line considerations for what constitutes a great debrief. Are you doing these well in your environments?

1. Psychological safety and the notion of creating a calm, positive and supportive space. As part of this consideration, set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Finally, do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
2. Get good at questioning. Use open, non-judgmental questions and a lot of follow up questions. Focus on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
3. Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. A reminder: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works.
4. Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals.

The pathway to better collaboration and multidisciplinary working

Finally, we wanted to highlight some interesting insights and perspectives from our topic-led roundtable on functioning more effectively as multidisciplinary teams, which is often a very popular topic of interest across the Institute when speaking to many of you.

Do check out the complete summary. Below are a handful of ideas from members on the call that they feel are currently missing or need to be given more attention in the quest to do this well:

1. How are you supporting new leaders in your teams? Often we see those in technical expertise of ‘tactician’ roles move up to leadership position but lack the requisite skills to lead effectively. The role inevitably changes, so what are you or we doing to help them ‘lead’ their teams and embed true collaboration?
2. Be intentional with feedback. It was shared that an opportunity is a robust and thoughtful feedback mechanism that have variations in their approach. The idea of thinking about detailed feedback is to support learning on a consistent and ongoing basis within your teams. It always seems to us that high quality feedback seems challenging for our teams, so this may well be an opportunity to explore.
3. Are your standard operating procedures clear? If not, they need to be to support this quest for high levels of collaboration.
4. Psychological safety and empowerment. How do we  empower people more effectively to take targeted risks within their roles, whilst still feeling safe and secure? What we are really getting at here is psychological safety in teams and a shared understanding of what that means and looks like.

By Rachel Woodland, Sarah Evans and Lottie Wright

• Use the critical moments to reinforce your culture.

• Expansion franchises must recruit staff who want to be challenged and challenge themselves to be the best they can be.

• Challenge yourself as a leader to have a diverse staff, so that when you are recruiting female athletes, lifestyle and protecting the longevity of their career can be just as important considerations as pay.

There has never been a better time for women’s sport in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In March, Bay FC began their inaugural NWSL campaign to great fanfare.

The club was co-founded by former US women’s national team stars Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Danielle Slayton and Leslie Osborne, who propelled the project from an ambitious idea to a grand reality.

They hired Lucy Rushton as General Manager. Rushton, who was the second woman to serve as GM in MLS when she joined DC United in 2021, spoke at this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica.

Rushton is no stranger to the Leaders stage having also spoken during her time at Atlanta United, whom she joined following excellent spells with Watford, Reading and the Football Association in her native England.

She sat next to another trail blazer, Ohemaa Nyanin, the newly appointed GM of WNBA expansion franchise the Golden State Valkyries, who will join the league in 2025.

Nyanin, a Ghanian-American, had been with the New York Liberty for five years, most recently as Assistant GM, jumped at the chance to bring further basketball prestige to this corner of southern California. She previously served as Assistant Director of the US women’s national team and helped Team USA to Olympic gold in 2016 and World Cup gold in 2018.

The duo delivered insights into how they are shaping the cultures of their nascent organisations; how they’re working or planning on working with their athletes; how they’ve chosen to lead; how they’re supporting their staff; as well as how they’re changing the sporting landscape.

Owners must establish the culture and values

The Bay culture was clear well before Rushton had even accepted her position: everything is about the people, from the staff to the players. The owners want everyone to be B-A-Y. That is:

Brave – the ownership want the franchise to be bold in the industry, pushing boundaries, breaking barriers by being innovative.

Accountable – the staff turn up everyday and are responsible for their actions and drive, and push themselves forward.

You – Bay FC also celebrate themselves as individuals and bring their true authentic selves to work every day.

The three concepts have helped shape the mindset each day and give the staff and players something tangible to hold onto. The organisation’s vision is to be a global sport franchise at the head of innovation and change.

How can these be measured? For Rushton, “it’s the feeling when you go to bed or wake up and how you feel about going to work the next day or that morning”. She believes the staff feel good and know they can influence what is happening; they know it’s a positive environment and everyone is striving for the same things.

Women’s sport should not simply replicate men’s sport

Rushton’s experience of men’s football taught her a valuable lesson. “Coming into a women’s franchise, it’s so important that we understand and appreciate the difference to men’s sport and don’t try and replicate it,” she said. The club has been intentional on that since day one and strives to be people-first, player-centric, and celebrates and promotes good female health.

With Bay midway through their first season, Rushton reflected on how the staff live the values every day. They all want to work hard, but care, kindness, and mutual support are just as critical for an expansion team. You need people who want to be there, who have the grit to go through the ups and downs, but support each other when you might not have the same resources as the teams that are 5 or 10 years old.

“How we approach training everyday and present ourselves to the players gives them energy,” she continued. “Which in turn the players buy into and end up energised and galvanised.” The key is how you present yourself and how you turn up and how you live by the standards that have been set, and the biggest factor is togetherness and collaboration of all departments.

Measure success through environment and collective wellbeing

Nyanin left a household name in the New York Liberty, but her goal is not to merely recreate that team in the Bay Area. Nor does she simply want to recreate the Golden State Warriors (Valkyries co-owner Joe Lacob is also the majority owner of the Warriors). Nyanin wants the Golden State Valkyries to stand alone.

She needs to find people that are interested in a vision of winning championships, in alignment with the ownership group. Success will ultimately be measured in trophies. They are the first WNBA expansion team since 2008, so Nyanin is considering what it looks like to build a successful organisation. She said: “We need to find individuals who are interested in being challenged every day, leaning into the team. Do you want to come to work everyday, and serve the athletes everyday in a way that provides for an innovative space, that provides for us to do what we know we can do, and how quickly can we get there?”

With this question in mind, Nyanin reflected on the qualities she seeks out as the Valkyries hire and write job descriptions. “Being an expansion team means you have to be entrepreneurial. By embracing the unknown can you be empathetic too,” she added.

Rushton asked Nyanin about measuring success from a cultural perspective rather than through championships. In response Nyanin said it is about the climate of the people that come in the door. “When we ask how you are doing they might say ‘I’m fine’ or ‘I’m good’, but if you say ‘how are you doing in the terms of a climate?’; so ‘sunny, or ‘cloudy’, or ‘rainy’ – it adds depth. A way of measuring success is how we can collectively come up with our non-results-based success criteria, how do we make it such so that everyone is sunny?”

For Nyanin, ‘sunny’ doesn’t mean super excited, or super extroverted – you can be introverted but still be sunny. Success is ultimately defined by how the Golden State Valkyries create their own definitions of safety in the workplace; it stems from executives to coordinators, to players, and even changing the way agents and external stakeholders engage with the organisation.

A culture born of diversity

We all know the saying about the best-laid plans, so Rushton and Nyanin spoke of the importance of allowing culture to shape itself. For Rushton, the critical moments are when things haven’t gone to plan. “How you react to things not going to plan is how you create culture. Actions taken in those moments show the players and staff what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she said.

Some decisions have been made that may have impacted performance outcomes but certainly reinforced their culture and values. They might have been a “nightmare” at times, but they’re critical. The backing of the ownership and the Head Coach, Albertin Montoya, helped give Rushton the confidence to go ahead. Showing the group that the leaders are aligned was powerful and gave them the confidence that it was the right thing to do and that the leaders had each others’ backs.

For Nyanin, it is important to give newly-hired executives their own blank slate to contribute to the masterpiece. She said: “If everyone has a different background, you have to listen to their ideas as they’re all coming from different spaces. So it’s still being architected from all different walks and types of cultural differences.”

This means that it’s important to Nyanin to have each executive bring their own unique experience. Through these different experiences and backgrounds the culture develops. This will bring challenges and added work, as you have forces leaders out of their comfort zones. It also means that you have to be willing to think differently.

“It’s like explaining basketball to children, who all ask ‘why?’ People from different backgrounds are going to ask why do we need to execute things this way, and will ask good questions, and bring contributions beyond asking ‘why?’”

In return, Nyanin believes that the athlete will benefit, especially the female athlete who comes with different complexities. “If your own staff can challenge you and ask you why before the athlete does, then you’re giving the athlete a space for them to feel safe to be elite at their sport.”

Athlete care is paramount

What about their appeal to female players? Bay spoke with the potential recruits about player-centricity of club and how they were going to elevate player care. From starting from a blank slate, they were able to accelerate mechanisms that can help with impacting the salary cap through player housing for example. The club emphasised treating them like the athlete they are in comparison to some of their poor experiences in other environments.

In Rushton’s experience, the priorities are very different to male athletes, where pay often dictates the direction of negotiations. With females, it’s about living standards and how the organisation will elongate their career. It’s important to give them confidence in the staff who would give them the best care, medical treatment, and infrastructure. Rushton is proud that, as far as she knows, the players have no complaints about the level of care and how the organisation treats them as female athletes.

On a day to day basis it boils down to two things in her mind. Firstly, helping them be in the best position they can be for the longest time possible and, secondly, to help them live a nice lifestyle outside of football.

This focus on player care resonated with Nyanin, who was pleasantly surprised at the rapid expansion of the NWSL given her own experience of the WNBA. Bringing it back to athlete experience is hugely important because, in WNBA, athlete experience tends to focus on ‘how you do get elite talent to come through?’ Nyanin explained that longevity in the sport is different, although is it changing, because the majority of the athletes play six months in the WNBA and then go and play overseas where the conditions are often worse, but they’re getting paid more money. “Understanding the motivations of the athlete prior to them coming to your organisation and engaging in your space is important,” she said.

Attracting elite practitioners from male sport

How might top level practitioners be attracted from historically better-funded male sports? Both Nyanin and Rushton believe that efforts must be based on the vision, culture and concepts the organisations trying to build.

For the Valkyries, as Nyanin explained, the vision is to “build the best, to be the most elite, to build a space where people feel they’re being heard and their ideas being executed in a way that results in excellence. Why wouldn’t you want to come? How can I create an environment for you to thrive, and how can we do that together?”

Rushton agreed. She said: “it shouldn’t be about the gender. It does matter though – many wouldn’t be right for women’s sport. I want to make you the best practitioner in what you do, and give you the platform to excel in your specialisation.”

New franchises means recruiting for those who are willing to challenge themselves and go outside the box with their thinking. It becomes about finding the people who are comfortable with the associated risk in order to better themselves. Rushton believes they have to “believe that they can go there and make a difference.” Rushton also observed that, “a lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female athlete team because it’s a totally different environment, with totally different feeling and vibe.”

For Rushton herself, when she moved from men’s to women’s football there were two main factors that drew her in:

1. Knowing what the owner was striving for, and it being incredibly ambitious, and the level of care and his values as a person. She said it’s rare to find someone that ambitious but be about the process and the care that is shown in achieving it.
2. Giving back to the game and being a role model. When Rushton was younger the women’s game didn’t have the opportunities; and for many years she was the sole women working in the footballing environments that she was in. Now she can show there’s a pathway to make it a profession and a career. All the staff are in positions where they can help the youth see bigger prospects for the future within sports and the women’s game.

How fans contribute to a team culture

There remains another crucial component of a team culture: the fans.

The final moments of the session were used to discuss how both Nyanin and Rushton, and their organisations, are forging connections with their fans. As Nyanin said, fans expect communications, but there are times when you can’t share with them. This is a dilemma considering that the fans are also investing in the franchise and so they deserve communication. It becomes about finding the balance around what to do when things aren’t going well. Working on being honest in their communications so that the fans understand that the leaders and everybody involved is working to solve any issues.

Similarly, Rushton and Bay have been deliberate in how they present the organisation to the fans. The Business Operations team at Bay go to the fans and ask them to bring the energy and passion; to be part of their story. They seek to empower the fans and have them be part of the journey. Bay have gone out to the community, had fans come and watch training, and prioritised outward action in the build-up to launch. People now want to be a part of their journey.

Rushton spoke of how Bay deliberately tell the stories of their players. This means that people become invested in the emotional side of who the player is, so if the team lose a game, the fans are more invested in the person than the result. The outcome is one of which she is proud and the Valkyries hope to emulate. “The fans have fallen in love with the team, despite the record.”

Results will surely follow but, here and now, both women are intent on proving that new women’s sports teams are not only viable but can thrive.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Queens Park Rangers’ season went poorly for more than four months, with the League Championship club sitting squarely in the relegation zone deep into January.

QPR soon turned its season around, however, after a change in leadership. The club won 10 times and added five draws over its final 19 matches to secure its spot in the second tier of English football another season. Most estimates suggest that relegation from the Championship to League One is a financial hit of more than $10 million (£7.9 million).

Right around the time of that upset over Leicester, QPR onboarded a new AI-powered predictive modeling tool, Gemini Sports Analytics, to make optimal use of the massive datasets they’ve compiled. Gemini is a “force multiplier,” CEO Jake Schuster has said, by simplifying the process of building machine learning algorithms catered to each club’s specific needs.

“What I really liked about Gemini was they didn’t have an ego in trying to solve every problem,” QPR Director of Performance Ben Williams said. “They created a tool where you can solve your own problems.”

Around the time of QPR’s on-field nadir, CEO Lee Hoos retired from that role, while remaining as chairman, and hired Christian Nourry as the new chief executive. Nourry was 26 and a managing partner at Retexo Intelligence, a data analytics and advisory business that worked with Real Madrid CF, AS Roma and the Mexican national team. (He became the youngest CEO in English soccer, with one European executive describing Nourry as “the Lionel Messi of the football business world,” according to the Independent.)

Nourry wanted to implement market-leading solutions to upgrade the club’s tech stack. QPR asked itself, according to Williams, “Are we able to interrogate that data optimally, to forge outcomes that are positive for the long-term future of the football club? Our answer to that was ‘no.’” That prompted the search that led the club to Gemini.

The very thesis of Gemini is to empower analysts, coaches or “anyone with a dataset,” as Williams put it, to take action with data. He noted that it can be used for everything from tactical match plans to traffic probabilities on bus trips to road matches.

Founded by Schuster, a longtime sport scientist, Gemini leverages the tech infrastructure of cloud and AI partners Snowflake, DataRobot and Databricks with data sources such as StatsBomb, SportRadar, Genius Sports, Sports Info Solutions, SkillCorner and Infinite Athlete.

As an example of what’s possible, Shuster explained that Gemini users can apply clustering algorithms to match stats and tracking data to create passing trees to identify how opponents like to create scoring chances of their own or concede them to others.

“The early lift was certainly centered around pre-match and post-match reports,” Schuster said. “So, opposition analysis — how do we approach this game? And then, post-match, what happened and what are the implications for future events? A big part of the early work with them was helping them automate those reports. And then the next step was approaching the summer transfer window.”

But it also remains an area of exploration, as QPR onboards more staff members over time.

“The power comes from our curiosity,” Williams said. “We’re in a phase of play and learn and discovery.”

Other Gemini clients include the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, the SEC’s Texas A&M and Italian soccer club Parma Calcio, which just claimed a Serie B title to earn promotion back to Serie A. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company also raised two investment rounds north of $3 million in the past year. There are now 27 sports franchise owners either directly invested in Gemini or through recent round-leading investor Will Ventures. QPR’s owners individually own minority stakes in two MLS clubs (LAFC and FC Cincinnati) as well as MLB’s Cincinnati Reds.

That financial backing has led to Gemini’s first customer success hire, former Arizona Diamondbacks Director of Operations Sam Eaton, and a budget allocation to hire a CTO, a role Schuster is actively recruiting. The company is also in the testing phase of some new generative AI features it hopes to roll out soon.

“The whole idea behind going with this tool was we can be really broad in our thought process of what we think helps our performance,” Williams said, “rather than be penned in by somebody else’s thought process of what is important to performance because they’ve created a tool that solves a problem that they once had.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

An article brought to you by our Event Partners

By the Leaders Performance Institute team

John F Kennedy’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech remains a masterclass in political rhetoric.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said the US President at Rice University on 12 September 1962.

Those words, undiminished by six decades of distance, might have become a monument to presidential hubris had NASA’s Apollo program failed to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Instead, Kennedy’s vision galvanised his nation and, allied to federal resource, gave the program the impetus it needed.

NASA’s ‘moonshot’ has since become a byword for ingenious and audacious projects that showcase adaptive growth. That is: being adaptable in the face of change and challenges, continuously striving for growth and improvement, learning from your experiences and making strategic decisions that drive progress and innovation.

Moonshots were a theme of the recent Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica, with Jennifer Allum, who is part of the leadership team at Alphabet’s X, The Moonshot Factory, taking to the stage to discuss an environment where audacity is a prerequisite.

It was a marvellous start to proceedings on the morning of day one but, in truth, other themes discussed across both days, from talent and creativity to strategic thinking and resilience, just as readily point to adaptive growth.

Here, inspired by the worlds of sport, the arts and academia, we touch upon seven factors that can help to fuel your own moonshot, whether you’re taking your first small step, sustaining your early momentum, or looking to make a giant leap.

1. Fearlessness in the face of failure

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed that large, established organisations do not always take advantage of potentially disruptive technologies and trends, while newer and less-established organisations often do. In his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, he explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations.

Allum discussed the concept onstage in front of an audience where ‘failure’ is a common bedfellow. She understands that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. So while X, The Moonshot Factory performs an instrumental role in delivering ‘moonshot technologies that make the world a radically better place’, there are myriad failures that pile high on their factory floor – and Alphabet wouldn’t have it any other way because they perceive failure as a learning opportunity rather than a threat.

Allum’s top tips for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma:

• Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
• Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
• Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
• Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

“We reward project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty.”

Jennifer Allum, leadership team, X, The Moonshot Factory

2. Swerve common pitfalls

Long-established teams can all do better, but what of those just starting out, particularly in women’s sport? How can a beginner’s zeal be channelled into establishing a stable, long-term concern? Those are two of the questions currently facing NSWL expansion team Bay FC and their WNBA counterparts the Golden State Valkyries.

It is an exciting time for women’s sport but there are pitfalls to be avoided:

• It’s important to understand and appreciate the differences between men’s and women’s sport – don’t look to replicate the approach. Bay have, for example, intentionally fashioned a culture that is people-first, player-centric and focused on player health.
• What skills are required in expansion environments? An entrepreneurial mindset, for one. Embrace the unknown and have empathy.
• There will be critical moments in the early days, but this is where you can shape the culture. Find moments to demonstrate what is both acceptable and unacceptable.

“Our culture and values are aligned to the name of our team. We want people to be Brave, Accountable and You; underpinned by the idea of bringing your authentic self everyday.”

Lucy Rushton, General Manager, Bay FC

“I am a believer in asking people how they are feeling in terms of a particular climate: are you sunny, happy or cloudy? It’s a simple way to help measure your culture.”

Ohemaa Nyanin, General Manager, Golden State Valkyries

3. Conditions where creativity can thrive

Is yours a creative learning environment? Either way, you’d do well to listen to the Westside School of Ballet (LA’s most successful public ballet school) and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music – what can such schools teach the world of sport about the creation of learning environments that encourage improvisation, experimentation and intrinsic motivation?

It begins with a love for the art form and a welcoming ecosystem that allows the freedom to explore:

• Open yourself to the notion of ‘winning’ in other ways; you need to allow failure to happen and experimentation to take place so that young people can find different moments in their work.
• How can you shift your environment to create more challenge and failure, but communicate it in a way, that nurtures solution-minded individuals who can respond to what’s thrown at them in the context of competition?
• Can you say you understand your young athletes’ intrinsic motivations? If you don’t, it can leave a lot of creative potential on the table.
• At UCLA, they do not speak about ‘working’ music – they talk about ‘play’.

“We want to foster a love of the art form rather than fear.”

Adrian Blake Mitchell, Associate Executive Director, Westside School of Ballet

“We work on improvisation to get to more fundamental questions – what am I trying to convey? What story is being told?”

Eileen Strempel, Dean, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

4. Leaders skilled at optimising their energy

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage in Santa Monica. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.”

How to show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.
• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.
• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?
• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

“Are the habits that you’re leading with still serving you, your career, role and impact?”

Holly Ransom, author, The Leading Edge

5. Collective resilience

No matter your level of success or the smoothness of your systems, high performance can exact a large toll if your stakeholders are not resilient. As Red Bull US CEO Chris Hunt explained, a leader’s first job is to engender trust amongst their team. There’s no instant solution – you have to advocate for people and stand up for your values time and again.

How can people in high performance develop their resilience?

• Celebrate examples of resilience within the team.
• You have to manage your personal and collective fear of tactical failure; allowing for the ability to test and learn from the failings and, simultaneously, build resilience. Look for dynamic interruption and get better at absorbing it.
• Leadership is not changing, but the context is. What has traditionally grounded teams in the past will still help them now.

“Marginal gains come from resilience, and victory comes from marginal gains time and again.”

Chris Hunt, CEO Red Bull US, Red Bull

6. Clutch performers

As a big wave surfer, Red Bull’s Ian Walsh is well-placed to discuss performance under pressure. He took to the stage to discuss the strategies that serve him well out on the surf.

Pressure points:

• Understand how your body reacts when under duress both in sport and beyond. From there you can maintain control.
• When your work requires you to continually return to moments of risk and pressure you have to ensure that your ambitions, drive, hunger and desire outweigh your fear of failure or injury.
• At Red Bull, Walsh and his teammates catalogue their good and bad experiences in the moments of pressure and risk – these help to create a lifetime of understanding that can be used the next time they encounter both.

“Pressure is a valuable condition for performing at your highest level.”

Ian Walsh, big wave surfer, Red Bull

7. The role of tech in decision making

Technology at its best can inform your decision making and, as Fabio Serpiello, a professor at the University of Central Queensland, told the audience at Red Bull, there are steps you can take to ensure you’re using the right technology and datasets.

Ensure you’re staying on top of tech innovations:

• Is the technology helping us to make better decisions or requiring us to make more decisions? It can be overwhelming so be sure your tech is in service of the former.
• The future lies in the ability to read and interpret context; personalise recommendations and make decisions easier.
• Consider using the Cynefin Framework.  This is a conceptual tool used in the field of leadership and decision-making. It was created by management consultant Dave Snowden in 1999 during his tenure at IBM Global Services. The word ‘cynefin’ comes from Welsh and means ‘habitat’ or ‘haunt’.

“Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean impact. We often forget about impact because of the overwhelming amount of consumer tech.”

Fabio Serpiello, Director, Sports Strategy, University of Central Queensland

By Luke Whitworth

There is a firm link between strong cultural leadership and sustained excellence.

Those leaders can be athletes, such as England captain Harry Kane, who will lead the Three Lions in their Euro 2024 campaign. Or Breanna Stewart, the New York native who returned home in 2022 and led the Liberty to the 2023 WNBA Finals; bagging the league’s MVP in the process.

Kane and Stewart are the embodiment of local heroes who have done well, particularly if you include Kane’s remarkable spell at Tottenham Hotspur.

Then there are coaches who represent an expression of the systems that enable their programmes to excel. On that front, one can point to Kane’s international manager, Gareth Southgate, who has overseen England’s most successful spell since the mid-1960s.

Cultural leaders, however, need not be so high profile. They operate at all levels of an organisation, independent of job title or seniority. Do you recognise the cultural leaders in your team? What steps can you be a better cultural leader?

Cultural leadership – the super enabler

The link between leadership and sustained success is the centrepiece of a research project run by Edd Vahid, the Head of Football Academy Operations at the Premier League.

In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.

Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.

The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.

The second, which took place in early June, homed in on cultural leadership, specifically how leaders might change or sustain a culture. The concept is, as Vahid described, a “super enabler” for your sense of purpose, belonging or even psychological safety.

Culture should be an accelerator and energiser

In the session, Vahid observed that organisations are increasingly deliberate and intentional about culture because they see it as a competitive advantage. It is not a one-time annual event – it’s a regular part of ongoing conversations.

This is lost on some organisations, as Jon R Katzenbach, Illona Steffen and Caroline Kronley wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2012:

‘All too often, leaders see cultural initiatives as a last resort. By the time they get around to culture, they’re convinced that a comprehensive overhaul of the culture is the only way to overcome the company’s resistance to major change. Culture thus becomes an excuse and a diversion rather than an accelerator and energiser’.

Four ways to get to grips with your culture

To understand culture you need keen observation and data collection. Vahid proposed several useful tools:

1. The OODA Loop Framework.

During the Korean War, John Boyd, an American military strategist and fighter pilot, devised the OODA Loop as a decision-making process designed to emphasise adaptation and agility in four stages:

• Observation: collect data from various sources.
• Orientation: data is filtered, analysed and enriched.
• Decision: selecting actionable insights for the best response.
• Action: action is taken and the loop begins anew.

Organisations can apply the OODA Loop to assess and respond effectively to cultural dynamics.

2. Cultural health checks

Vahid also pointed to other efforts to collect data around culture, such as UK Sport’s ‘cultural health check’ or retail giant Selfridges using data to better understand their most culturally-stressed communities.

3. Critical incident reviews

Vahid also stressed the importance of critical incident reviews to help observe culture during specific moments such as exits, inductions, wins and losses.

4. The Sigmoid Curve

Teams can also find their place on the Sigmoid Curve, a common model for tracking organisational growth and decline. At each stage, expectations can change, which affects what we see, hear and feel.

Five Steps Towards Cultural leadership

Vahid explored five steps that can help a team to develop cultural leaders.

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process. As Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Reviewin 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like. Katzenbach, Steffen and Kronley noted that existing cultural strength should be acknowledged.
4. Build a guiding coalition: identify key individuals and consider diversity within your leadership groups. You should build what thought leader John Kotter calls a ‘guiding coalition’.
5. Understand the levels of cultural leadership: Vahid’s research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

• • Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
  • Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
  • Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

By Luke Whitworth

May was the month where Emma Hayes signed off at Chelsea Women with a fifth consecutive WSL title, Red Bull’s reigning world champion Max Verstappen extended his lead in the Formula 1 World Championship, and Tadej Pogačar won his second Grand Tour at the Giro d’Italia.

Those three, different as they are, share a reputation for sustained high performance and, as such, represent the profile we had in mind as we picked May to launch of our latest Performance Support Series.

That series – which has two sessions still to run at the time of writing – was just one of the opportunities on offer to Leaders Performance Institute members through their membership during the course of the month.

There was much more besides and The Debrief is designed to keep you on the pulse of contemporary thinking across the high performance space. Do check out some of our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.

Four interconnected cultural enablers

We have all asked ourselves this question at various times but Dr Edd Vahid and Management Futures decided to delve a little deeper.

In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.

Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.

The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four interconnected enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.

Vahid explored each enabler in turn.

1. Cultural leadership. It is seen as a super enabler. When you’ve got strong and aligned cultural leadership it will be a precursor to psychological safety and belonging.

Questions for you to consider in your organisations:

• Who are your cultural guardians?
• How are you supporting the development of your guardians?

2. Psychological safety. This was prominent in Vahid’s findings. Author Amy Edmondson in her book, The Fearless Organization, suggests that ‘making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century’. She also highlighted the importance and relationship between cultural leadership and effective psychological safety.

Questions for you to consider in your organisations:

• What are you doing to build safety?
• How do you respond to mistakes in your environment?

3. Purpose. Most high performing cultures have an inspiring purpose. Vahid referred to clothing brand Patagonia, which says ‘we’re in the business to save our home planet’ and its every action is driven by that purpose. Those organisations that are attending to culture regularly are taking the time to check-in on their purpose; what it means for the organisation and the individuals within.

Questions for you to consider in your organisations:

• Does your organisation have an inspiring purpose?
• How closely aligned are an individual(s) and organisational purpose?

4. Belonging. Ultimately, we want to get people to a point of challenge, but that doesn’t always happen by accident. The In his book Belonging, Owen Eastwood wrote that ‘our senses are primed to constantly seek information about belonging from our environment. We are hardwired to quickly and intuitively understand whether or not we are in a safe place with people we can trust’. Most optimal environments where there is a high degree of psychological safety is where individuals feel comfortable to challenge.

A question for you to consider in your organisations:

• What belonging cues are evident in your environment?

Achieving communication nirvana

Win, lose or draw, teams are constantly in transition and, as such, they need different things from their leaders at each stage in their development.

This can be tricky because you can’t shortcut the development of rapport, belonging and trust – all are critical to team development and effective transitions – and yet teams and leaders still face pressure to perform now.

That comes down to good communication, as discussed in a recent Leadership Skills Series session.

In fact, it is worth exploring five levels of communication as experienced in a team setting. It is useful to think of the following as a pyramid. Teams begin at No 1 and work towards No 5, with increasing exposure to risk, vulnerability and criticism at each level.

1. Basic ritual: this is a safe place to start. When sharing basic rituals, we are weighing each other up and there is an unconscious measuring process going on.
2. Sharing information: the next layer up is when there is a confidence and trust to begin to share information. This might be personal information or progress and insights on internal projects.
3. Exchanging ideas and opinions: now we want to know what people really think. This is where the risk factor in teams can be increased. The asking of opinions and ideas. There may be an exposure to risk and a need to be bolder.
4. Free expression of feelings: some teams never really get to this stage. This can be a drag on potential when you can’t share feelings and there is a lot of energy wasted. There can be an atmosphere of tension.
5. Unspoken rapport: this is the nirvana. The stage where things happen and others know how to respond.

Five fundamentals when measuring the impact of your mental skills work

In the modern landscape of high performance sport, we often here the phrase ‘everything that is managed is measured’.

Such is the desire to show impact and return on investment, we are indeed measuring much of what can be measured.

Nevertheless, it can be difficult to measure the impact of areas such as coach development work or, as discussed in a recent Virtual Roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members, mental skills work.

While it is tempting to jump into the measuring process, it is important to first build some pre-requisites.

1. Have you defined and discussed what are we actually measuring and why? We can’t be trapped into the tendency to measure for measure’s sake.
2. Does trust exist in the environment between staff, players and the coaches? When we think of the success of effective mental skills or sport psychology support, trust is a cornerstone of a well-functioning approach.
3. Additionally, how can you work through your coaches to get athlete buy-in while garnering their feedback on the athletes’ growth and improvement?
4. Are your data and insights valid and reliable?
5. How regularly and intently are you debriefing? As part of the process, make time to debrief and discuss results to understand how stakeholders are interpreting data.

By Luke Whitworth

What traits characterise a sustainable high performance culture?

We have all asked ourselves this question at various times but Dr Edd Vahid and Management Futures decided to delve a little deeper.

In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.

Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.

The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.

Vahid explored each enabler in turn.

1. Purpose

Most sustained high performing cultures have an inspiring purpose. Vahid referred to clothing brand Patagonia, which says ‘we’re in the business to save our home planet’ and its every action is driven by that purpose. This example calls to mind the work of Alex Hill who, in his book Centennials, suggests that organisations that have sustained success over a long period of time have a stable core and a disruptive edge. According to Hill, it is important that your purpose doesn’t fluctuate too much or disappear because its has the power to help your organisation shape society and enable you to effectively engage future talent.

Another aspect of ‘purpose’ is the idea of individual and organisational alignment. Those organisations that are tending to culture regularly are taking the time to consider how their purpose resonates at an individual and organisational level.

Questions to consider:

• Does your organisation have an inspiring purpose?
• How closely aligned are your people’s sense of individual purpose and your organisation’s?

2. Psychological safety

In The Fearless Organization, psychologist Amy Edmondson suggested that ‘making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century’.

The findings of Vahid’s ‘Cultural Hypothesis’ suggest that cultural leadership plays a fundamental role in an individual’s experience of psychological safety. In the session, he referred to Netflix, which has adapted its in-house feedback mechanisms to ‘lead with context and not control’ (concepts that are highly aligned and loosely coupled).

Questions to consider:

• What are you doing to build safety?
• How do you respond to mistakes in your environment?

3. Belonging

Owen Eastwood, in his seminal book Belonging, wrote that ‘our senses are primed to constantly seek information about belonging from our environment. We are hardwired to quickly and intuitively understand whether or not we are in a safe place with people we can trust’.

Organisational anthropologist Timothy Clark also highlights a bridge between psychological safety and belonging in suggesting that the first level of psychological safety is the idea of inclusion safety – you belong to something.

New Zealand Rugby provide a case study in this area, as the theme of belonging is central to their philosophy. They recognise the diversity of their playing groups. They invest in their inductions, and there’s some literature that highlights the importance of your sense of belonging on entry and the critical process of effective inductions to ensure from the very outset that you feel like you belong in your environment. There is a regular and considered approach to belonging cues and rituals that reinforce the idea that people belong, and that could be as simple as ensuring that people’s voices are heard.

Ultimately, we want to get people to a point of challenge. The most optimal environments where there is a high degree of psychological safety is where individuals feel comfortable to challenge.

A question to consider:

• What belonging cues are evident in your environment?

4. Cultural leadership

An inspiring purpose is essential, a psychologically safe environment is crucial, and a sense of belonging exists as a fundamental human need. Coupled with exceptional leadership, these elements distinguish cultures that thrive.

Leadership is presented as a crucial and critical part of Vahid’s ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. It feels central in that it is seen as a super enabler, that when you’ve got strong and aligned cultural leadership it will be a precursor, certainly to psychological safety and belonging.

Questions to consider:

• Who are your cultural guardians?
• How are you supporting the development of your guardians?

The four traits of the ‘Cultural Hypothesis’ ranked by members

Vahid invited attendees to rank their current satisfaction with these enablers. This offers a snapshot of the state of play across elite sport, particularly in North America, Europe and Australasia:

1. Purpose
2. Belonging
3. Cultural leadership
4. Psychological safety

Other reflections on culture

The ‘Iceberg Effect’

The discourse prompted a further question on the nature of ‘culture’. Vahid cited the work of psychologist Edgar Schein on the ‘Iceberg Effect’. Schein’s model likens culture to an iceberg: what we see (artifacts) is just a fraction of what lies beneath (espoused beliefs and assumptions). This is how that may look in a sports organisation:

• What we see: policies, systems and processes.
• What we say: ideals, goals, values and aspirations.
• What we believe: underlying assumptions.

Culture: a ‘group phenomenon’

The ‘Iceberg Effect’ chimes with the work of business academic Boris Groysberg who in 2018 co-wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review with Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng. They defined culture as:

• Shared: it is a group phenomenon. It is a product of the interaction between multiple people.
• Pervasive: it exists on multiple levels.
• Enduring: it is resistant to change.
• Implicit: it possesses a ‘silent’ language.[1]

[1] ‘The Leaders Guide to Corporate Culture’, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2018

If you are interested in joining the second session of this Performance Support Series with Dr Edd Vahid on Thursday 6 June, sign up here.