By John Portch

“The hardest thing with elite level para athletes is that you tend to gain experience and learning from mistakes,” says Victoria Moore. “Because you don’t have a large group of people to compare an athlete to.”

The Head of Performance Support & Solutions at Athletics Australia oversees athlete support for both the Olympic and Paralympic programs. When it comes to the latter, the first thing she says is that no two para athletes will have the same high support needs.

“It’s hard to know everything about everyone on the team and what might happen to them in different environments,” she continues. “So having a breadth of knowledge of a range of issues, any comorbidities and being able to adapt, is really important. That’s why I try to upskill people where possible and share knowledge and what I’ve learned.”

She spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute earlier this year as Athletics Australia prepared to take a team of 39 athletes to the 2023 Para Athletics World Championships, which took place in Paris in July. Australia would claim 14 medals: three golds, eight silvers and three bronzes. It was a haul that placed the nation eighteenth in the medals table.

A year from now, the 2024 Paralympic Games will also come to the French capital. This year’s worlds afforded Athletics Australia a rare opportunity to run tests in near identical conditions. “That doesn’t always happen, but when we can align then we try to align.”

Moore was a contributor to our Performance Special Report Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions. She also found time to discuss her role, which sees her work across both Olympic and Paralympic sport.

“You need to be specific about how you manage each team environment. I’m a connection point, joining the dots, and giving people as much information as I can to be able to support them to do their role effectively.”

Here, we highlight four lessons from Moore’s work meeting the needs of para athletes and how they may provide food for thought for the wider sporting world.

1. ‘You can’t have a lot of peacocks’

When Athletics Australia sends a team to a meet such as the Para Athletics World Championships, it is important for coaches to have both humility and a capacity to build rapport. Or, as Moore puts it, they must have the right amount of ‘awesomeness and awkwardness’. She says: “I have this thing about teams, it’s my ‘awesome and awkward’ theory. Generally, what it means is, when I put a team together, I’m quite considered in how I do it across performance support. The awkward and awesome theory is that people need to have the right amount of awesomeness with regards to technical capabilities but the right amount of awkwardness so that on a team they are able to fit well. So you can’t have a lot of peacocks. Whereas you might be able to have them in a daily training environment because they all go home at the end of the day, people need to be able to pick up the roles of others in camp environments. They need to be humble and they need to be able to build rapport quickly.”

2. Identify opportunities to upskill your support staff and blend complementary skillsets

Moore will not rely on prior experience alone when preparing to support para athletes at a major games. “I really need to understand the needs of the athletes that make up the team and then put support structures around them,” she says. “For a para team, that means anything from underlying medical conditions that require extra support to the skillsets of the staff that are going.” If there is a large contingent of athletes that compete in wheelchairs then it could be that Moore prioritises doctors or physios with expertise in pressure sore management, for example. “If there is a gap then I need to upskill the team so they can manage in those conditions.” This approach has led to numerous adaptations, such as the employment of performance psychologists with mental health training. Where limits on staff accreditation press upon Moore, she will work backwards with her team to enable them to cover as many bases as possible. “Our carers’ roles have evolved. We used to just take people who had good relationships with the athletes. Now we take very highly skilled occupational therapists who help manage the daily planning and can pivot towards other areas.” Support staff roles at a competition are defined by their necessary skillsets, which are determined by documenting athletes’ needs. “People are more accountable now and better able to deliver.”

3. Try to test athletes away from their home environments

Athlete assessments of need are better done away from home. “We always try to create camps where we can get these athletes away from their daily training environment so that we can truly understand what their needs are going to be away from home – it’s hard to know what those things are until you see them outside their home environments and away from their traditional support systems,” says Moore. The athletes themselves also need to experience being away. “They probably wouldn’t know [their true support needs] until they leave their home environment,” she adds. “We haven’t taken individual carers away with us. We don’t want to create a dependency. We’ll always make sure that we build rapport with the athlete and our support person. We also have to think of the needs of the whole team.”

4. Devise frameworks that capture the wisdom and knowledge of your team

When considering para sport support services, learning tends to come through a process of trial and error as much as through evidence-based practice or interventions. Therefore, it is important to capture knowledge gained in the field. “You can create efficiencies by synthesising information,” says Moore. The potential issue is that budgets will only stretch so far and requests for funding can come from all angles. Moore cannot risk support systems and processes becoming unwieldy and inefficient. She recommends a framework that enables the transition of knowledge from one cycle to the next (“an information dump”, as Moore herself puts it). “People want to be innovative but they tend to not know where the big rocks are in doing that. If you can have a person coordinate that, you can be efficient, you can understand themes, you can see what’s been done and not reinvent the wheel. Then you can help people to put in frameworks to begin to implement change.”

Victoria Moore was a contributor to our Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Athletics Australia, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Hockey Ireland and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch

Years – perhaps decades – had passed since the Leaders Performance Institute had last heard of the Y2K scare until it was dredged from the recesses of our mind by UK Sports Institute CEO Matt Archibald.

He is discussing the logistics of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI] changing its name from the English Institute of Sport in April. As part of the process, on the 24 April, the organisation’s website and email addresses changed and its staff entered a short period of downtime to enable those changes to take effect.

“Everything worked like it did across Y2K and nothing dropped out of the sky,” he says, referring to the late-’90s fear across society that digital calendars resetting to ‘00’ on 1 January 2000 might cause havoc. “I did have a flashback on the morning and remembered the millennium,” he adds.

The English Institute of Sport [EIS] was founded shortly after the turn of the millennium, in 2002, to support teams and athletes across the UK’s ‘Home Nations’ – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“We routinely send hundreds of our people on secondments with teams or sports to the Olympics and Paralympics,” he continues. “What we all aspire to do is support British sports, teams and athletes that go to the Paralympics and Olympics and perform at their best, and they come from all of the Home Nations. For me, it just helps with that.”

The EIS, and now the UKSI, will continue to work closely with the other home nations to ensure all the support offered is aligned.

The reasons behind what Archibald admits was a “misnomer” are “locked up in the mystique that surrounds the genesis of the Institute”.

“Right from the outset, there was a question mark about the name,” he says.

“People who have been with the organisation for 20 years have sent me screenshots of various documents and items of stationery with the name ‘UKSI’ on them”.

For some people, the misnomer was an important issue and they argued for change.

“A number of voices within the system raised the question again and again when others didn’t see it as a priority”.

Of course, the name change was never the priority – the Institute’s commitment throughout the 2024 Paris cycle was and remains the delivery of ‘outstanding support that enables sports and athletes to excel’ – but the case was vigorously made and the name change was approved by all key stakeholders.

The transition was operationalised in the 12 months before it was announced and, through that process, the other Home Nations sports institutes, namely Sportscotland, Sport Wales and Sport Northern Ireland, offered their full support. “They are all 100% behind us and we do not now supersede them. We might be the scale operator, but they will carry on doing the great work they’ve always done”.

While there is some nostalgia for the era of the EIS, there is undoubtedly greater cohesion with the renaming. “UK Sport [the government agency responsible for investing in Olympic and Paralympic sport in the United Kingdom], the UK Sports Institute, British Olympic Association and British Paralympic Association – we feel it more accurately reflects the Institute’s role as a powerhouse of the British sporting system.”

Speaking of which, the changes to the previous EIS logo are minimal. “We haven’t deviated too far because we did feel that if you change both the logo and the name too much at the same time then you do run the risk of becoming somewhat unrecognisable”.

The EIS logo, characterised as it was by a V shape, has been retained with tweaks to the colours used – red, white and blue – to make it more British. “There was no piece of paper that clarified the original colour scheme and there were lots of stories floating around. One was that the colours were, broadly speaking, although not exactly, the five Olympic colours. There was also a view that the V may be the V for ‘victory’ or maybe a butterfly stroke or maybe the ribbon of a medal.

“Following consideration and reflection with our people, we felt that the ribbon concept chimed with more of our people more strongly in the sense that we see ourselves as an organisation that provides the support and the infrastructure to athletes and sports to help them win.”

“We wouldn’t be comfortable putting the medal on the front and we’re in the background, but the ribbon that holds the medal sits well alongside what the UKSI is going to do and what the EIS has done. So we’ve gone back to that history and that may have driven the original logo and we’ve maintained that. We’ve also changed the colour to have a GB-style red, white and blue, and that can be used online and in some of our physical branding as well”.

The UKSI does not expect its rebranding to have any impact on the quality of the services it provides to the UK’s sports teams and athletes. “Fortunately, we’re a business to business institute that does not serve the general public,” says Archibald. “The risk for us in a name change, with a loss of custom or a loss of recognition, is negligible. For example, we supply to British Swimming and they’re not going to get confused by who we are.

“The high standard of support that we offer to sports and athletes will not change, we are as committed as ever to delivering the quality that we have become known for across the board.”

Archibald explains that an internal working group, in tandem with a small group of consultants, ensured the transition was smooth as the branding was brought up to date and rolled out across all UKSI platforms.

“We see this as a significant piece of work but not one that’s so high risk that we needed to follow a particularly well-beaten path. We’ve done it ourselves and we’re confident that we’ve run a good process and taken everyone with us,” he says.

There is optimism for the future too. “We’ll have a little more confidence as there’s no question mark about why we’re called this or why we aren’t called that and it will enable us to be more confident in how we express ourselves.

“We’re not expecting a 20% performance uplift for the sector at Paris on the basis that we’ve changed our name, but we do see it as a long-term strategic adjustment that will hopefully help us to attract the best people from across the country to work for us, people that weren’t as keen to join the English Institute of Sport as they would the UKSI, especially if they come from the other Home Nations.

“We also feel this could apply to athletes having a greater understanding of who we are and what we do and perhaps make them feel more comfortable acknowledging our work externally if they’re not from England.”

Another aspect that remains unchanged is the often recognised black t-shirts sported by EIS staff when working with teams and athletes. This was important to Charlotte Henshaw, who won gold in the Canoe Sprint women’s KL2 event at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics.

Upon learning of the EIS’s impending name change from UKSI Communications Manager Grace Cullen, she asked: ‘Will you still be wearing the black t-shirts? That’s all that matters because we see people in black t-shirts and we feel reassured because we know those people, they know what they’re doing, they’re there to support us’.

“We’ve changed our name, we’ve slightly changed our logo, and we will still be in our black kits,” says Archibald. “It does stand out as most UK National Governing Bodies tend to wear red, white and blue and our people have always been in black. It’s nice that athletes recognise that and, for them, it will be business as usual.

“It doesn’t matter if our name is changing, they know UKSI people will be of the same high calibre and will still be there to support them.”

Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

Main image: courtesy of the Australian Institute of Sport

By John Portch

Lúcás Ó Ceallacháin, the Coach Development Lead of the National Generation 2032 Program at the Australian Institute of Sport, is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute about his work using Lego Serious Play with athletes and coaches.

“If I were to describe it in a nutshell,” he says, “It’s a facilitation method. A novel way of having great conversations.”

During his sessions, attendees will be encouraged, using un-themed Lego (“no Star Wars”), to build a model based on a thought, question or intention.

Lego Serious Play’s reputation as a tool for solving complex problems stems from a project in 1996 when Lego Group owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen worked with two professors from the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, to explore ways to stimulate imagination and creativity within his organisation.

It has proven popular as a strategic planning tool, with Lego bricks physically standing in for issues and challenges faced by companies across the corporate world. The method is also making inroads in the world of sport thanks to the work of individuals, such as Ó Ceallacháin, who has observed high levels of engagement with athletes and coaches.

“The amount of cortex devoted to any given body region is not proportional to that body region’s surface area or volume, but rather to how richly innervated that region is,” he continues. “Your hands have a disproportionate representation in your brain. Sports people use their hands and body more than the average person so these senses are trained to a higher level.”

Some of sport’s challenges are ideal for exploration through Lego Serious Play. “Where it works really well is with things like high-ceiling, low-threshold questions where everybody’s got an answer, everybody wants to contribute. If you’re talking about strategy, culture, values or vision, it’s a good tool.” Lego Serious Play also encourages people to be curious rather than judgemental, and is designed to give everyone a voice, from the head coach to the kit person.

It is not, Ó Ceallacháin stresses, a mere team-building exercise. “There’s definitely a team-building element because you build connection, but if someone says ‘we’ve done paintball and we’ve done go-karting – let’s do Lego next’ then I know they’re just trying to fill a couple of hours with a fun activity. I’ll quickly say no to those kinds of things, but if someone says ‘we’re struggling to understand why this is a problem in our organisation’ that’s where I get curious.”

Here, Ó Ceallacháin explains how he uses Lego Serious Play with teams across Australia.

How does a typical session pan out?

LÓC: A typical session lasts for two hours – this is to ensure we have time to build the skills they need to use the method. The first 30 minutes are dedicated to introducing the method, the background and how to communicate through metaphor and storytelling. Then we get cracking! The method follows four steps – Question, Build, Share and Capture.  We use the Padlet App to capture our work as we go.

Is there an optimal group size?

LÓC: I like to work with smaller groups but it can be done on a large scale. The challenge with large groups is you won’t have enough time for everyone to hear what is being shared – so you need extra help on tables or in the room.

How do you use Lego Serious Play in your sessions?

LÓC: I’ll take a group through the skills first; ‘what do you need to be able to do?’ and the skills are not about ‘how do you connect these pieces or how do you do that?’ The skills are about ‘how do you tell stories, how do you use metaphors?’ So something as simple as an orange brick might hold a lot of meaning for somebody because they’ve put meaning into it. We ask questions, we build the answer, we reflect and share the answer together – that’s how we generate insights – then we capture, we’ll take pictures and keep a record of it and break it all down and build something else. Typically they’re building for five minutes. It’s not hours of building. The bulk of the session is always about the discussion that they have about whatever they’ve built.

Image: Australian Institute of Sport

With what issues does Lego Serious Play work best?

LÓC: Questions that need creative answers. These are typically around vision, strategy, culture, values, UX design, innovation, team development. What’s exciting now is how people are taking this to their own environments and applying their owns skills to enhance it. It unlocks the creative thinking of the wisdom in the room.

What is a good type of question to ask?

LÓC: High-ceiling, low-threshold questions – future-focused questions where everyone has an answer and can contribute. I use an assets-based approach so I will often frame the question in a positive way. My approach is to understand what their challenge is currently and also what they may have tried previously. The flow of a session builds to a bigger question but all the steps on the way contribute to the momentum of a session.

How does that look in practice?

LÓC: For example, one technical director asked: ‘how do we get the best out of each other?’. Their team was new and had few opportunities to be in the room together. So there was a bit of ‘who am I and what am I about? What do I care about and what are my values? What makes me tick?’ All of that came out in a three-minute build that we did and they started talking about that. Then we said ‘think of a time when you’ve been part of a really successful team – what did it look like? What did it feel like? What helped you to be your best in that team and what are some of the things that you bring to that team that no one else can bring?’ Lots of stuff came out and then they were then able to talk about ‘what are the things that are common? What are the things that are different? How do we get to those next steps for what we want to build?’ And they’ll continue that conversation long after I’m gone. But it just kind of gave them a primer rather than just coming in and asking ‘what are your values?’ and they look at their logo or their crest and start talking about whatever had been written down by corporate leadership a couple of years ago. They asked of themselves: ‘what are our behaviours? What does that look like? How do we want the players to experience us as a coaching team as well?’

Image: Australian Institute of Sport

Can you outline the science behind Lego Serious Play?

LÓC: I learned from [Lego Serious Play expert] Michael Fearne – who trained me – there are sound scientific principles underpinning the use of Lego in engaging people, changing the conversation and solving complex problems. The way building something with your hands unlocks knowledge you didn’t know you had. There is also the joy and productivity of getting into a flow experience. There is safety in talking about issues through a model rather than the usual business/power dynamic. For example, we might have an idea and we try to make sense of it, but when you put something physical out into the world and you and I can look at it together and say ‘well, what do you see? What do I see? Let’s turn it around and look at it from another side’. We see very different things. And then the flow piece is fascinating with sportspeople because of the connection between the hand and the brain. When you’ve got a big pile of Lego in front of you and your hands are like another search engine for your brain. So you start pulling out stuff that you didn’t even know was there. With my HP hat on – in simple terms, it works!

How might that emerge during a session?

LÓC: So I go back to our orange brick. One coach used an odd orange brick in a model and I asked them about it. They  said: ‘Oh… that’s the fire in my belly and that’s why it’s in the middle. My grandad was the first person who brought me to a game. That’s where I got the fire and I take that wherever I go and I think about how important it is to pass that on to the next generation of kids’. That was just a little brick, just the colour, that didn’t look like anything but the fact that we had a quick conversation about it; and the meaning that somebody had put into that brick was really powerful. These stories come up and the power of storytelling resonates here in Australia, where that storytelling tradition is really strong. And I feel like sportspeople just love a good yarn.

How does a second or third session differ from a first?

LÓC: We can get to more complex questions more quickly using different skills, such as rapid builds or you can build with no question or instructions. Then I hand them a Post-It with a theme to explain using the model they built. With the skills warmed up we can tackle system issues or stakeholder maps – the truly complex environment that HP Sport operates in.

How do you encourage introverts or those less likely to talk to actually speak up?

LÓC:  I make sure that we let people know that they only have to share what they want to and I also put caps on time. With curious questioning lots of people start to share more. Best of all is that others in the room model the sharing and it gets the rest of the group going. The design of the first hour is all about warming up to get to better sharing – we don’t jump in at the deep end.  In my research as part of my Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance at Dublin City University I am also looking more closely at how Lego Serious Play builds the behaviours that contribute to psychological safety.

How do you know when to stop digging with a person? What are the signs to move on to the next person?

LÓC: We put time limits to ensure that we don’t get one person dominating the conversation but I also invite the group to question the model and be curious about it. Often I do very little talking. At the top of the session I make sure that people know that they only have to share what they are comfortable with. The time limit helps with those who are more sceptical too – they get time to warm up to the method and once others share their stories you find the sceptics start to join in.  This is also part of the power of Lego Serious Play – it flattens the hierarchy – no one is more expert in your own story and model than you, but you invite others in to see and share your inner world. That demonstrates courage and vulnerability.

Image: Australian Institute of Sport

You said you take pictures. What are you trying to capture?

LÓC: I’m documenting the experience, summarising insights and generating artefacts that can continue to be used long after the session ends. We are also encouraging people to reflect on and retrieve what they have learned. Also, each model is broken down after it is built – so you are constantly breaking down the models to build something new. It also allows me to be fully present in the room and the conversation.

Do you take notes along the way?

LÓC: Honestly, very few. My job is to continue to facilitate the flow of the conversation so that the participants are producing the questions. This is another reason why the live feed on Padlet is important. By the end of the session the group will produce some simple guiding principles to apply going forward.

Do you prefer to be well-versed in the sport or team?

LÓC: I like to have some background and context of the room I am walking into – where does the session fit in for them, what kind of headspace are they in? I don’t want to have preconceived notions about the group or the outcome. As a former athlete, coach and High Performance Director myself, I’m cautious about what I introduce to an environment.

How do you work with leaders to give them the skills to host sessions of their own?

LÓC: I’m doing a large amount of Lego Serious Play facilitator training now. It can be nerve-racking to lead a session with your own team so I’m currently building a community of practitioners who I train. They are very supportive of each other and help to design sessions for each other. I am excited to see how others apply LSP, especially in situations like 1-to-1 wellbeing or coaching sessions. Everyone will come up with their own way of applying this to solve their challenges.

By Sarah Evans

Recommended Reading:

Tips For Coaching Generation Z, From Eton College

Are Coaches Too Dogmatic About their Methods?

Coaching Mastery & Creating Environments for Talent to Flourish

Framing the topic:

Our first Member Case Study of the year provided an opportunity for Michelle De Highden and Bill Davoren from the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to delve deeper into a case study of the coach development practices that are having the most impact across the Australian Institute system.

The session explored:

• The AIS’s key operating principles.
• Their ‘how’.
• The impact of AIS coach development practices so far.
• How they work to shine a lens on experiential, social learning.

This was followed by:

• Breakout discussions for attendees.
• A ‘what we have learned’ feedback opportunity after the breakouts.

Michelle and Bill began with a outline of the AIS’s key operating principles:

• Respect the challenge of coaching.
• Understand the context of the National Sporting Organisations (NSOs).
• Value engagement.
• Seek collaboration.
• Pursue alignment.
• Think bespoke and creative solutions.
• Underpin with evidence-based thinking.
• Commitment to social and experiential learning.
• Consider system outcomes.
• Design thinking methodology.

Next came an explanation of the AIS’s ‘how’:

They seek to enhance coach capability through the following approaches:

• Develop and lead.
• Integrate and organise.
• Consult and collaborate.
• Design, create and deliver.

How the AIS shines a lens on experiential, social learning:

• Design features in their programmes are consistent with research showing that most coaches tend to favour informal approaches to learning.
• Social structures that enable meaningful interactions to take place are a core feature.
• Better outcomes are typically achieved when programmes are continually shaped by the inputs of people for whom the solutions are being sought.

Four examples of coach development programmes implemented so far:

1. Head Coach Summit Programme:

• Targets the development and learning of our best coaches.
• Adopted a learner-centred approach.
• Considers different perspectives and ways of thinking.
• Examines real world experiences.
• Hosts fortnightly, virtual, small group facilitated discussions.
• Held a two-day summit in Alice Springs last September for the first cohort.

2. Generation 32 Coach Programme:

• A national programme for 31 coaches, 20 of whom are women.
• Includes the Queensland Australian Sport Programme (24 coaches, 13 women).
• Coaches complete two-year full-time/Part-time employment with the NSO and National Institute Network partner.
• Provides mentoring.
• Hosts AIS-led learning labs (16 across the two years).
• Works with the principle that success leaves clues.

3. High Performance Coach Mentorship Programme (Pilot)

• This programme is a direct response. The No 1 requested opportunity is mentoring from both more experienced and less experienced coaches.
• Two pilot programmes: AIS Programme (11 mentors, 13 mentees); Athletics Programme (10 mentors, 26 mentees).
• Enables pre-programming training, programme guides, financial support and ongoing support from programme managers.
• Places the emphasis on developing non-hierarchical support networks among coaches.
• Facilitates the skill development of mentor and mentee coaches.

4. National Coach Network

• Network of Australian High Performance coaches.
• Facilitate networking, learning and engagement with one another.
• Formal and informal learning opportunities.
• Newsletters and regular webinars – world-class coaches.
• Future: face-to-face learning events.
• Reach: 300+ network members.

These were the two discussion points attendees were encouraged to answer in their breakout conversations:

• What is currently occurring in your coach development space? Is there a fundamental philosophy/approach?
• What is the impact of this learning programme? And how do you know?

The following emerged as learnings:

• It’s a big job!
• Collaboration is key.
• Different lenses are vital.
• There’s no one way to do things.
• Relationship-building is important.
• NSO engagement is fundamental.
• Performance directors are absolutely crucial to coach development.
• The inability to resource coach development adequately can be an issue.
• There is a need for a future-focused approach to programming.
• A social and experiential learning approach is favoured by coaches and learners alike.
• Coaches are under increased scrutiny, which can take its toll.
• People can feel undervalued and confused without proper support.
• High performance, athlete voice and wellbeing are connected.
• Coach wellbeing should be a priority.
• A periodised approach to coach development is sensible.
• Prioritise impact over quantity.
• There is momentum to be harnessed in the high performance environment.

Questions and key takeaways from our members:

• How do we utilise athlete feedback in evidence of a coach’s growth and the development impact?
• It is important to have a shared understanding of key operating principles / guidelines for how coaches align.
• In Australia, there is an Aboriginal culture of story sharing and elders passing on information, yet in our world we let wisdom leave the building too easily.
• One attendee liked the behavioural traits that were listed for being part of coach development group. Helps people bring a similar mindset to the task.
• A pool of mentors from across the sport sector can really help to impact on coaches, coach developers, performance psych, mentors etc. it broadens the impact and support.
• Independent analysis of impact is essential. We can’t ‘mark our own homework’.
• Checking that the athlete and coach are on the same page.
• Exploring at the idea of experiential and social learning and how best to connect like-minded people.
• One attendee said: “in our breakout room we discussed the importance of mentoring – how we utilise that and measure impact. From Bill’s initial brief I personally really enjoyed the thought that had gone into engaging culture, and understanding the bespoke needs of teams and coaches”.
• One attendee liked the phrase ‘library book’ approach – making it more bespoke.
• There is value in having someone independent to come into to your programme and work with the coaches on specific areas such as communication.
• Look for more opportunities to bring coaches together – use various forms of bait.
• How can we leverage the idea of ‘custodians of knowledge’ to support our more experienced and skilled coaching staff to pass on knowledge to other coaches across our pathway?
• Can we identify coaches earlier who really want to go on the long journey?
• It is important to agree who owns coach development when the system is looking to lead, enabling people to be most effective on the front line of coaching in the sport.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the first day.

(Day 2 takeaways here.)

Session 1: Collingwood Training Observation

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood

• Profiling the current environment: upon Craig’s appointment, he asked both staff and players for one word to describe the environment – what came out was really clear, those in the building lacked connection. To drive alignment, the group came back to creating a set of fundamentals they could live by that was agreed as a collective.
• The aim: ‘to create an environment where we live side by side, acting like winners everyday.’

Magpies training observation questions:

For the first portion of the event, we watched the team train. Attendees were asked to note down observations around three core questions, the answers to which were then fed back to coaches. Those questions were:

1. What stood out?​
2. What impressed you?​
3. What do you think could be improved?

Feedback:

Question: what was the focus of the pre-training meeting?

• Players were asked to analyse and evaluate the specific play versus coaches telling them what is required for the play. The purpose was to build the capacity to adapt out on the oval. The coaches wanted the players to feel it in a live space instead of being inside. The coaches wanted to allow the players to see how their movements help to connect with others. A real aim from a staffing point of view is to create on-field coaches, so creating situations for them to think and solve problems is a key strategy of the team’s training methodology.

Question: how often do you do repeat the same drills?

• Collingwood has regular setup on Tuesdays, which is a down day in terms of GPS. A large focus goes into specific roles, with focus and intent. The team talk about the ‘why’ a lot, but an area of improvement for the coaches is how the drills flow and efficiency between them in the nature of their design. A question they are asking is how are you valuing the time versus the efficiency of the time?

Question: talk us through the senior coach and assistant coach relationships – how do you communicate, challenge and collaborate?

• Every day, organically. There is a lot of consistency in the vision and plan. In the AFL, as a league, there is a lot of like-mindedness in the sport – Craig shared that he was determined not to have that in the club, instead having a diverse coaching group. It was important to note that the robust discussions that coaching teams often strive for do not happen immediately – a good question to ask is ‘would you tell the coach or other coaches how you are feeling?’ The robust discussions around coaching are easy, but do you spend a lot of time with each other and others’ families in order to take it to the next level?

Question: how do you balance the winning mentality in the vision versus that mentality in training?

• Craig shared from prior experiences from winning organisations is that they smelled the same and had the same DNA. The behaviours that correlated to winning are consistent in other environments. Players and staff really felt as part of a team, there was a sense of belonging and value in the staff. We can’t guarantee winning, but we can control behaviours and mantras.

Question: what role or involvement in the training is by the leadership group?

• The coaching staff explained that they want them to solve problems, evaluate and come up with solutions. They do some background workshopping off the oval and are asked to come up with solutions on the field. The leadership group are also pushed in terms of leadership development to help lead themselves and others around them.

Session 2 – Performance in Practice: Part 1 – Building a High Performing Team (Selecting the Right Talent)

Speakers: Dave Slemen, Founder, EPP, and Anna Edwards, Managing Director, EPP

• It’s important to always come back to the idea that high performance is a collective endeavour.
• The quality of connections between people is as important as the quality of individual talents.
• With the above in mind, it’s crucial to ensure you have the best possible talent​ ​and​ ​ensuring the richness of connections between them.

Nine-Step framework:

1. Cultural fit
2. Communication
3. Character
4. Leadership & followership
5. Relationships
6. Strategy & planning
7. Philosophy
8. Sporting knowledge
9. Technical skills.

Communication:

• How, when and with whom are you communicating?​ ​Board or team? Or both? Internal or external?​ ​
• This is about understanding the different languages required by different situations​ ​
• Do you vary your style for different team members? What is the impact of your approach?

Character:

• Which of the five types of Emotional intelligence are required for a role?​ ​
• Do you over, or under, index on one or another?​ ​
• Do people need to relate to each other in a particular way?​ ​
• Is there a personality type missing from the team to balance it out?

Leadership / followership:

• Followership can be as important as leadership​.
• Sometimes being effective in a role means taking people on a journey with you​.
• Inspiring people to follow is a very different style to standing at the front and showing the way.

Relationships:

• High performance comes from creating effective relationships at different levels: the board, the media, owners and players​.
• Increasingly we see roles that require individuals to be able to form relationships quickly across boundaries to get things done​.
• The ability to play different roles, while staying true to yourself, is an increasingly important attribute in leaders at all levels​.
• Curiosity about others – their skills and abilities is key to success. This is how we can develop change at pace.

Strategy & planning:

• How people create change is important – do they dictate it or show by example?​ ​
• Are you / your team members strategists, implementers, or both?​ ​
• Do you have a methodology or a systematic and organised approach?
• Do you expect the same in others?

Philosophy:

• How do you know you belong?
• What creates a sense of belonging in your team?​ ​
• Is your job to establish a vision?
• Does the role need someone with a vision of how they want to play or what they want to create?​ ​
• Do you know what you stand for?
• And can you articulate it? Can others?​ ​
• How much flexibility is there on where you are going? How adaptable do you need to be?

Sporting knowledge:

• Is it important to know the sport? Why?​ ​Or is it better not to? Why?​ ​
• How can you translate knowledge from sport to sport? What’s unique, and what’s transferable? ​
• Who in your team can ask the stupid questions and challenge the ‘always done’?

Technical skills:

• The very specific ‘must haves’ usually found on a practitioner brief​.
• These could be financial acumen, medical skillset, youth development experience or qualifications​.
• Is specific applied knowledge required?

Traps & Opportunities: Getting the Right Talent in Your Environments

Speakers: Darren Burgess, Director, EPP, and Craig Duncan, Director, EPP

• What are the most common traps? Those that purely use gut feel. Existing networks can create a sense of safety, but also create groupthink. Not using process for how you go and think about talent development.
• Loyalty over competency: hiring people who are loyal and have your back. Even if they may be loyal, have you checked for competency? If you invest in new people and ideas, they may be more competent and have your back anyway.
• How much input do you get from athletes? The best environments seek that input.
• Not factoring in culture. How do you want people to respond in certain situations? If something goes wrong, what are the reactions you are looking for? Align to the profile of people you are looking to bring in.

Session 3 – Performance in Practice: Part 2 – Building a High Performing Team (Creating High Performing Teamwork)

Speaker: John Bull, Head of High Performance, Management Futures

• Leaders who create high performing teamwork instil a culture of collaboration, galvanising people across silos behind a shared purpose. They create an environment of psychological safety and trust, where people debate ideas and support each other.
• High performance is a collective endeavour – so how are you building a culture of teaming?

Four skills of effective collaboration:

1. Collaborative mindset:

• Build trust at pace.
• Act ‘as if’ it is there immediately.
• Give ‘belonging cues’.
• Reach across silos.
• Invest time and energy in building relationships.

2. Speaking up:

• Contribute – sharing knowledge, insights and ideas.
• Raising issues.
• Constructively challenging.

3. Listening up:

• Situational humility (open to what we don’t know).
• Proactively seek out and be open to other people’s insights and views.
• Lead with questions.

4. Situational awareness:

• Be aware of and take responsibility for how the team is performing.
• Help the team to make good use of time.
• Diamond thinking: what could we do (option generation)? What should we do? (Evaluate options and make a call.)

Six common inhibitors of effective teamwork:

1. Unequal contribution: who speaks is determined by personality and / or status.
2. Groupthink.
3. Tribal: we are naturally less open with people we see as part of a different group.
4. Lack of psychological safety: leading people to withhold their thoughts.
5. Fixed position.
6. Lack of strategic focus: we don’t use time effectively in meetings.

Psychological safety

Psychological safety is the extent to which people feel that speaking up will be welcomed and not judged negatively.

The conversations we are not having will be some of the most important the neuroscience. When people feel social pain it compromises the brain’s ability to think by up to 30%.

Four types of psychological safety:

1. Inclusion safety: belonging, valued and safe to be myself.
2. Learner safety: I feel safe to show gaps in my knowledge and competence. Make mistakes and ask questions.
3. Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas and be trusted.
4. Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge status quo.

How can we increase psychological safety?

1. Put it all on the table.
2. Building trust and belonging.
3. Make it easy to speak up.
4. Model openness and honesty.
5. Praise it.
6. Challenge with skilled candour.

Creating conditions for high performing teamwork

1. Build buy-in to the value of teamwork

• Unite people behind a common goal which requires teamwork.​
• Share your vision of high performing teamwork​.
• Get clear on how teamwork can add value and what you’re looking for in terms of teaming behaviours, and share this with people​.
• Create some quick wins that show the value of teamwork​.
• Build momentum and buy-in by creating some quick win opportunities for effective teamwork to add value​.
• Use feedback to reinforce collaborative behaviour​.
• Praise it​. Challenge in a supportive way where you want more of it. (i.e. hold people to account on it).

2. Create the conditions for high quality interactions ​ – inside & outside of meetings

• Invest time in building trust and respect. Learning a bit about each other’s stories. Unique strengths each person brings.​
• Build psychological safety. To enable honest constructive debate, free flow of all ideas and people asking for help.​
• Agree a set of winning behaviours, you review against regularly. Building collective responsibility.​
• Review the effectiveness of your meetings​ Resolve any tensions quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the second day here.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

The meaning of ‘wellbeing’ in Australian sport has continually developed and the most marked development has been in the last five years.

“Traditionally, it centred around careers and education,” Matt Butterworth, Mental Health Manager at the Australian Institute of Sport [AIS], tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “There may have been some mental health support but nothing as formal and structured as a mental health service. Then there was a fundamental shift in how the AIS did things.”

One of the key milestones was the launch of the AIS’s Wellbeing & Engagement initiative in 2018. “The resulting services were a statement that we’re helping people to be the best athletes but we’re also helping them to develop into well-rounded people that can get on with their lives while they’re athletes. They’re also as well prepared as possible when they transition out,” Butterworth adds. “It’s not ‘you’re a high performance athlete and that’s it’, it’s more about ‘you’re a high performance athlete and we’re here to support you as an overall human being as well’.”

Within the theme of wellbeing, the AIS Mental Health Referral Network overseen by Butterworth operates as a national service where athletes, coaches and high performance support staff can see a mental health professional such as a psychologist for individual support that is confidential and at no cost to them. “The benefit of a national service is that you can operate at a larger scale to benefit more people across sports in terms of the resources we can build and offer in the mental health space. Then the sports themselves can choose to engage with the services they find useful.”

Here we explore where mental health sits in the wider picture for Australian athletes, coaches and practitioners.

Matt, where does the line sit between mental health and mental skills?

MB: There is a network of performance psychologists who are employed by individual sports  and they focus more on helping people with matters related to their performance on the field, on the track or in the pool. This is more mental skills-focussed. Our mental health services at the AIS focus less on performance or execution of a sporting skill, and more on helping people in managing wider aspects of their lives, such as their overall mood, relationships, and day to day functioning. The issues that my team assist with, such as anxiety difficulties, may be happening during an athlete’s performance but they’d also be occurring in other important areas of their lives such as during work, study, or with family and friends.

Can you truly balance wellbeing and performance?

MB: I think a balance can be achieved. The way I’ve heard others explain it really well is for people to be aware of what their priorities are and to spend most of their time doing things that are important to them. That’s the terminology that I think we’ll start using a bit more down here because usually when you say ‘lifestyle balance’ you see people roll their eyes and start turning away from you. If we’re aware of what our priorities are, the important things for us to be doing, the things to make life quite meaningful and enjoyable for us, then that’s a good way to be spending most of our time.

How can you address the common fear, that mental health services are only for making athletes feel better about poor performance?

MB: I think the people who choose to come into a high-performance system, whether they are athletes, coaches, or high performance support staff, like physios, dietitians etc. they probably self-select in that they are quite focused on performing and wanting to win. My perspective would be ‘what are the things we can do to help them move towards that?’ There are times when you have setbacks, there are times when you don’t win. If you can accept not necessarily feeling awesome, accept when things don’t go to plan, it is quite important to manage your emotions and figure out what you need to do to change the result or get a better result in the future. If that involves people feeling a bit better instead of being absolutely crushed and devastated every time that they have a set back or they don’t win an event, then I’m OK with that. I would say it’s more about the journey and the trend to where you’re heading rather than feeling devastated any time you lose. That’s not helpful either.

How are the mental health issues facing Australian athletes evolving?

MB: Typical presentation issues for us are anxiety and depression. That’s the same for pretty much most mental health services around the world and it’s not that different in sport. It is not necessarily a new issue but we’re becoming better at detecting more things. I think our system is now doing more work in the space of eating disorders. We’re becoming aware of just how common traumatic experiences are for people generally in life and that people in our system experience traumatic experiences too. So we’re starting to get better at how we might educate people around that, how we best provide services to support people. An athlete, coach or staff member can go and see a psychologist or mental health clinician for one-to-one support if they want. The Mental Health Referral Network has been operating since 2018 and referral rates are continuing to trend upwards. Generally, the people who access the service have difficulties  at the mild to moderate end rather than needing to go to hospital or anything like that, and I think that’s an indication that people feel less stigma and are more comfortable reaching out for support. We’ve evaluated our services in the last year too and our clients are telling us that our services are helping them to be more aware of what’s more important for mental health, and how to look after their mental health as well. We’re thinking about how we continue to make this sustainable and accessible for more people as well.

How can an athlete refer themselves?

MB: Athletes and other eligible people can refer themselves to the Mental Health Referral Network directly by calling or emailing us. They can also be referred to us by another person, typically this would be by an Athlete Wellbeing Manager in their sport, but we also get referrals on behalf of people such as family members, performance psychologists, coaches, doctors or other support staff. Anyone can make a referral on behalf of an eligible person.

What about the mental health of coaches?

MB: Any coach or high performance support staff member can access the Mental Health Referral Network. Our stakeholders told us back in 2019 that if we want a healthy system then we’ve got to look after as many parts of the system as possible – particularly the coaches and performance staff that work directly with athletes. Coaches play a crucial role in the wellbeing of athletes and the broader system. We know that the expectations and pressure on coaches are very high, their roles are multifaceted, and their job security can be low. This combination of factors can take a high toll on them and their families. With coaches in particular, there’s been a development at the AIS in the past two years of having a specific High Performance Coach Development team. They focus on how best to develop coaches in the Australian high performance system. Part of their work has  a wellbeing aspect as well. We liaise with their team about how they best get information about services available to them in front of the coaches that they’re working with.

Have you enjoyed much success?

MB: Yes, I think so. Independent research that we’ve commissioned over the last four years has told us  that mental health rates in our high performance system have been fairly stable across that time but access to our Mental Health Referral Network has continued to increase year on year. We take this as a positive sign that people are increasingly aware of the need to take care of their mental health and that they’re feeling more comfortable, and less stigmatised, to proactively reach out for support when they need it. A recent independent survey of people who’ve accessed the Mental Health Referral Network also told us that the service has helped them in managing their mental health, in some cases they said it had saved their life, and they want the service to continue to be available to them. We also know from this research that we’ve got work to do around building more awareness, continuing to have the right skills mix of professionals, and we’re about to do some work around how we keep the service sustainable into the future as demand continues to increase.

Do you feel these initiatives have built the credibility of the Mental Health Referral Network?

MB: Yes. The credibility of our programs such as the Mental Health Referral Network has been built by a number of factors. A key one which I think is a hallmark for any type of success has been having great leadership. My team and I have been fortunate to have excellent leadership sitting above us so that we could get on with the job of helping athletes, coaches and staff. There’s been many leaders who’ve assisted. Our current Acting Director of the AIS, Matti Clements, has been a leader at executive level and has really owned and driven the AIS’s approach to wellbeing over the last four years. I think it’s accurate to say that her vision and leadership has been transformative for our system. I think that other factors that have helped in building credibility is the authenticity and work ethic of the people providing mental health services to athletes, coaches and staff. The people involved have taken the approach that if we say we’re going to do something then they’ve worked really hard to deliver that for our stakeholders, whether that’s an individual athlete or a national sporting organisation or one of the organisations that runs the various games in terms of Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth Games.

What is next in the mental health space for the AIS?

MB: I think moving more into how we best support mental health at a systemic level, so the overall Australian sport system or the National Sporting Organisations (NSOs/NSODs) who are running their high performance programs but, at the same time, also needing to support the mental health and wellbeing of their athletes.

Does that research tend to back up what you thought in the first place?

MB: Yes, I think so in a number of areas. It’s also given us insights into particular issues we should be targeting more. The trauma space is one of those, the eating disorder space is another one as well, which is why in our Mental Health Referral Network we’ve done a lot of work to ensure professionals with those skillsets are available to help people in our system. Moving forward, we want to create pathways for people who experience more serious  mental health difficulties. While the rate is probably lower than we have in the broader community, we’ve  got some work that we need to do in that space around having good pathways.

A podcast brought to you by our Partners Elite Performance Partners

“I’ve spent a lot of time in professional sports and often been one, if not the only female, in those particular organisations,” says Matti Clements, the Acting Director of the Australian Institute of Sport.

Her observation is all too common in such a male-dominated industry with certain roles, such as psychology, often presumed to be a more natural fit for a female practitioner than, say, a strength & conditioning role.

Matti, for her part, is a psychologist by training but has served in a series of senior managerial roles – becoming a pioneer in the process – and has shifted perceived wisdoms in the fields of people, culture and wellbeing.

As such, she was an ideal guest for the latest edition of the Elite Performance Partners (EPP) Industry Insight Series Podcast where she spoke to Dave Slemen, EPP’s Founding Partner, about her career journey and her thoughts on the evolution of psychology and wellbeing in sport.

She continues: “Over time, I got a bit more comfortable with ‘what do I bring? Why am I here? So what is the role that I’m being asked to fill and how do I utilise my strengths in that role?’”

Over the course of the conversation, Matti also spoke about:

• How being a leader differs from working as a specialist [4:30];
• Parallels she sees between psychology and marketing [8:00];
• The current shift in thinking around coach wellbeing [20:00];
• Building cultures of psychological safety [28:00].

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

In Partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our fifth and final Leaders Meet of 2022 was around how to collaborate with the wider interdisciplinary team.

An ongoing thread throughout the conversations across the day was how crucial relationship building is when working within an interdisciplinary team.

Session 1: Session Observation with Loughborough University National Tennis Academy:

Featuring:

Nick Cavaday, Academy Head Coach, Loughborough University National Tennis Academy

Louis Cayer, Coaching Consultant, LTA

Ben Trevor-Jones, Physiotherapist, Loughborough University

Kam Sodha, Strength & Conditioning Coach, Loughborough University

Ranah Stoiber, Tennis Player

For the first session of the day we had an interactive session, observing a live tennis training session at Loughborough University National Training Academy. Nick Cavaday, and the coaching team wore microphones during the session so the attendees were able to see and hear how the team approach their coaching sessions. It was not only Cavaday and the tennis coaches that were on court providing input, they were joined by the S&C and physio for the duration of the session.

Session 2: A Coaching Perspective

Speakers (from the Loughborough University National Tennis Academy):

Nick Cavaday, Academy Head Coach

Alex Bailey, Performance Lifestyle Advisor

Nathan Miller, Academy Manager and Head of Performance Support

Following the session observation, we were able to hear from Nick Cavaday, Alex Bailey and Nathan Miller to get their view in a Q&A style format on what it takes to have a perfectly functioning team around the athlete.

• Is a psychologist also present on court as part of the interdisciplinary team? Yes, we work closely with the psychology team, however they are only contracted for one day per week. When the psychologist is working, she will be on court and listen to the sessions, the coaches’ feedback, and assess how the player reacts to the feedback. The psychologist also feeds into the wellbeing and psych/social team who are full-time practitioners.
• What are the processes around session design, especially for a technical proficiency session? How do you make it the best quality session? The athlete needs to be mentally engaged as there is high learning content and a lot of detail. It shouldn’t be scheduled at the back end of a tiring week, as the athlete needs to be more mentally fresh. These sessions actually have some of the highest load in terms of mental/physical so it’s better to do them in the morning and when the athlete is physically fresh.
• How much are athletes involved in the analysis process? There’s a balance, as they grow there’s a transition period of needing to know more about their opponent but then having information overload and not concentrating on her own game. When they are younger they don’t have analysis and so they just focus on playing, but getting this balance of how much information is needed as she gets older is key. As they get older, the coaches compare key stats against other world top junior players to see if there are any trends or areas of real improvement. Coaches can analyse the stats and use it to look deeper and understand how that can translate into coaching points before they share them with the athlete. Analysis varies so much when they are younger as it is so harder to pick out trends, and they are more focused on the athlete’s understanding of the game when they younger, and as they get older and the trends are more obvious, then you can incorporate the analysis into coaching.
• How do you encourage openness and feedback from the younger athletes? You have to recognise that it’s a huge transition process for the younger athletes, therefore we do a lot around helping the athletes feel a sense of belonging to the programme. We look to build relationships with the staff and players in the first instance, coaches visit their home environment too; and building relationships is a big focus when onboarding new junior players. Pre-match chats and post-match debriefs when on the road also encourage open feedback. These are interactive and collaborative sessions, rather than the coach telling them what they need/don’t need to do, and the athlete always feeds back first.

Session 3: Building Relationship Intelligence

Speaker: Jide Fado, Coach & Trainer, Management Futures

For the third session of the day, we shifted our attentions to exploring a skill that can be hugely impactful in working with others, building relationships. Fado began the session by asking our attendees to discuss in their roundtable groups and think about what skills needed by those who are good at building relationships. The attendees were then asked to make a snapshot wheel of their relationships with the colleagues/departments they work with, and score their relationship with each out of 10. He then invited participants to answer the following questions:

• What strikes you about your wheel?
• What surprises are there?
• Where would you like to focus some energy?
• What score would you like this relationship to be?
• Specifically, what does that relationship need from you?
• How motivated are you to do it?
• What is your first step?
• When will you do it?

Key takeaways:

• Don’t find time; make the time to build relationships.
• Show your appreciation.
• Regularly reflect on the quality of your relationships and take action.

Session 4: A Bird’s Eye View

Speaker: Mo Bobat, Performance Director, England & Wales Cricket Board

Moderator: Edd Vahid, Head of Academy Football Operations, Premier League

For the final session of the day, we had the opportunity to explore the strategic view of the inter-disciplinary teams and hear from the Performance Director of England and Wales Cricket, Mo Bobat. The session format was a Q&A style with Edd Vahid from the Premier League drawing out some learnings around interdisciplinary support.

• What is high performance? It’s important to pay attention to both words, and inevitably it means to be better than everyone else, and to be able to sustain it. I think you need three ingredients to operate at a high performance level: quality of people, alignment to a vision, and to be less dysfunctional to your opposition.
• Interdisciplinary support is all about cohesion. Ultimately you want cohesion so you can add to the player experience.
• When you think about problem solving, often there’s not one problem that is wrong, so why would there only be one solution?
• When you have diverse thinking, you’re more likely to find the best solution.
• Just having more people at the table and more disciplines working with athletes, if they are not aligned then it can create more problems than it solves. They have to work together in a clear, cohesive and simple way.
• We have had healthy disruption recently with a new head coach coming in. There is enough pressure around the first team at the moment that my role is to not add to those pressures. How can you get them to prepare like a professional but play like a kid enjoying the game with no pressure? It is important to do the work off the field to cover scenarios so they don’t have to think on match day, they can just perform.
• Start with the needs of the athlete and getting buy-in from the people that are closest to them such as parents, agent etc., and then collaborating to speak about their performance programme. If you start with the programme you can miss some of the most obvious pieces and solutions, and also lack the buy-in from the athlete.
• Don’t underestimate the value of having the athlete in conversations about their development, with the other practitioners. They need to understand the bigger picture and also the process.
• Managing multi-format players across different schedules is a challenge and so is finding a time to sit down and make a plan for these players with the wider team.
• We are conscious of wanting to make the players feel like they are a part of one programme rather than stretched across different programmes with different outcomes and with different practitioners.
• Is it in the player’s best interest? Practitioners have to be humble enough to be able to recognise whether it is in the players best interest for you not to be a part of their development.
• A skilful generalist who is really adaptable might be more valuable to a team than just simply adding more specialists to a group. Of course, a specialist can be incredibly valuable but if you think the answer is just adding more specialisms, it doesn’t necessarily add more value if they aren’t aligned and don’t work cohesively.
• Player power and player ownership is a key area of work within interdisciplinary teams moving forwards.
• Strategy is all about priority. Therefore you have to be really honest and clear about what the key focuses are. How you then communicate this with the athletes is also key, and you need to have them bought into the strategy.
• If the player is self-aware and clear on their own needs that really helps the wider team. But if not how can you communicate and involve them in the development process. Having the player at the centre is crucial, and you must let them adapt to the different practitioners.
• If you’re struggling to fulfil a need or a role, an adaptable generalist in your team can be invaluable as part of the interdisciplinary team. You don’t want to compromise specialisms but you have to be aligned and cohesive.

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The team behind the team

This year (2022) marks the 20th Anniversary of the English Institute of Sport (EIS). We were formed in 2002 and have grown significantly over those 20 years to become a world leader in sports science, medicine, innovation and technology.

Our primary objective is to provide the outstanding support that will enable sports and athletes to excel, both on and off the field of play. We achieve that by working in close partnership with sports and our other stakeholders. While this report will focus on the EIS’s work, we could not operate or deliver any of the services you will read about without the support and partnership of the sports we work with and multiple other organisations. We are grateful to all our partners for their collaboration and feedback which helps us to learn and improve the services we offer.

After our formation in 2002, the EIS has continued to grow and add new services to our portfolio, meeting the growing needs of the high performance system. After Rio 2016, where the EIS contributed towards 93% of medals won by GB athletes, we created a world-first Athlete Health team, as well as taking on responsibility for a dedicated Performance Innovation team. By the time the Tokyo Games came around, we were proud to be working with 40 different Olympic and Paralympic sports, as well as sending more than 100 of our people to the Games as part of the official support teams for Team GB and ParalympicsGB.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a recent example of how well the EIS adapts to handle challenging situations; our medical teams worked extensively with sports to produce Return to Training guidance, enabled athletes to continue heat training by installing individual heat tents at sites across the country and administered more than 500 Covid tests to athletes.

We are committed to putting people at the heart of extraordinary performance and none of our success as an organisation would be possible without our 350-strong expert team. Our people work tirelessly behind the scenes to problem solve and innovate, often working as part of, or as an extension to, a sport’s personnel. I am delighted that through the course of this Special Report, you will hear from a number of that team, some of whom have been with the EIS for over 15 years!

I am immensely proud to lead this great organisation as we look to another 20 years of outstanding support. I hope you enjoy reading about our teams, projects and successes, as well as hearing from some of our much-respected colleagues from the world of high performance sport.

Matt Archibald, CEO, English Institute of Sport

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