A session brought to you by our Partners

Speakers:

Joel Shinofield, Managing Director, Sport Development, USA Swimming

Jatin Patel, Head of Inclusion & Diversity, Rugby Football Union

Moderator:

Shona Crooks, Head of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Management Futures

We kicked off the second day of the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium with Joel Shinofield and Jatin Patel delving into how they are able to weave Inclusion & Diversity work into the fabric of their organisations.

Inclusion:

• Be inclusive first, and be really intentional with it. You want to foster an environment where people can be themselves and contribute.
• You need to ensure that when you bring in diverse talent, you have to provide them with the support to ensure they thrive.
• If you understand inclusion better, it will make engaging with diverse groups much easier.

What are you doing to make your organisations inclusive?

• Bystander training – how do we get teams to have more effective conversations and have the confidence to speak up? How do you ask better questions of each other?
• You have to invest in it. USA Swimming have a grant programme for clubs to move into new facilities. If you are able to access to the sport in your community, you are much more likely to be involved in the sport.
• Water has been an incredibly divisive tool in American history – pools were off limits to black families, so we have to acknowledge that first and intentionally increase greater access. We have to look at the ways in which we have excluded people to then help us find ways to include them.
• Rugby United – primarily aimed at black and Asian communities. England Rugby first looked at insights from these communities, their engagement, positive and negative experiences and tailor the approach to the specific communities. Ultimately it is about how we bring that cultural awareness into the broader game of rugby.
• Education is key, how to take responsibility of how to be more inclusive.
• On each of our teams there is someone who has DEI training. It is therefore woven into our coach development programmes. You have to make it part of your fabric.
• It is a strategic imperative as well as an outcome and output. ‘Drip drip’ it, don’t just have milestone big events, have it woven into every day and make sure it is pushed on the agenda constantly.
• Cognitive diversity starts with inclusion – how are you welcoming people in with new ways of thinking into your organisation?
  • Weekly department meetings, anyone can put something on the agenda, no matter your role.
  • How we approach specific groups where we know we haven’t done enough with in the past – there is a big gap in female coaching at the moment. Therefore we need a better pathway for young female coaches.
  • Data is crucial to understand how you haven’t served communities in the past so you can change it.
• Talk about it! Make it part of your everyday thoughts and conversations.

By John Portch

Effective performance pathways will create space for outliers, according to Ken Lynch, the National Performance Pathways Manager at Australian Sailing.

“Not everybody will fit into ‘the box’ and there are many out there that comment negatively on sport ‘pathways’,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“While the term ‘pathways’ can be off-putting, looking beyond the concept and understanding that many sports are producing pathways that represent the many but are tolerant of the few is important. Getting clear on what ‘good’ looks like enables you to achieve this flexibility and offer time and resource to those with potential who may not quite fit the mould.”

Lynch argues that rigid, linear pathways are unlikely to be fit for purpose as a guide or for use as a selection tool. “Most performance pathways I have worked with are considerate of non-linear progression,” he adds. “They give athletes room to fail and learn and work with other athletes over extended periods to better understand athlete potential and how they respond to the various stimuli provided within the parameters of any well designed and applied framework.”

Can a performance model sustain both linear and non-linear progression? “I think that it has to if sustainable, repeatable success is the goal,” says Lynch, who explains that efficiencies come from an accurate understanding of the numerous factors behind what it takes to win.

“There are plenty of elements that contribute to sustainability that require attention and minimal resource to have impact in the first instance. For example, how are you succession planning your coach pool? How are you testing who has potential while adding capacity to your coach workforce?

“Many of these things can be achieved utilising existing platforms and, with the addition of a small level of investment, can become a significant contributor to your program. Even something as simple as how you treat your people can significantly increase the value proposition of being involved with your sport for no additional investment.”

This is the second of two instalments in which Lynch, a former teacher who has worked at sports organisations including the Irish Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ], discusses the space given to talent pathways in sport.

The first half of our interview explored long and short-term planning, as well as the need to be evidence-based in your practice and, in this second half, Lynch reflects on the need for patience and the need to ensure staff and athletes have ready support.

How important is patience in high performance and how can a performance manager buy themselves more time?

KL: Patience is extremely important in high-performance. When we think about how long it takes an athlete to achieve the required level to deliver an Olympic medal-winning performance or how long it took their coach to learn their trade, we start to understand the importance of patience and sustained, consistent support to be able to deliver these types of moments. The ‘flow’ of a system (insert link to part one) should see the right number of athletes and coaches on the right trajectory at the various phases of the High Performance [HP] pathway. Gaps in that athlete or coach population risk the ability to deliver the required consistency and performances over more than one athlete generation. This type of view and thinking should enable a system to identify and fill these gaps early and minimise the associated risks. Milestone targets and markers can support informing stakeholders and giving confidence that interventions are having an impact and that the progress towards pinnacle goals is on track.

How can you ensure that everyone is onboard when it comes to supporting your pathway?

KL: Building capability and effective system leadership takes time. When I arrived at HPSNZ there were three leaders in sports tasked with managing HP Pathways. Minimal direct investment into that area of the system required us to generate understanding in the value of the space to sustainability. Post generating understanding, we needed to build capacity and then develop capability. The system supported this movement by including HP Athlete Development as part of the annual review process, emphasising that demonstrating future potential was an important part of the investment process. Having people in various sports waking up in their sport every day thinking about development was a huge advantage – much better than an external probe or support dropping in periodically. These types of pathway roles are quite new to Olympic and Paralympic sport so the learning curve for many was quite steep. Very soon people shifted from managing the space to leading and driving it. This was a real turning point for many sports but it took six to eight years of consistent attention to achieve that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a lot of it still remains – not a bad effort!

What did you learn from that experience in New Zealand, where you worked for eight years?

KL: The learnings suggest that patience is required, as I believe it is, but there were many times in that six to eight years where we tried to move things a little too quickly or moved too far away from the capability build to be useful. Having built honest working relationships with those leaders their feedback helped us realign and move at a pace that was more appropriate. Bringing them with us was what enabled its success and was a good reminder to me around understanding tolerable pace and the intensity of leadership and support.

Surely tensions can emerge when the message is to be patient?

KL: It requires constant attention. Consider the markers that you lay down around the progression of something for the future. It’s important to be able to show progression. When you write a strategy across three cycles, the first four years of the cycle should see you working on all three strands:

• Current cycle (the next Games);
• Next cycle (the Games in eight years’ time) and;
• The eight-year plus plan (identifying and confirming the right type of athletes and coaches to deliver longer term).

All three areas of work should carry milestone markers and enabling the reporting of progress across each of them. Each will have projected targets to project against to understand how athletes and coaches are tracking against future performance targets rather than what it will take to deliver a performance in this cycle only. Previously, and perhaps currently in some systems or sports, perhaps those with less resource, only focus or can only focus on the current cycle and don’t turn their attention to the next one until they get to it.

How and in what ways can a performance manager support their staff?

KL: Another part of that constant, which I probably didn’t do in New Zealand well enough, is to continue to reiterate people’s understanding or support people’s understanding of the value and importance of what next cycle thinking is. Highlighting the progression so that people can see we’re having an impact and retain the interest and motivation to continue to support sustainability and the value of those with roles in this space. Most people are attracted up. Coaches are thinking: ‘how can I coach at the Olympics?’ Service providers may be thinking: ‘how can I work with the best athletes?’ There’s not many people in the world that place themselves in the high performance development space going ‘this is me. I don’t actually want to go up there. This is where my expertise is, this is where I can really deliver, this is where I can make a difference.’ Some that have lived in the ‘current cycle’ space have arrived at: ‘I’m better suited here, at this level.’ I think it requires a bit of system experience and guidance from people who lead in shepherding those with a real ability at this level to see their value to the system, the future and the repeatability of success. Quality professional development opportunities, effective planning and honest conversations are key ingredients to supporting coaches to realise their potential regardless of the level. The next step is ensuring we value and promote the work they do to highlight the important role they play in the system. These roles are critical to sustainability and have often been the forgotten ones in the past. Let’s value these people and these roles as they become a more prominent and important part of their sports.

By Sarah Evans

After a brilliant first day of insights and learning at Twickenham Stadium, we were very excited to get Day 2 of our Sport Performance Summit underway. The agenda included sessions from Andrea Furst, Sport Psychologist at England Rugby, Rob Pountney, Chief Operating Officer at Breaking GB, and Kay Cossington, Head of Women’s Technical at the FA to name just a few.

Session 1: From Grassroots to Elite: Inclusion at Every Stage brought to you by Science in Sport  

Speakers:

Joel Shinofield, Managing Director, Sport Development, USA Swimming

Jatin Patel, Head of Inclusion & Diversity, Rugby Football Union

Moderator:

Shona Crooks, Head of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Management Futures

We kicked off Day 2 with an extremely insightful session where Joel Shinofield and Jatin Patel delved deeper into how they are able to weave Inclusion and Diversity work into the fabric of their organisations.

Inclusion:

• Be inclusive first, and be really intentional with it. You want to foster an environment where people can be themselves and contribute.
• You need to ensure that when you bring in diverse talent, you have to provide them with the support to ensure they thrive.
• If you understand inclusion better, it will make engaging with diverse groups much easier.

What are you doing to make your organisations inclusive?

• Bystander training – how do we get teams to have more effective conversations and have the confidence to speak up? How do you ask better questions of each other?
• You have to invest in it. USA Swimming have a grant programme for clubs to move into new facilities. If you are able to access to the sport in your community, you are much more likely to be involved in the sport.
• Water has been an incredibly divisive tool in American history – pools were off limits to black families, so we have to acknowledge that first and intentionally increase greater access. We have to look at the ways in which we have excluded people to then help us find ways to include them.
• Rugby United – primarily aimed at black and Asian communities. England Rugby first looked at insights from these communities, their engagement, positive and negative experiences and tailor the approach to the specific communities. Ultimately it is about how we bring that cultural awareness into the broader game of rugby.
• Education is key, how to take responsibility of how to be more inclusive.
• On each of our teams there is someone who has DEI training. It is therefore woven into our coach development programmes. You have to make it part of your fabric.
• It is a strategic imperative as well as an outcome and output. ‘Drip drip’ it, don’t just have milestone big events, have it woven into every day and make sure it is pushed on the agenda constantly.
• Cognitive diversity starts with inclusion – how are you welcoming people in with new ways of thinking into your organisation?
  • Weekly department meetings, anyone can put something on the agenda, no matter your role.
  • How we approach specific groups where we know we haven’t done enough with in the past – there is a big gap in female coaching at the moment. Therefore we need a better pathway for young female coaches.
  • Data is crucial to understand how you haven’t served communities in the past so you can change it.
• Talk about it! Make it part of your everyday thoughts and conversations.

Session 2: Psychology and Purpose: Creating a Thriving Team Environment

Speakers:

Andrea Furst, Sport Psychologist, England Rugby and Surrey County Cricket Club

Helen Richardson-Walsh, Performance & Culture Coach, Tottenham Hotspur FC

For session two, we had a peer to peer interview between Andrea Furst and Helen Richardson-Walsh, who worked together as psychologist and athlete to win Rio 2016 Olympic Hockey Gold for Great Britain. The pair talked us through how they were able to create a winning team environment and the importance of the role psychology can play in performance.

• Fostering trust between the psychologist and athlete is key. The athlete trusting that they are having a confidential conversation has such a positive impact.
• Allowing the players to sit down and set the culture helped to get player buy-in straight away, and it was credit to the head coach to allow that to be the starting point.
• When your vision is ‘winning’ it can leave you with a very empty feeling or feel very disappointed even if you’re on the podium. There is something more than just winning.
• The biggest thing a head coach can do with regards to culture work is give it time. To have the whole staff and players group involved and integrate it into every day behaviours.
• ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ It is about what can you do on the hockey pitch, but also who can you be off it. To be role models for women in sport, to stand up for what you believe and use your voice for good.

GB Women’s Hockey Vision:

• Be the Difference; Create History; Inspire the Future.
• The vision, values and behaviours make you accountable. The language was everything everyone had bought into and would use regularly. You knew what was expected of yourself and of one another.

Individual mindset: Knowing your ‘A Game’

• It is so important for every individual to understand their performance mindset before they go out to play and take responsibility for this.
• Knowing this allows you to understand how to be consistent.
• This is a skill and it can be learned.
• You then share your A game with the rest of the team, and the team understand you better plus they know how they can help you to stay on your A game. It is for a team work on; and it normalises it.
• If it matters to the head coach, it matters to the athletes. The head coach sets the tone, if they disregard psychology or integrate it, it filters through to the players and makes a huge difference.

Session 3: When Sport Meets Culture: Lessons from the New Sports

Speakers:

Lorraine Brown, Head of Performance, GB Climbing

Rob Pountney, Chief Operating Officer, Breaking GB

Moderator: 

Edd Vahid, Head of Academy Football Operations, The Premier League

The final session before the lunch break, we heard from Lorraine and Rob who have been at the forefront of two new sports, and how they preparing for Olympics whilst staying true to the culture of their sports.

• We have had a cultural shift in climbing from participation to performance.
• We have to make sure the pathway is really clear, and look at ways to identify how to add value on a daily basis.
• You have to stay true to your own sport, it is easy to think you have to be like the other sports who have been well established. Keep the roots and culture of the sport whilst making the transition to Olympic sport and the increasing demands it brings.
• What does talent look like? Once we have talent, how do we help them progress? How do we create the experiences to help them fulfil their potential?
• Lots of athletes coming from other sports, migrate to climbing for its culture. How can we still be an outlet for other athletes who want to try something different?
• Breaking is about pushing the individual boundaries of your own creation which makes the training environment very challenging.
• The idea of making sure it is fun has to be top of the pile. We don’t have the fear of change right now, we are trying to find the way the sport should look based on the culture of the sport. We have the freedom to make bold decisions.
• Every day we have to accept the different behaviours from our athletes, they are more independent and have more control over their schedules. Coaches and team managers have to work with the athletes whilst embracing the individuality and creativity of the athletes.
• How do we maintain that cultural element but also raise the standard and expectation and develop the right environments for athletes and coaches to thrive in.

Session 4: Culture and Collaboration: Learning Through an Interdisciplinary System

Speaker: Carl Gombrich, Academic Lead & Head of Teaching & Learning, London Interdisciplinary School

Moderator: Jeanette Kwakye

In this session we heard from Carl about why interdisciplinary education is so important, rethinking expertise, and finally Interactional expertise.

Interdisciplinarity:

• Combining knowledge in new and useful ways.
• An explosion in the combinatorial space of ideas.
• Yet we don’t have the educational processes to support this. We often are taught in a very rigid, traditional way.
• It is a battle against specialisation.

• UCL Founded the first BASc (Bachelor of Arts And Science). This equipped the students with a very wide skillset, prepared for innovation in the workplace and a burning curiosity to understand all processes and independent thinking. Have unique combinations of knowledge.

• You are an expert because of your interdisciplinarity, not in spite of it.
• Sport is highly specialised, but the environments do change. Unless you are constantly drawing on new knowledge you won’t be able to adapt and grow.
• The value in going broad when you’re young.

Interactional Expertise:

• The ability to :
  • Ask penetrating questions
  • Play devil’s advocate or just advocate
• Translate accurately from one expert to another
• Sell
• Negotiate in unfamiliar areas
• Make jokes

Relationship to Interdisciplinarity:

• Perspective taking
• Translating between sectors
• Brokering
• Empathy
• Team Leading
• Creative approaches

Session 5: Case Study: England Lionesses

Speaker: Kay Cossington, Head of Women’s Technical, The FA

Moderator: Jeanette Kwakye

The final session of the day was one not to miss. We heard from Kay Cossington who took us through what it took to win European Gold.

Where the journey began:

• Huge investment of finances and people into women’s football. However, they grew so big so soon with little direction on where to go and how to get there.
• To get people to understand that the women’s and men’s game are different was the first big step over a major hurdle.
• Created Women’s Technical Division of the FA.
• Implemented the first Women’s technical strategy and became a blueprint for success within the women’s development teams.

Building their own Identity:

• ‘Find A Way’
• Courage
• Grounded

• However, they found that they then began working in silos. Very quickly they recognised that they had to collaborate and used the phrase ‘football first’.
• Had a curiosity of what made the best in class, and how they were able to close the gap.
• Final piece of the puzzle was to appoint the right leadership.

New Women’s Strategy:

1. Identify the Purpose: Inspire positive change
2. Performance Requirements: Elements required for success
3. Identify the gaps: England in relation to other nations
4. Performance Plan: Football first initiative
5. Understand & Deliver: All staff are aligned

• Be Different
• Take Risks
• Be Brave

“Play for the little girl inside of you who dreamt of being here one day” – Sarina Wiegman’s team talk ahead of the European Final.

Former England, Lions and Saracens lock George Kruis played at two Rugby World Cups, won three European Cups and four English Premierships during a distinguished playing career.

Those 14 years spent at the thick end of the game have imbued him with a number of skills as he now turns his attention full-time to his CBD and wellness venture, Fourfive, which he co-founded with former Saracens teammate Dom Day in 2018.

Fourfive is the official wellness provider to a number of sports organisations and is going from strength to strength, yet Kruis saw himself at a disadvantage for all his talents away from the pitch.

“Most people who start a company, their background will be in finance, it will be marketing, it might be in product development, it won’t necessarily be in your ability to catch a ball in the lineout,” he tells the Leaders Performance podcast.

Kruis hung up his boots in June having ended his playing career with the Saitama Wild Knights in Japan and came into the Leaders studio to discuss how he prepared for his post-playing career while still at the top of his game.

During the course of our chat we discuss:

• Why Saracens’ approach to player care was transformative [4:30];
• How ‘tough love’ has gradually been replaced by ‘calculated culture’ [11:20];
• What English rugby does well and what could be done better to prepare transitioning players [28:00];
• His advice for current players [30:30].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Andrew Cohen

Impact-monitoring mouthguard developer Prevent Biometrics has collected data on more than one million head impacts over the past couple of years, spanning “tens of thousands” of players that have worn its mouthguard across contact sports such as football, rugby, hockey, lacrosse and soccer. The company believes its data creates a more accurate depiction of the head impact risks associated with youth sports.

“We have really begun to restate what’s the correct amount and magnitude of head impacts in sports are [and] at young sports it shows they’re pretty safe,” Prevent Biometrics CEO Mike Shogren tells SportTechie. “We’ve shown that less than 1% of all impacts are over 50 gs [g-force] and 50g is big.”

Prevent’s mouthguards measure the g-force of each hit though its built-in accelerometers that collect data such as linear acceleration, rotational acceleration, location on head, direction of impact and total number of impacts.

Prevent’s mouthguard’s tight-coupling to the skull is a newer (and possibly more accurate) method to measure head impacts.

“10g is what you do when you sit in a chair, you can stop really hard, and you’ll get five to 10g” Shogren explains. “Ten to 20g are a bump, you might not even know what happened to you, you might not contend you got hit the head, but you had some contact. 20-30g you realize you were hit, that’s a head to the facemask, a small trip and you bump your head. 40g is when you definitely know you got hit, and 50g is bad. And above 50 is we’ve almost shown all of them to be reflective of a person acting in ways you would typically remove someone from a game.”

Minnesota-based Prevent Biometrics is involved in several ongoing studies, including working with Indiana University to equip 160 high school football players with its mouthguards and another study with a suburban Minneapolis youth tackle football organization that equipped 400 players with Prevent’s mouthguard. The University of Nevada is entering year three of a study in which 50 players on the school’s D1 college football team have worn the mouthguard and has thus far collected data on 20,000 head impacts over the past two seasons.

“We’re seeing around an average of six impacts per player. And about 80% of those impacts are below 20g and 90% are below about 25g consistently in the schools that we look at. So less impacts that are smaller is the first finding in almost everything we do,” Shogren says.

Shogren is critical of past methods predominantly used in football to measure head impacts, such as the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS) developed by Simbex that leading helmet manufacturer Riddell began adding to their helmets around the mid-2000s. That system saw accelerometers placed inside the helmet, but its impact data is less accurate than Prevent’s mouthguard because the helmet sensor system is more susceptible to moving out of place on each impact, effecting the measure of force.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill equipped its football players with Riddel’s HITS-embedded helmet during practices and games from the 2004 to 2006 college football seasons. UNC released a study on the impact data in 2007 that found “In football, a hit can easily jerk the head, for milliseconds, at 50g, and hits above 100g are common,” adding that one player experienced a 168g hit.

“All of the football data you’ve ever seen about how dangerous football is, is about five times too many impacts and way too big. And it’s because the helmets systems they use move,” Shogren says. “All the way up to college and professional levels, we’ve showed that these games are nowhere near as dangerous as the studies have reported in the past. Hits equal to car accidents, this stuff is just not usually true.”

Prevent’s data can be accessed in real time and allows for multiple team users to monitor athletes.

Among the other support of Prevent Biometrics is Dr. Joseph Maroon, who is the Team Neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers and medical director for the WWE. The NFL recognized Prevent Biometrics as a finalist at the league’s first and future pitch competition in 2017. Last year, the NFL expanded its impact-sensing mouthguard program from NFL teams to also include players on four college football programs, though that mouthguard device was developed with Virginia-based engineering firm Biocore.

“The data from the HITS system indicated there were 1,000s of hits and huge forces. And it was all erroneous, most of it was erroneous,” Maroon says. “The Prevent [Biometrics] system with fixing the mouthpiece to the upper teeth has been shown to be very accurate.”

Shogren says Prevent sells its mouthguard predominantly to teams with the price now around $300 to outfit an entire team in which each player gets their own device. The company’s biggest partnership to date has been with World Rugby, which began in 2021 with more than 700 youth players in New Zealand outfitted with Prevent’s mouthguards. The deal is now expanding to equip roughly 3,000 rugby players across the world, including players in the women’s Rugby World Cup.

Last month, World Rugby announced that it was extending its return-to-play window for players who got diagnosed with a concession to 12 days, meaning they likely would be forced to miss their next match after being diagnosed. Prevent is also working with World Rugby to establish a score of g-force that would signal when a player has reached an accumulation of impacts that would require evaluation for possible concussion.

“At some point in time, small impacts add up to a dangerous thing. We’re working with World Rugby now on with what we call a load calculation,” Shogren says. So figuring out this number where there will be some threshold where you would also say, ‘Hey, this guy in a football game, took 10 hits that added up to a number and that’s the threshold we want to assess him.’”

World Rugby’s collaboration with Prevent has also found that girl athletes at the youth level tend to sustain bigger head impacts than boys.

“We have seen differences in women, where we think because they start later in certain sports, they end up having more head to ground contacts and bigger impacts because they just don’t seem to go to the ground as well as boys,” Shogren says. We’ve confirmed that’s true that girls can have larger head impacts when they hit the ground, and it looks like it’s something to do with how they fall. So it’s immediately led to World Rugby developing some drills at the younger age for how you take a tackle and go to the ground.”

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

By John Portch

Jimmy Wright, the Team Biokineticists at the Natal Sharks, is a strong believer in the concept of ‘ubuntu’.

“It’s a simple African way of saying my existence is dependent on your success – me being well is dependent on you being well,” he told the Keiser Series Podcast in August.

“I think team sports should embrace that idea because there cannot be a single standout star in a team. You’ll never see a team succeed because of a single individual. In fact, individuals will rise to the top because of great teams.”

Wright spoke at length about his 23 years working with the Sharks – he was the first biokineticist to work full-time at a South African franchise – and how his role has evolved during that time.

“There’s more evidence to support what we do but, at the same time, there’s more perspective, but certain things don’t change,” he continued. “If you chase the science, if you purely chase the literature, and you forget about experience and what has traditionally delivered the results you might just miss the diamonds.”

Here, Wright reflects on his strengths and areas for future improvement.

Jimmy, what do you consider to be your greatest strength?

JW: It’s my ability to take perspective. Perspective helps cut through the stuff that can potentially distract and perspective is what is creating the future for us. If we can see things for how they can be and we can look back from that point to the present, and if we can tell the story of what created that reality, we will have the formula for success. But you need to be able to do a bit of future travel. Perspective is important, understanding that winning is not everything, losing is not final, but to focus on getting better – growth – and take whatever the business is going to give you year on year. Perspective for me is a good thing; I think it’s more beneficial than benching one and a half times my body weight.

What strength do you admire in others?

JW: I would say it’s putting up with me! On a good day, I can be very draining – you can ask my wife – but I think it’s not in a bad way. It’s passion. Our CEO once upon a time was a player here [Eduard Coetzee], he then went away, played in France, came back, and now happens to be the CEO of the Sharks. His go-to line is that he came back to fire me! The nice thing is that we’ve always been very good friends and we still our very good friends. It’s a respectful relationship. But I think I can be challenging. I follow the advice I would have given myself when I was younger, I push hard. If I want money, so to speak, I won’t go away until I can have what I want, and if I can’t have the money, I’ll find another way. But on a good day I’m a high performance manager’s worst nightmare.

What is the key to strong teamwork?

JW: It’s ubuntu. It’s very simply an unselfish mindset. It’s counter-cultural. Sport does teach us all the wrong values, it teaches us winning at all costs. You can’t take that idea into a marriage. If you take the idea into a marriage that it’s winning at all costs, you’re going to be single very quickly. To a lesser extent teamwork has to focus on that which I will benefit from only when the team wins. Therefore, my efforts have to be solely focused on what makes the team better because if the team doesn’t win then I’m not going to win. What makes a team better? Winning fixes a lot of problems, so I will do whatever I can to make this team win but it starts with me. It cannot start with anybody else.

How will you look to get stronger in your role?

JW: To keep that perspective I mentioned, to keep myself sharp mentally and physically. Obviously, we deliver a health service and I like to practise what I preach and I like to be respected. I’ll keep pushing myself physically and mentally, I will keep on valuing good relationships. If I can keep on doing that then when I eventually depart I will have made a difference. That’s the important thing: to say that when we leave we’ve done our best, the place is better than when I arrived, then I’ll be happy.

To hear more from Jimmy Wright, listen below:

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

By John Portch

When Rory Sloane spoke at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021, he delivered a curious insight into the make-up of the Adelaide Football Club’s player leadership group.

The club, which draws its five-player leadership group from a list of 45 decided to give youth a chance in 2020.

“Couple of guys who have been part of the leadership group over the previous four years stepped aside to let some of these young kids develop,” said Sloane.

Adelaide finished bottom of the AFL ladder in 2020 – a fact that left Sloane, as captain, “stung” – and decided to turn to youth to renew their fortunes. In this context, it made sense to empower some of the younger players on the list.

“We’ve still got a lot of leaders without titles,” he continued, “But yeah, five official leaders.”

Sloane is joined onstage by Jarrad Butler, the captain of Connacht Rugby, where their eight-strong leadership group takes responsibility for driving standards and behaviours. Together, they explore the creation of leadership groups at Adelaide and Connacht and the main dynamics involved.

Democracy

Leadership groups tend to be elected by athletes from amongst their peers and neither Adelaide nor Connacht are any different. “At the start of the year there was a questionnaire on who do you think leads by example on the field, who do you think is the best communicator, the guy that holds the most people to account,” said Butler of the process that saw Connacht’s eight-person group appointed for the 2020-2021 season. “We kind of ticked boxes that we thought [represented] values that we wanted to have as a group, as a team, who do you think best kind of ticks that box. And we tried to put a group together that then covers a whole lot of those bases, so we didn’t want just a whole bunch of guys that are all maybe very good at the same areas, so that was important.”

Regular meetings

“What we’ve been trying to do is catch up at least once a fortnight just to get on the same,” said Butler. “I think where we fell short, especially when the seasons for us dragged on, you kind of get caught just going through the motions a little bit and you forget to catch up. “We’ve have a meeting where we all get together and these guys aren’t really on the same page, and you’re seeing that come out in the performances as well and you’re like, well we haven’t got together in four weeks [so] no wonder we’re not on the same page at the moment. So we found one of the first challenges I guess was being diligent and actually catching up with each other, and again it’s one of those things where Andy Friend, our head coach, he was like ‘well it’s up to guys if you want to get together, we’re not going to chuck something in your diaries for you – either you do it or you don’t,’ and we learnt early that if you’re not going to do, then everything else starts slipping by the wayside as well.”

Learning dynamics

Butler explained that leadership groups also have a vital role in ensuring learning and development of understanding because there are times when a coach’s impact can be limited. “It’s one of those things where you’re in a meeting and you’re getting – you know, the defence coach comes up, the head coach, and they’re showing clips and clips and clips – it’s easy for things to get watered down,” said Butler, who discussed the balance of challenge and support with Sloane in more depth here. “For the main session, we [often] get one of the players, usually one of the leaders, early on they would do the review of the session, and they would come up with the clips. This year, it’s been a little harder to have these meetings with Covid, but still, coming up with clips and sending them out because we’ve found that when you’re getting told by your peers, when they’re highlighting something I think it holds more weight than when you’re getting it from a coach for whatever reason.”

Spread the load

Butler also makes the point that their duties extend beyond performance or rugby and it is important that the playing group does not allow a mere handful of individuals manage tasks for the group. “I think the main thing is that we all took on something that wasn’t rugby-related,” he said, “so it wasn’t falling on the same guys. So one guy would link up with the team manager on if there was any issue around travel or things like that, someone else would link up with the kitman, if there were any issues; and it would just mean that we haven’t had the same conversations with a whole bunch of people unnecessarily. So it helped kind of disperse that load as well, so it wasn’t falling on the same blokes. Because imagine, you know, there’s all those guys that are happy to do everything if you ask them to, but it’s not fair to them as well. So it’s all about lightening the load.”

A Keiser Series Podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

“There’s more evidence to support what we do but, at the same time, there’s more perspective, but certain things don’t change,” says Jimmy Wright.

“If you chase the science, if you purely chase the literature, and you forget about experience and what has traditionally delivered the results you might just miss the diamonds.”

Jimmy Wright, the Team Biokineticist at the Durban-based Sharks, who compete locally in the Currie Cup and internationally in the United Rugby Championship, is the first guest on the latest series of the Keiser Series Podcast.

Jimmy has been with the Sharks for 23 years – in fact he was the first individual to hold his position at a franchise in South Africa – and has seen both his role evolve as well as the needs of the game.

He discusses those developments and also touches upon:

• His belief in focusing on growth between Monday and Friday [14:30];
• The concept of ‘ubuntu’ and selflessness that informs his work [17:00];
• How his style as a leader developed from his background in track & field [20:00];
• The advice he would like to give his younger self [26:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

Jarrad Butler, the flanker who captains United Championship Side Connacht Rugby in western Ireland, recalls the time when, as a young professional, his senior teammates left him “rattled”.

He was on the cusp of his 21^st birthday, in 2012, when he joined the Queensland Reds on a short-term contract to help cover for a recent spate of injuries.

Leadership was not on his mind at the time. “When I was at the Reds, early doors, it was kind of hard to say because when you’re just fresh out of school and you’re just kind of getting in there you don’t really see what’s going on behind-the-scenes as much,” Butler told an audience at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021. “You don’t really see the conversations that are being had, you just kind of see what’s happening on the field, and I’m just wondering around trying to do my job, do it really well.”

The Reds had won the Super Rugby title the previous season and the training sessions were an eye-opener for the young Butler. “I remember some guys that were maybe my age now getting into me about something that I might’ve done on the training field and just how much that rattled me a little bit as well,” he continued.

“It’s one of those things where I reflect on it and [tell myself]: ‘actually, I think I did the right thing there, but what could I have done better?’ and then maybe have a conversation after the training session and kind of tease out what happened and get a positive from it.

Butler tries to bring this dynamic to his interactions as Connacht captain, a role he has held since 2018. “It’s one of those things where you don’t really notice at the time until you’re reflecting on it,” he added.

The scenario is familiar to session moderator Dan Jackson, the Leadership Development Manager at the AFL’s Adelaide Football Club. Of Adelaide, he said: “We talk about this model of care and candour, if you criticise people all the time and you’re just ruthless, then, yeah, you’re driving standards but people eventually are just going to turn a shoulder on you because they know that there’s no love there, but [after] showing that care and making sure there’s a standard of love, then you can be as candid as you need, because then it’s a gift rather than a slap.”

Two years later, in 2014, Butler joined the Canberra-based Brumbies, where he briefly played alongside the team’s captain, Ben Mowen. Butler described Mowen as a mentor, someone who was able to drive standards, while also being able to put the proverbial arm around a player’s shoulder.

“He just kind of nailed it somewhere in the middle,” said Butler. “I think that first and foremost, is he was just a really good guy, as he was someone that would come down to Canberra and he would help you move into your place and he would want to have a coffee with you, and, you know, that’s crazy when you’re 21 years old, you’re the new guy there and you have this guy wanting to genuinely meet you and be a friend.

“But then when he got onto the field, he was an animal and he was ruthless on the field, performed at a consistently high level. So being able to find that balance there I think was the most interesting for me, and seeing that there’s not just one way to skin a cat.”

Relationships enable difficult conversations

Joining Butler and Jackson is Adelaide captain and midfielder Rory Sloane. At the time, Sloane was in his third season as captain (including one as joint-captain alongside Taylor Walker) as the Crows embarked on a rebuilding project to restore the club to AFL prominence.

Sloane had fewer concerns about his on-field captaincy than he did his off-field abilities. “Off-field stuff has always been my challenge absolutely – that’s something that I’ve always had to work on massively over the years,” he said. “I wasn’t someone that loved confrontation at all, and that’s where I worked really hard over the years just on my relationships with people to be able to then have those conversations.”

He cites the influence of renowned American leadership specialist Brené Brown. “There was something she said: ‘Sit next to someone when you’re having those conversations rather than across’; because I reckon I used to always come across very aggressively, so sitting next to someone was something that really helped me just have those conversations.”

It is an attitude that Jackson promotes around the Crows’ enviroment. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about connection, and it’s a theme I keep seeing across elite sport, and also across corporate organisations – great cultures are built on connection,” he said.

Sloane readily admitted that results were not good enough at the time, and the Crows remain a work in progress (Sloane himself suffered an ACL injury in April), but he explained to the virtual audience that it was important to get things back on track through building those team bonds.

“We finished on the bottom of the ladder last year [2020], for the first time at the club and, in my first year as captain that stung massively,” he said. “And we got some feedback from guys in our football club, in our leadership, where we [felt we had] lost our way, our identity as a football club, where everyone used to know that we trained hard and we had this ruthless edge as a footy club.”

The players convened, in their own free time during the off-season – Covid restrictions at the time prevented interstate and overseas travel – and trained three or four times per week. It consisted of activities such as practice games, Pilates, and boxing sessions. “We look for opportunities to be together,” he continued. “It’s everything that comes into that connection whether it be [socialising] or something as simple as [listening to] music.”

Jackson sheepishly commended Sloane for his work on himself as a leader, for accepting that he did not automatically know how to manage difficult conversations with teammates. “You’re humble in this space, Rory, and I know you keep accounts of when you’ve chatted to your teammates – and you’re not running an Excel spreadsheet – but you’re checking in with guys you haven’t checked in with in a while, just calling or sending a text and making sure they know that you care so that you can have those hard conversations.”

Butler is of a similar mindset and drew parallels between his time at the Brumbies and his current tenure at Connacht, where he arrived in 2017. Both are clubs based in relatively remote parts of the country, with smaller populations, and founded by their respective federations as ‘development’ teams – a home for players who were not as highly sought after by other teams but who retained significant potential. Yet the Brumbies are Australia’s most successful team in Super Rugby and Connacht were a particularly tough proposition for most opponents long before their 2015-16 PRO12 title.

He said: “You’re usually a bit further away from your family, you get better connection with each other just off the bat because you’re all there for the same reason – you’re there because you’re trying to prove people wrong. Maybe you have a little chip on your shoulder; and I’ve found that being on the other side of that, when you actually know somebody you get a better connection with them. It makes it easier to have those hard conversations.”

Player power

Both Butler and Sloane speak of leadership groups drawn from their playing groups. In Connacht’s case, it consisted of eight players; in Adelaide’s, five. Beyond their responsibilities for driving standards and behaviours, theirs is a vital role in ensuring learning and development of understanding because there are times when a coach’s impact can be limited.

“It’s one of those things where you’re in a meeting and you’re getting – you know, the defence coach comes up, the head coach, and they’re showing clips and clips and clips – it’s easy for things to get watered down,” said Butler.

“For the main session, we [often] get one of the players, usually one of the leaders, early on they would do the review of the session, and they would come up with the clips. This year, it’s been a little harder to have these meetings with Covid, but still, coming up with clips and sending them out because we’ve found that when you’re getting told by your peers, when they’re highlighting something I think it holds more weight than when you’re getting it from a coach for whatever reason.”

The impact of your peers can be multifaceted, as Sloane illustrated when discussing the culture that was developing under Adelaide’s Senior Coach Matthew Nicks, who took the team’s reins in 2020. “His whole philosophy around football is: how can you help someone else there?” said Sloane. “And that’s not just around football, that’s around life as well, and I think that’s the biggest shift in mentality I’ve seen in our players.”

Jackson encouraged the team to celebrate those moments of selflessness, which quickly became part of the Adelaide routine. “It’s literally nothing special,” said Sloane. “We’ve had a couple of sessions this year and, at the end of the year, we might recognise a few guys for what they’ve done to prioritise someone else. It literally just became something that’s picked up by other players now, and we’ve noticed it, and I think it’s something that’s starting to become infectious.

“I’ve spoken to DJ [Jackson] about this, [and the important thing] is actually to just reward someone for something that you’ve seen and making sure you’re still instilling those habits, because, yeah, if it goes unnoticed then at times it may not become engrained, so that’s something that I think goes down incredibly well.”

He asked Jackson to elaborate and the Adelaide Leadership Development Manager provided an apt summary.

“Anyone involved in elite sport knows that you can’t get to the elite level without systems,” he said. “I mean building in routines that become habits and then those habits just become natural, and that’s something that you guys are leading impeccably as a team.”

In partnership with

By Sarah Evans

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

Session 1: Performance Pathways Part 1: Creating Effective Transitions

Speakers:

John Alder, Head of Player Development, Welsh Rugby Union

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

Transition experiences:

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

Effective transitions:

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

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

Speaker:

Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Psychological safety:

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

Why it matters:

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

Social pain & the brain:

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

Four stages of psychological safety:

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

Inclusion safety – key concepts:

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

Learner safety – key concepts:

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

Contributor safety – key concepts:

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

Challenger safety – key concepts:

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

Six ways we can increase psychological safety:

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

Model openness & honesty

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

Make it easy to speak up

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

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

Speaker:

Phil Church, Senior Coach Development Lead, The Football Association

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

Attendee takeaways:

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