By John Portch

What is the best way to define and resolve a performance problem?

It is a topic that comes up with regularity at the Leaders Performance Institute and, here, we present the approach of British bobsledder Montell Douglas; Swimming Australia’s Head Coach Rohan Taylor, Wales women’s rugby union team Head Coach Ioan Cunningham; Jayne Ellis, currently a performance advisor with UK Sport; and actor Dom Simpson, who delivers a view from the world of the performing arts.

We distil their responses into five essential considerations.

1. How do your athletes approach goal-setting?

“I address my performance gaps through real, basic goal-setting. In the sense that there’s always a process,” says Montell Douglas, who competed for Great Britain in the two-person bobsleigh at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Previously, she competed for her nation in the 100m and 4x100m relay at the 2008 Summer Olympics, also in Beijing. In completing the switch she made British history. It was something she was aware of in the build-up to the Games and here she gives the Leaders Performance Institute an insight into the continuous conversation she had with herself.

“What does British history mean?” she continues. “I reverse-engineered the goal, looked back and said ‘this means I have to do X’. ‘But where am I now? Well, I’m right here and that means I have to do this’.

“One of the things was ‘what does my sport need? What do you require? Am I reflective of a history-making athlete?’ If not, then I’m making those little adjustments; ‘I need to gain four kilos by this date’, for example.”

Douglas interrogated herself constantly. “It enabled me to make clear targets and goals, with deadlines for all that was needed, because you have to be ready on 20 February 2022 [in the case of the Olympic bobsleigh]. You can’t be ready on 21 February 2022 – it’s too late.”

2. Engage your athletes in two-way conversations

The coaches have a role to play too. “It’s having a two-way conversation,” says Ioan Cunningham. “Footage is huge and we have individual development plans for players. So if our number nine [scrum half] needs to work on her pass off the base so that it’s quicker  and she needs to get the ball off the deck, that’ll be a performance plan for her.

“How does she get better? Link it to footage and then have constant catch-ups every week or two where you go ‘look, this is better – you can see it’s better. The ball is in the ten’s hands [fly half] much quicker’.

“The ten could then give her feedback as well and say ‘yes, the passing is much better, it’s faster and more accurate’; and then breaking that down to the drills she needs to do to make sure that it gets her passing better.”

Actor Dom Simpson, who stars as Elder Price in the West End production of The Book of Mormon in London, also prefers a two-way discussion in his work. “My agent always describes it as a ‘dance’,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “I can do one thing for a dance but the partners have to be working together to make that work.

“An issue, for example, could be my director coming to me and saying ‘this scene is not quite reading right. Maybe we can try this?’ and a lot of the time that works best when it’s a collaborative discussion – I don’t think anyone works best when it’s ‘do this and it’ll be better’ because unless I have an understanding of why that is it won’t feel like the best way to do it.”

3. Enable guided discovery to mutually desired outcomes

Simpson also explains that the best directors facilitate the actor’s path to the best agreed outcome. He says: “The best creatives that I’ve ever worked with, they allow that conversation to happen and they facilitate you finding the answer. They ask questions that make you find the answer that they just want to tell you anyway so that there’s a feeling of ‘we both got to it’, whereas the director might be saying ‘I knew that’s where we wanted to get to but I had to allow you to find that for it to feel real’. When we talk about the ‘truth’ in a scene, a lot of the time that’s how we get to the bottom of an issue.”

4. Where does your multidisciplinary team fit in?

Cunningham tells the Leaders Performance Institute of a hypothetical scenario involving an athlete. “A player may need more power in her lower legs, so that becomes a three-way conversation with the S&C coach,” he says. “[The player will say] ‘OK, if I do this, it’ll make me a better rugby player, it’ll make me more powerful, and it’ll get me picked’.”

The multidisciplinary approach was taken by Jayne Ellis and British Wheelchair Basketball during her time serving as the organisation’s Performance Director. Much like at Wales Rugby, performance questions were generally raised in an athlete’s individual development plan between the athlete themselves and the coach. “They determine what the objectives are and the rest of the staff will work around and towards those objectives,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2021.

Progress was tracked at fortnightly meetings for both the men’s and women’s teams. “That’s when we look at how everybody’s work programme is feeding into that athlete achieving that objective,” she continued. “Then there are different bits and pieces that we do with each practitioner in order to assess where they are with things and where they want to go. That all gets captured so that the player can see their development. Sometimes when you’re an athlete and you’re in the grind, you’re like ‘this is so difficult, I don’t feel like I’m progressing’ but then you’ve got this whole piece here, which helps you see that you are progressing and that’s why it’s important.”

5. Call upon your network and collective knowledge

At Swimming Australia, coaches and practitioners attend monthly meetings specific to their event or discipline in order to ensure everyone is on track. Head Coach Rohan Taylor will drop into those meetings and is always on hand to discuss performance issues with athletes and their coaches as he travels to the state hubs located across Australia.

“I’ll ask questions; [for example] ‘So you’re having trouble here? Have you spoken to somebody else?’ because I get to see everybody around the country. I might see a solution in Western Australia, in Perth, and I can say ‘have you connected with this person?’ I’m kind of guiding and advising them where to go.

“If I think they’re at a road block, I’d hope that they’ve already done that. That’s the system that’s set up. If not, I’d be saying ‘have you done that? Have you done this?’ I saw a good example this morning [concerning] an athlete who is struggling to absorb feedback around the communication on their skill development; the tasks. I just watched and I observed and I just said to the coach and the biomechanist ‘have you guys tried just letting him watch what it looks like when it’s done correctly by someone else and just letting him go and explore rather than giving him too much detail?’ ‘No, actually we haven’t’. ‘So maybe that’s their learning style?’

“It’s just me bringing what I see out there and asking them the questions.”

By John Portch

What makes for a great training facility? It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute posed to a series of athletes, coaches and practitioners, including Kate Warne-Holland, the Under-14s Girls Captain at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA].

“You have to bring the energy. Don’t come in if you’re not ready to come in,” she says.

“The players need to know exactly what the expectation level is of them and we have to challenge each other to bring the energy and the right attitude. When I ran my own environment as a coach, everybody in the team would have clear roles about where they would be that day; leading the session, assisting the session, hitting in the session. If, as a coach, you’re hitting in the session then you’re a player so you’d better behave like a player. You’re a real role model. Communication with the players in the session has to be pitched to what is in front of you that day.”

We spoke to individuals in American football, bobsleigh, rugby union, swimming, tennis, field hockey and athletics to glean their views on what makes a training or practice facility great. Here is what they told us.

Jack Easterby, NFL performance coach:

The flow is the number one thing. How does it flow and does that flow match the work flow of the operation? For example, I’ve had people walk into a locker room and it’s the first thing you see, which is great, but you’re spending more time in a meeting hall or in a study area than you are in the locker room. The second thing is unified technology. I think that technology creates behaviour. And so I think if you have a flow that’s really well done and you have unified technology around the building, it’s going to create the behaviours that are needed for the people inside.

Montell Douglas, British Olympic bobsledder and former Olympic sprinter:

The ideal is to have everything you need in one place. If you wanted to make the best athlete, you would give them everything you need in that realm to perform, but that’s rare. In transitioning into my newer sport, I realised that things aren’t always ideal and the best training facilities came from the times where I thought outside the box. A lot of times in my sport, I was training out of a garage with free weights. I would never imagine in sprinting that you could do that and still perform, but when you think about facilities, it’s not about the quality, although that’s hugely important. It’s always about: what is required and am I able to get the same desired outcome with what I have?

Ioan Cunningham, Head Coach, Wales senior women’s rugby union team:

The biggest thing for me is: how much does an environment help a player to learn? When you set up the environment, when they walk in, what triggers are there for them to learn? Is there signposting? And then out on the field it’s very similar. Is there an opportunity with us to get live feedback on a TV on the side of the field; ‘we’re just going to play this and then go and look at it’, ‘that was really good’ or ‘you didn’t run your line there properly’. We’re lucky we can do that at our level, but it’s also creating an environment where we will stop the session, give them 30 seconds to discuss it as a group, and then come back with two points. No more than two points. ‘How are you going to win the next minute?’ Those are the type of environments and learning environments – because learning leads to motivation, in my view. If you’re learning, you’re motivated. If you stop learning you become stale.

Rohan Taylor, Head Coach, Swimming Australia:

For me, there’s three really critical components that you look at across any high performance environment. These are almost non-negotiables. The facility needs to be accessible. Sometimes [swimmers] get kicked out of the pools or lane space, so we’ll secure access to facilities to be able to do the basics, the training. The second one is the coaching and the level of coaching expertise, not just elite coaches but the coaching group; I’m talking about the sports science. You need to have that and if it’s just one person they need to be really good, if it’s two people they need to work collaboratively together. And the third part is that you need that administrative support, that dry side support, to ensure those coaches are coaching, those athletes are training, and somebody’s supporting the structure around it. Whether it’s a large, professional football club or it’s a small swimming club, it needs those three components to be operating and working together. And if you take one away, it becomes a problem.

Kate Warne-Holland, Under-14s Girls Captain, LTA:

Hard work also has to be fun. I work with under-14s and there has to be enjoyment throughout the session, with the amount of volume and intensity the kids are undertaking. I think there also needs to be respect for the effort the players are putting in, respect for the parents, and the coaching staff. And walking in each morning to a nice, clean space. No litter, no balls everywhere, everything is nicely tidy and the baskets of balls are ready to go. Often the session will start at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning. You don’t want to be walking in to a messy chaotic environment. After every single session we would quickly reflect at the end; assistant into lead, player into assistant, and then lead into player. I might say: ‘I thought you were really good at bringing the energy, you behave like a player, you had high expectations of the other person’. Each person says a couple of things and it just keeps everyone on their toes around the idea that ‘this is important and we care about the quality of the sessions’.

Lisa Jacob, High Performance Director, Hockey Ireland:

It’s a feeling of ‘home’ and I think it’s somewhere you walk into and it makes you elevate your thinking. It’s very hard to describe what that looks like and, at the moment, we’re in conversations with Sport Ireland around what we want the hockey facility to look like going forward. I’m pretty sure if we started off with ‘it’s a feeling’ – Jesus, the architects can’t work with that! It has to have the basics [such as pitches and gym facilities onsite or nearby], but the one critical thing that would differentiate it for me is what the team room is like. In some places you won’t have couches and bean bags or graduated steps where you can watch videos or movies, but a place where a team can actually make it their own and create what empowers them most [is important]. There are a couple of facilities that have got it right.

Victoria Moore, Head of Performance Support and Solutions, Athletics Australia:

I see resources of people as far more beneficial than resources such as equipment and or a building. I’ve seen athletes absolutely flourish when they’ve got people to help them make informed decisions. I think you can make a lot with the right people. That’s why I’ve put resources and dollars into investing into building people’s capacity. A nice building might look great, but you should invest in people and make them feel valued and that they belong; and that’s when you’re going to get the better outcomes.

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.

By John Portch

• Do you guarantee the quality of experience for your athletes?

• It can be helpful to look over the fence but don’t be swayed by external noise.

• Fill your ranks with specialists coaches and reward them suitably.

Experience is everything

Are you creating an environment where everyone – athletes and their parents or guardians – wants to be? Don Barrell, the Head of Performance Programmes & Pathways at the Rugby Football Union [RFU], believes it is essential. He told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2021 that, “If your primary driver is the quality of experience that people have, both the player and all the surrounding stakeholders, you can create a model where people want to be there and choose to come into your programme as opposed to others and that’s where we’ve positioned our programme.”

Establish age-specific priorities

A smart talent pathway recognises that what an athlete needs as a teenager is not necessarily what an athlete needs at 25. “The whole purpose of it is that you’ve got two or three years to look at players and  for them to be nurtured and developed; go through puberty, grow, change, held by some really core principles,” said Barrell. “One of the big challenges is when the top of the game says it needs A, B and C – at 14 that will look very different and we probably don’t need to see A, B and C, we may just focus on one thing.”

Stick to your guns

Being aware of best practice is one thing, but once you have established your guiding principles, stick to them. Barrell said: “If you keep compromising because someone else will do ‘something’ and you feel the need to react then you’ll end up with six-year-olds in academies as everyone races to the bottom. We have set a clear line based on solid evidence and practice.”

Ask: who is the athletes’ main point of contact?

Talent pathways at club and international level are inevitably different in English rugby union and Barrell was keen to avoid stepping on the toes of the clubs with whom the RFU works. “The whole myth of age-grade international programmes – and I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job here – the majority of contact is at the school, club, academy. Pre-18, it is not with an international programme. Age 18-20, it’s still not with an international programme – 80 percent of your contact is still within your club,” he said. “The international programme’s job is to add value to the journey and act as a critical friend to the clubs, working with them to develop the players. We have excellent people who work with the academies and schools to help shape practice.”

Employ both specialists and agitators

Any talent pathway needs its specialist coaches who are happy to work at academy level. “If we want world class development systems then we need to reward those world class practitioners who want to specialise with young athletes. Having your most knowledgeable people working in the pathway, a good pathway will make your senior teams better and add huge value,” said Barrell. “You will always have some coaches that want to go in and progress to a senior role. That’s fine, but I’d suggest if you’re running the system, you need to understand how many of those you’ve got versus how many people you can install who want to stay in development.”

Temper the input of senior coaches

Beware the input of the senior coach. “One big challenge you find across all sports is the idea that senior coaches have all the answers the whole way through,” said Barrell. “Senior coaches often specialise for the here and now, ‘how do we win this weekend?’ Bringing expertise at the top end of the game is critical, as this is where our players end up, but is it always right for the developing player?; the same way I don’t need my primary school kids being taught by a university lecturer.”

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.