“Rather than thinking it’s some support thing on the periphery, wellbeing is energy. It should be the centrepiece of our performance,” performance coach Owen Eastwood told an audience at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium last November.
“Wellbeing is an essential ingredient of performance. If you think of it from an individual level, am I really going to perform anywhere near my capacity if I’m not well? If I’m not physically well, if I’m not emotionally well, if I’m not spiritually well?
“I think this is happening, where our wellbeing is becoming more central to the question of if we’re able to perform at our best rather than just being a support peripheral piece over here where people think ‘if people are having physical or mental problems then someone is looking after them’. I think we’re moving to a place where everyone understands that.”
Eastwood’s words echo Kate Hays’ at last June’s Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership. “I think coaches are embracing it and I think the high performance system is embracing it, and I think athletes are embracing it,” said the former Head of Psychology at the English Institute of Sport. “The world has not been as we’ve known it, and we’ve seen real empathy and compassion towards people.”
That empathy and compassion was on show at Harlequins prior to last season’s Gallagher Premiership final where the men’s team would claim their first national championship in 11 years. A player approached Billy Millard, Quins’ Director of Rugby, with news that his mum had taken ill. “We said ‘just go. Just be back for the game’,” said Millard, also speaking at last year’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham. “He was like ‘what?’ ‘Just go’. So he came back and had an absolute stormer and it was very emotional and he was very thankful.
“It’s very easy to say that relationships are the most important, then you get a big call like that, ahead of the biggest game the club has had in a long time, and the coaches and the staff just went ‘that comes first. Just go, brother’. The players hear about that and there was a lot of things like that we did, it builds trust both ways.”
Millard’s point is underlined by Quins scrum-half Danny Care, who is sat beside him. He said: “To have the coaches go ‘that comes first, your family comes first’ even though we’ve got the biggest game the club’s ever had at the weekend. Then, as a player, you go ‘amazing’; we’re not robots, we’re people.”
Eastwood, who sits on the board at Harlequins, elaborated on this point backstage at Twickenham. He said: “We’ve had discussions with the players where we’ve said ‘success for us looks like us being competitive now, this team, and striving to win, but success for the club also means after you leave this club and retire from professional rugby that you have a happy life, that you’ve learnt traits about yourself and how to cope with adversity that happens in life. That you’ve got a strong group and network of people and players who become friends forever. That’s what we want.
“Our parameters of success include wellbeing and that’s very authentic – we’re not just saying that, we genuinely feel that. We don’t want them to be having a crisis in their 40s and 50s, being lost, not knowing who they are, not having good life skills, not having a good network. Again, it’s good in the short term, I suppose, to have a culture like that, but we genuinely want it to be something that extends well beyond their time playing.”
The staff around the athlete are a vital part of the wellbeing question, as Angus Mugford, the Vice President of High Performance at Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays told the Leaders Performance Institute. “That aspect of all our lives is really important for staff,” he says. “High performance is not often a balanced world, there’s a lot of time on the road and away from family, and the high stress; and I think acknowledging that human beings, in their physical and mental health are really important aspects that we need to focus on, provide resources for, and work on too.”
A similar point was made by Lauren Whitt, Google’s Head of Global Resilience, at Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership, in the context of building resilience. She said: “Resilience prioritises rest and recovery. You do it for your athletes. Oftentimes we forget as leaders, as managers, as other folks who are working with the high performers, we also need you at your best; we also need you able to make decisions on the fly and to be sharp and to be crisp.”
Attitudes are shifting across high performance sport but, as Mugford says, “actions speak louder than words.”
This article originally appeared in our Special Report Enhancing Your Environment: Nurturing positive high performance set-ups.
Six months earlier, the team were languishing sixth in the Premiership table and were without a lead coaching figure following the departure of Paul Gustard as Head of Rugby.
A series of swift and profound decisions transformed Quins’ campaign. Firstly, Gustard was not directly replaced. Instead, the reins were taken by Director of Rugby Billy Millard, with support from coaches Jerry Flannery, Nick Evans and Adam Jones.
Off the field, the club sought the counsel of performance coach Owen Eastwood, who has worked with organisations including Gareth Southgate’s England men’s team, the British Olympic team, NATO and the South African men’s cricket team, in an effort to revive their fortunes.
“Everybody was looking at them and saying ‘there’s no energy – are they not fit?’ Eastwood tells the 2021 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium. “The team was struggling, they weren’t playing well, and they were getting a hard time for that.”
Eastwood’s role was vital. “We were lost in our DNA and Owen Eastwood started spending time with the club,” says Millard, speaking on a different day at Twickenham, where Quins lifted the Premiership trophy. “We excavated the history of Harlequins.”
By June, both the men’s and women’s teams had taken their leagues by storm, playing fast and frenetic rugby on their way to being crowned champions. Both were aided in part by the cultural reset that laid the foundations of both triumphs.
Back to Quins’ roots
As the Leaders Performance Institute speaks to Millard, it is clear that part of him still cannot believe the turnaround that took place. “You don’t have seasons like that,” he says.
His mind goes back to Harlequins’ last Premiership triumph in 2012. “We played a certain style, we behaved a certain way. Quins have always been entertainers – that’s why we’re ‘the jesters’ – and we just had to tap back into that, which we did. Our owners [Duncan Saville and Charles Jillings] set a vision, we stripped it right back, and that vision was aligned right through the playing squad.”
Sitting beside Millard is Danny Care, Quins’ scrum-half who was a key part of that earlier success. He says that he and his teammates had ‘fun’ as the club raised its game. “I think the main thing we did is that we said we were going to do it our way, we’re going to do it the Quins way, we’re going to go back to our roots, back to what we feel is the way we like to play rugby, do it with a smile on our face,” he says. “And we went and did it.”
“In 21 years of professional sport I’ve never seen it so strong,” adds Millard. “If we lost a game, which we did on the run to winning it, there was no panic, as long as we were doing what we said we’d do and play a certain way, everyone stayed true to that.”
Back in January, Eastwood had spotted the lack of energy. He would conduct 52 interviews with players and staff as he sought to make his recommendations. He says: “Just through some changes in the environment, different philosophies, all of a sudden, this team had this unbelievable amount of energy, and they were the same conditioned group and they were the same people. Something shifted that created this unbelievable energy – and that was the environment, the culture.”
TRUE values
As Eastwood, who joined the Quins board in August, began his research into the club founded in 1866 – the fourth-oldest rugby club in the world – he quickly unearthed characteristics that lent themselves to a neat and powerful acronym: TRUE, which stands for ‘tempo, relationships, unconventional, enjoyment.’
“Owen said this acronym had been around forever,” says Millard. “’Tempo’ – Harlequins play with tempo. ‘Relationships’ – everyone says relationships are important, but we live and breathe that. Our relationships are the foundation of what we do.
“We’re ‘unconventional’. As [prop] Joe Marler says, that means we can do whatever we want. Pretty close. And enjoyment, so T-R-U-E. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s Quins for nearly 160 years.
“[Eastwood] spoke to us about all these amazing stories about relationships and unconventional and enjoyment; and we all tapped into that.”
Care takes up the theme. “I think it’s the main reason we were successful come the end of last season,” he says. “To revisit what the club is all about, I think, for players, sometimes you’re in a hard situation as a player. You feel that you can’t really speak out and say what the coach doesn’t want to hear. But when we did have this reset, I think it was a great opportunity for players, coaches, staff to sit in a room and each of them describe what we needed. I’ve never known an environment where we’ve felt more empowered because we were asked questions.”
Belonging cues
As Care says, the Harlequins players were asked for their input to help shape training and preparation in the absence of a head coaching figure. Tabai Matson would be installed as Head Coach during the subsequent off-season but, there and then, the players led the way and, most importantly, felt heard by Millard and his support staff.
He says: “The coaches fully gave us that trust and listened to us. Then, as a player, you then feel empowered and trusted to go out on the weekend.”
As befitting Quins’ ‘unconventional’ label, changes were made behind the scenes, including the abolition of the ‘captain’s run’ [the traditional final captain-led training session on the eve of a match] and Quins consistently found a level of performance befitting their talent.
Eastwood believes that a fundamental factor was the ‘belonging cues’ the players increasingly received from the coaching staff. It stems from his research into the relationship between energy and hormonal states.
“Fundamentally, from a hormonal point of view, when we go an compete, we will be stressed,” he says. “The two biggest energisers in our hormones are adrenaline and cortisol. It’s not hard to find them when we’re competing, but if we’re only fuelled by them then a) is it sustainable? And b) that type of fuel will have consequences. People in those states can have tunnel vision, they can find it hard to talk. More widely, people who are marinating in cortisol and adrenaline can get into a self-preservation mode and find it hard to connect with other people. People who are fuelled by cortisol and adrenaline can find it hard to be vulnerable; if they don’t understand something they may not put their hand up and say it.
“So what we want to do is create this balance, from a hormonal point of view, when we are in a competitive environment. The cortisol and adrenaline will be there, we don’t need to ramp it up, actually we need to calm it a bit. And what hormones like oxytocin, around our connection with other people; dopamine, which is that motivator pushing us forwards towards the goal; serotonin, which has a regulatory effect on our mood. What we really need to do is, in our environment, promote those hormones. I think there’s a simple way of understanding it and it’s all related to energy.”
Therefore, belonging cues, as Eastwood argues, can have a positive impact on a person’s energy and hormonal balance. “When people receive belonging cues, it’s a massive energiser. So many experiences I’ve had of going into teams where people, they trust me and they’ll talk to me and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know if I belong here, I feel a little bit like an imposter, I don’t know if the coach respects me. I feel like every single thing I’m doing, even training, off the field, I’m being judged and people make decisions all the time about whether I should stick around here.’
“When that happens, again, people start marinating in cortisol, stress hormones and adrenaline. They go within themselves. If they don’t understand something or if they’ve got a weakness in their game that they want to develop, they’re not going to put their hands up and say that because they feel unbelievably vulnerable. We also know that our short-term memories are affected when we’re in that state as well.
“When we feel a sense of belonging, that we actually belong here, that people respect us, we’re in a completely different hormonal state. Our dopamine, oxytocin levels are raised, we’re able to focus on our job and our teammates, if we don’t understand something we feel comfortable in saying that.”
“It was definitely different to what I’ve been used to,” says Care. “I’ve never felt more trusted, empowered, respected, but also then there was a massive responsibility on us as senior players to lead it and the younger players to follow.”
Millard says that the approach is here to stay and, when it comes to recruitment, there is “a method to the madness,” adding, “you’ve got Danny and the leaders telling stories and Owen Eastwood saying ’70 years ago, this is what Quins used to do’ and these young kids are like ‘we’re bigger than this, the spotlight’s on us now but there’s so much that came before us and, in 20 years, we’re still going to be playing this way.’”
This article originally appeared in our Special Report Enhancing Your Environment: Nurturing positive high performance set-ups. It also features insights from English Premier League Brentford FC, Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays and Google.
The Leaders Performance Institute explores what Jones thinks it takes to get a team ‘humming’ and presents five points for consideration.
“You start at midnight, then you’ve got 12 hours to get to midday,” he told an audience at August’s Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments. “By that time your team has to have evolved into a winning team.” Jones, like numerous head coaches in team sports, can feel the clock ticking.
“In Premier League football, you’ve probably got eight games to get to the high performance, in international rugby you’ve probably got two years. Generally, I think it takes a team three years to be really humming when you’ve got all the bits and pieces in place.”
Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores what Jones thinks it takes to get a team ‘humming’ and presents five points for consideration.
1. The coach as a chemist
For Jones it starts with the leader’s vision for the team. A high performance environment must support that vision and the leader must be ready to tweak things when necessary. “You’ve got to work backwards,” he says. “Get the structure to support the vision, then you’ve got to get the right people and the right behaviours. You’re like a chemist, you’re pouring little bits and things in there, taking away, and every day you’ve got to check the temperature because every day you get closer to where you are at your best and you’re also a day closer to where you’re not at your best. The cycle of life is more exacerbated in the cycle of sport.”
2. Sports science as a key accelerator
Sports science practitioners, led by the vision, must work to ensure the most efficient application. “I think when sports science came in, they wanted to be Godzilla and beat their chests and show everyone how clever they were; and now they’ve worked out that they’re just part of the package,” says Jones with a smile. “They’ve got that understanding, they’re part of the package, they’re a key accelerator of sport but not a driver; their role has become clearer.” He retells the story of an episode ahead of England’s 2019 Rugby World Cup campaign. “The first four weeks we didn’t let the players wear GPS and the coaches were sweating,” he continues. “The coaches didn’t like it, the players didn’t like it. I just said ‘work out what a good session is’. So we did that and it took away that fixation with GPS.” Keen observers will have noted that GPS technology remained a vital tool in for England throughout the tournament and beyond. Jones simply wanted underline his point. “You’ve got to make sure you manage all of that and make sure it’s in the right direction for the team.”
3. Sports psychology is the future
Jones’ tone is bellicose but he readily admits to his reliance on the high performance team, including those working in performance psychology. He says: “I think the sports psychology area is the biggest growth area of the game of any sport at the moment. If you look at any team now, do they go into the game with the right attitude and how do you get them to be at the right attitude more often than not? If you can get your team with the necessary talent and the right attitude at the start of the game, then you can beat the average, you’re winning in your competition.
“How do you get that? I think the one block that’s got the most area to investigate is performance psychology. When I say that, I mean it’s everything: that’s the relationship when you’re sitting at the table with your staff, the relationship you have between the staff and the players, the players with each other.”
Relationships are crucial given the growth of multidisciplinary teams in high performance. “If you go back 20 years ago in rugby, a player would have to have in a team environment maybe four key relationships: the head coach, maybe the strength & conditioning coach, maybe the manager – maybe three – and now they’re expected to have maybe 15 key relationships. The ability to develop that area and make that really hum and be at the level you want it to be is the key thing.”
4. The forensic psychologist as a cultural architect
Jones continues with a joke: “I reckon now you almost need three psychologists on your team, if you’re a big team I reckon you need one for the players, who are working on their individual mindset, their own individual skills. You need one for the staff – then you probably need one for the sports psychologist!”
On a more serious note, he makes the case for teams hiring a forensic psychologist to help deliver an understanding of what makes people tick. “We’ve been working with this woman who’s a forensic psychologist. I’ve been lucky enough to coach for 30 years and, in the last three weeks, I’ve learnt more about how to be more engaged, more intentional in the way I speak to people.”
5. Guardiola and Klopp as model leaders
Jones has often stated his admiration for Manchester City Manager Coach Pep Guardiola and his Liverpool counterpart Jürgen Klopp, both of whom he thinks understand how to cajole players without letting standards slip and decline. He says: “They’re tough on standards, aren’t they? You see them during the game they’re yelling and screaming but when they come off the field they’re an engaged and loving father that’s embraced the players. Our ability to engage the players is one of the hard things.”
It stems from the high performance environment and the team’s original vision. “The ability to make people work hard and do the really difficult things is getting harder and you’ve got to explore every avenue of how you do that and that’s got to be through having the best psychology and having the best performance staff.”
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Day one set the bar high and we looked to carry that energy and momentum into day two. We began with a deep dive into the performing arts, looking at talent development at the Royal Ballet School and Royal College of Music before exploring the theme of diversity, equality and inclusion with Brentford FC and British department store Selfridges. We then checked in with performance coach Owen Eastwood before turning our attention to extreme adventurer Adrian Hayes in the afternoon. Aspetar then had the honour of bringing down the curtain with a fascinating look at rehabilitation and recovery.
A big thank you from the Leaders Performance Institute team and our main partners Keiser, Abu Dhabi Sports Council and Aspetar, for joining us for two days of total high performance.
For those of you who couldn’t make it – or those wishing you refresh your memories – here are the key takeaways from day two.
Full Day 2 programme:
Talent Factories: How the Performing Arts Develops & Nurtures World Class Talent
Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness
Diverse & Inclusive Leadership: Exploring How Diverse Workplaces Positively Influence Organisational Performance
Lessons from Extreme Adventuring: Adaptability & Resilience in Adversity
Rehabilitation & Recovery: The Latest Thinking to Support your Performance Strategy
A full 365 days elapsed between the All Blacks’ last appearance at the 2019 Rugby World Cup and their next test match, while the Black Ferns waited a little over 15 months to return to action.
What would have been almost unthinkable in 2019 came to pass at the start of the pandemic, when New Zealand introduced some of the world’s strictest border controls, which have largely served to keep the Pacific nation free of Covid-19. There has been much to champion in this approach, with fewer than 8,000 infections reported in a little over 18 months at the time of writing, but sport in New Zealand, much like everywhere else, has not been insulated against the impact.
In early 2020, New Zealand Rugby was forced to reduce staffing levels in an effort to cut costs, with some made redundant and others asked to take unpaid leave. “We reduced staffing levels by about a quarter,” says Mike Anthony, the Head of High Performance at New Zealand Rugby, when speaking to an audience at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership.
“We stood a number of programmes down, reduced the number of support staff they had. Competitions were impacted and the reduced number of games meant things like broadcasters and sponsors were impacted.” At the end of 2019, Ian Foster had succeeded Steve Hansen as Head Coach of the All Blacks but almost immediately found his plans in disarray.
Anthony says: “We had a new coaching group come in and they were just getting started in six test matches [across 2020], which is probably half of a normal year. So they didn’t get the opportunity to really set their mark.
“At one stage, the All Blacks were six weeks away from home in Australia playing in a competition [the 2020 Tri Nations Series], so you really wanted to make sure they felt supported.” The nation’s rugby male and female sevens players, who were preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, were encouraged to be involved in 15-a-side programmes while their programmes were temporarily mothballed.
The situation remains far from normal, with Covid outbreaks in Australia disrupting the trans-Tasman men’s Super Rugby Aotearoa competition, to cite one example. “I think what this has taught us is we’ve learned to be more agile and adapt to change. Like a lot of sports, we’re extremely well-planned, very routine-based, and what it’s taught us is there are other ways to look at things and do things, and we’ve had to be able to adapt on the move.”
Here, through Anthony’s words, the Leaders Performance Institute explores the role of the players and coaches in giving New Zealand Rugby a resilience and adaptability that has served them throughout the pandemic and stands them in good stead going forward.
Facilitative coaching
The All Blacks and Black Ferns went on an extended hiatus at the start of 2020, while New Zealand’s domestic rugby competitions were postponed, disrupted, and eventually returned in swiftly altered formats. It was a challenge for players across the game, with Anthony and his staff at New Zealand Rugby also challenged by the non-centralised nature of all but the national sevens teams.
“Our two sevens programmes are centralised, they’re together all the time, but with the All Blacks, we don’t see those players for six months of the year; they are with their Super Rugby clubs and then they come together. Our providers – S&C, medical, nutrition – are remote and come together virtually and then they spend time in the clubs working with their various departments in order to manage those athletes.
“I’ve seen better collaboration across the clubs, not silos. Now we’ve got our wellbeing group and our ‘med-fit’ group, which is S&C, medical, where the psychologist or the nutritionist links in if the player is injured. I think the process that we run around case management of our athletes has formed that collaborative crosspollination.”
The session moderator, Angus Mugford, the Vice President of High Performance at the Toronto Blue Jays, asks Anthony how the All Blacks and Black Ferns are empowered by their coaches and performance staff in this remote context. In many respects, his response pre-dates the pandemic and illustrates why both programmes were well-placed to manage the disruption.
“They have to own and drive the programme,” says Anthony. “The All Blacks have got a big season. As a competitive sport, we run from February to November, so they’ve got to get that off-season right and we give them time away to own and drive their programme and then come in refreshed mentally and physically. We want to make sure we get the best out of them that way. You use the word ‘empowering’ and our athletes have always been empowered within our programmes and our teams. I firmly believe that helps with the leadership development of our guys.
“It builds resilience as well. Richie McCaw [former New Zealand captain, record appearance holder, and two-time World Cup winner], one of our greatest All Blacks, talks about doing ‘the unseen things’ when no one’s watching. I think that’s a great way to capture what we do. It’s easy to work and sweat when you’re in and surrounded by others, but it’s doing those things at home, whether it be around your nutrition or your recovery, or your opposition analysis – they’re the things we need our athletes to do and not just be told to do.” It is important for All Blacks and Black Ferns players to have a “voice”, as Anthony puts it. “They need to own and drive the culture, the standards and the programme,” he says. “Everyone talks about how we’ve got a great culture, where it’s tied to ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’, but a true performance culture is where they can hold each other to account; and I think if you can empower your athletes and you’re just having to sit back and lead and manage rather than always coming in on some of that stuff then that’s a true performance culture.”
The players have an element of psychological safety, where they feel able to take interpersonal risks in pursuit of their self-development without fear of any negative consequences. In that vein, Anthony describes player performance reviews at the end of a training week, which strike a balance between challenge and support. “The expectation is that the player will come in prepared for the review of their performance and they will lead the conversation. It’s a great opportunity then for the coach to see their level of self-awareness around their game and where they’re at relative to their views.”
Crucially, coaches attempt to be facilitative rather than directive. “If you came to a team review, it’s not the coach standing at the front delivering, they are essentially facilitating the conversation, with a significant contribution from those players.
“Likewise leadership development, a critical piece in there because, at the end of the day, they’re the ones that have got to perform under pressure out on the pitch and execute, make decisions. I know with technology, messages can be delivered on the field, but that’s probably in between, in the breaks. In those critical moments, they’ve got to get it right.
“In my role, I spend time with the clubs and sit in on a lot of these sessions and you do see that. I think a strength to our coaches and our game is an ability to facilitate rather than be directive. That’s certainly an approach that the majority of our coaches take.” This trend, however common it may be in rugby in New Zealand, is something that needs to be built gradually and cannot be imposed on a team.
Anthony recalls the time when, working as a strength & conditioning coach, he left his role at the Crusaders, the New Zealand-based club where he had been working for a decade, to build a programme at a club in England. “[At the Crusaders] they had a great senior group that I would use as a sounding board around training load, the structure of the week the expert – you should be telling us – why are you asking us?’ and you’re trying to get that collaboration and I didn’t quite get it right. Rather than just dumping it on them, I needed to grow their understanding. ‘Here’s the end point and what we expect in the middle’.
In rugby in New Zealand, however, the practice is embedded and, as a consequence, the game is organically producing leaders in the mould of McCaw. “We’ve seen a transition of a lot of our players into the coaching ranks pretty early now and often they will want to stand up. Teaching and delivery is a skill. A lot of our coaches have great tactical and technical knowledge. That ability to share that deep knowledge, deep learning, and deep understanding, it is a balancing act and sometimes you’ve got to tell and sometimes you have to grow or check for understanding as you go. For young coaches, there’s an art that they need to learn. I’m a firm believer that you’ll get a lot deeper understanding over time if you can get them involved and make it collaborative.
“Sometimes you’ve got to deliver a message. I think it depends on the structure of your week; if we’re going week to week and want to move on from a performance and get some things in place, you’ve got to find a time to do that. You want to get your athletes up to speed. If they are getting up and presenting in front of their peers, it is time consuming – a hell of a lot more time consuming than if you just do it as a coach or whatever your role is – but I think the long-term benefits are massive. It’s how you bring them with you and, with time, it’s pretty organic in terms of the conversations that happen in the room.”
Teams in black are always being chased
The All Blacks played their first true test match against Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 15 August 1903 and the result was a 22-3 victory for the tourists in front of 30,000 spectators. As Mugford points out, since then, they – and the Black Ferns in the women’s game since 1990 – have dominated world rugby, developing a reputation for excelling at the basics of the game, while continually innovating around the edges. To what does Anthony attribute that quality? “That’s a tough one,” he says, before highlighting the strength of New Zealand Rugby’s campaign reviews. “You’ve got to be as robust with your review when you’re successful as when you’re not because I think it’s easy to find things when you’re not. When you are successful, you want to capture the learnings and say, ‘well, why are you successful?’ To me, they’re what I call our ‘big rocks’. You hope that they make up 80 to 90 percent of your programme and you retain those and take them through.”
Anthony also points out that in New Zealand, even at the highest level, the basics of rugby never become an afterthought. “If you go and watch an All Blacks’ 15 training session, you’ll see elements – ‘run, catch, pass, tackle technique, breakdown’ – those things are coached with regularity all the way through regardless of if you’re a world-class player or you’re a development player – at no stage are skillsets ticked off and then ignored. That is really key. “The art is how you retain the big rocks so that you know they’re critical to our success but make some adjustments to play around the fringes. You hope your programme is good and if there’s a few one percenters, that’s great, but you constantly want to look around the edges at what you can adjust.”
Anthony speaks of the creation of a ‘performance gap’. “The margins between teams are really small. Everyone wants to beat the All Blacks or our sevens programmes – teams in black are always getting chased – and you want to create a performance gap. It’s thinking about things; where we are now versus where we want to get to. We talk about ‘if you’ve got a performance gap, you create some discomfort in an environment and that drives the team and the individuals within it’.
“Competitive edge is something we look for in our athletes. If you’ve got that, doing the same old thing week to week, year to year, your athletes will be bored very quickly. So how do you create some of that discomfort and know that’s going to drive them to continue to get going?
“The other thing for us is how we road test that because, I talked before about how the All Blacks play 12 to 15 test matches a year; they assemble really late, they’ve got a small window, so how do we road test some of those initiatives and in our other competitions or environments to then go ‘we think that’s worth considering’? The strength of the collaboration within our teams helps with that and we really try to highlight ‘here’s something that was tried here and it worked really well’.”
Anthony raises an example away from the game itself, but it is possibly all the more important following periods of stress, anxiety and isolation. “Our sevens teams sing. The women started it, our men do it now, first thing around a training session. That is unbelievable for connection and now we’ve seen that happen, particularly around some of our age group teams, because certainly in my era, singing was something you’d frown upon and roll your eyes at, but our teams love it, our young athletes love it, and it creates great connection and then they’re switched on and into it before they go into things. You think about that and ask ‘how does that contribute to performance?’ but just little things like that around the edges are great.”
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A full version of this interview appeared in our latest Performance journal, which also featured England men’s Head Coach Gareth Southgate, the Arizona Diamondbacks of Major League Baseball, and British Wheelchair Basketball, who runs some of the finest programmes in the sport. Edd Vahid of Premier League club Southampton FC also penned a column focusing on talent pathways.
“There could be something in a group chat that was buried under half a dozen different birthday messages,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
That missing information could be the details of a pitch the team is training on, the details of a medical appointment or a sponsor engagement.
Trimble, a former rugby player with 229 caps for Ulster and 70 caps for Ireland, explains that teams across all sports struggle with communication channels. “There are teams with 10-15 WhatsApp groups or – just as bad – they have one group for every single topic and there are numerous threads being discussed; and no one can understand everything,” he continues.
It sounds confusing. “Then there’s numerous screen grabs of whiteboards, which are obviously non-live. In some instances, an athlete has to walk into the medical room, pick up a marker and book an appointment that way, which is very strange in this day and age.”
Trimble, who retired from playing in 2018, heads up the Belfast-based Kairos, who have created a unified digital planning platform that enables better communication within sports organisations, from operations and management to coaching and performance. The platform was designed to be not only sport agnostic, but has tools to support every level from first team down through academies.
Kairos – a Greek term meaning ‘the decisive moment’ – enables teams, through their app and desktop-based platform, to solve problems by eradicating the distractions caused by multi-channel approaches. Trimble and Kairos Chief Operating Officer Gareth Quinn, who developed the first iteration of their platform in the mid-2010s, soon realised there was no suitable tool on the market. “We received strong validation that this is a problem that’s really worth solving,” says Trimble, who explains that Kairos is compatible with third party calendars such as Outlook and Google. “With our platform, it’s all very clear, there’s no clutter, all the athletes know where they need to be and there’s greater levels of accountability.”
Their platform is currently used by teams in the English Premier League, United Rugby Championship, Premiership Rugby and a series of teams across North America and South East Asia. Trimble points out that these teams may not just be suffering from a problem of unclear communication. “From a staff member’s perspective, it could be getting assurance that if you send something important to an athlete that it’s going to be delivered, received and understood and engaged with correctly,” he says.
“If it’s one place, then it doesn’t take up any cognitive load for the athlete. They can spend 100 per cent of their time thinking about performance. If that’s compromised in any way, if they have to scroll through their screen grabs or pictures of a PDF, and they have to scroll through their email for something else and look through their WhatsApp group to find a thread, then all of that is a distraction and all of that impacts on performance. Equally, if multiple departments are speaking different languages then you’re asking an athlete to be a goalkeeper with ten different goals to defend.
Trimble delves further into the issues that can exist within a single team. “Even within one department you can have three or four different behaviours,” he says. “Take a medical department. One medic may create a block of availability that allows athletes to book appointments, another medic may book that same slot of availability but then allocate slots to athletes, there may then be another medic who bypasses all availability and pushes bespoke events or appointments to players.
Kairos helps to solve such problems. “Athletes and staff get the assurance that everything is on the platform and they can see it. It’s all live. Any department that wants to communicate with the athlete will use the one platform. Ultimately, they’ve got one goal to defend and, if anything changes, they can see notifications, reminders or updates on their notification channel; it’s very clear and very easy for them to know where they have to be, what they have to do, what the requirements are, and then how to get the best out of themselves.”
The platform can also be adapted to the prevailing culture at a team. “There’s ownership on one end and management on the other, and every team lies somewhere on that spectrum, but it’s important that we can support everybody, whatever that team culture is or environment or what the expectation of the players is; either to tell them where to be or what to do, or to allow them to manage all that themselves. We’ve got tools to capture both behaviours.
“There’s a number of different ways that you can use our software and it’s important that we can work with a team and find a way that works best for them and gets them the best results and, ultimately, gets their athletes performing the best.”
On that note, Trimble says that Kairos is continually reiterating its platform. “Every conversation for us is about discovery, finding where the club is at, and deciding what their unique issues are and, nine times out of ten, we will have encountered something similar before and there will be a mechanism in place to be able to provide a solution in the software,” he says. “We can take them through that, but often there can be something unique and there’s learnings in that for us too. That could even just be a coach with a new way of thinking about the game, a new way of communicating, or a new operational procedure. We have to capture that development.”
This attitude points the way forward for the next 12 months. “The next phase we’re going to be working on is the integration with third parties, be that GPS providers, sleep data, or nutrition and diet.”
The feedback from Kairos’ ever-growing client base has been positive too. “They say it is unthinkable that they’d be able to go back to the way it was before,” says Trimble. “Professional athletes require a platform that treats them like they’re a valued professional and communicate in a way that gives them back time and takes away distractions.”
Jul 06, 2021
ArticlesDon Barrell of the RFU promotes the idea of clarity and alignment as well as a variety of contributing voices when it comes to the personnel working on talent pathways.
Don Barrell, the Head of Regional Academies at the Rugby Football Union [RFU], is a former player who was already coaching academy players before he retired. Yet for all his years of experience working in Talent ID and development, he is still all ears when it comes to addressing performance questions.
“Diversity is a real superpower in performance,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “The more diverse you can make a conversation the better. You cannot work effectively unless you have independent people who can come in and challenge your thinking. If you’re having a talent ID review or selection meeting, I’d suggest you need every department in there providing their view of a player, otherwise you risk dropping into echo chambers. The broader the opinion in the room, the better it becomes. Subjectivity, done regularly, becomes objective. We need to be comfortable with that being a good thing, that’s the tension you have to hold as a system.”
Barrell, who previously shared six fundamentals to consider when establishing a talent pathway, turns his attention in the second instalment of our interview to the question of academy decision-making and the importance of diverse voices in multidisciplinary environments.
“The performance and development space should be a cross-department collaborative process,” he continues. “An oversimplification, but coaches can get upset when they do not win, which is an unavoidable reality. At that point, they shouldn’t be making decisions or giving feedback because they will not necessarily be tied to the athletes’ long-term objectives. If, as an organisation, you have a document that details what success in one year looks like and really clear, simple principles tied to multidisciplinary objectives, then better decisions can be made and feedback given in line with the long term in mind.”
“The big principle of any talent system is the end point and I’ll always talk about having the ‘end in mind’,” says Barrell. “If the end point is England Head Coach Eddie Jones using his criteria to select at that point, then we need to deliver towards that moment, understanding that the top of the game has so many influences. That’s the principle and purpose.”
Barrell oversees a gently graduated national programme that is supported by the Regional Academy club programmes across England. It is a multi-stakeholder process with each academy aligned to principles and guidance set down by the RFU.
“We want to see people really invested in their players at every stage of the programme – loving it, caring about it, and making it better. Then we need to accept that at any point in a transition in or out of a game selection, team or pathway; that a pathway coach is going to be really passionate, care about the person and may lose their objectivity – that’s fine too – and that’s why we bring in independence to provide that.”
Finding and embracing the paradoxes
What is more important: passion or objectivity? “You want both,” says Barrell, adding, “The whole talent space is full of paradoxes. Do you need to care or do you need to be standoffish and objective? Well, you need to be both. Do you want to win the game on Saturday or win the one in six years? Both. All these things, until we address them, can be roadblocks. You’ve got to find the paradoxes and then you’ve got to embrace them, the answers lie in there.”
The RFU has an essential role in ensuring England’s Regional Academy programmes are aligning in their working principles. “We constantly stay in the conversation and ensure there are clear decision-making frameworks. The reality is that some of the decisions made will be right, some of the decisions made will be wrong, but at least it’s clear.
“What can derail talent pathways is lack of clarity on decision-making; waiting to get a lot of stuff out onto the table in a room and people leaving unclear. Sometimes there isn’t an answer and you just need to commit to a direction. Then we’ll assess the decisions made. ‘Did that work? Yes’. ‘Did that work? No’. To be able to do that successfully, you need qualified practitioners, time, aligned stakeholders and a shared common understanding of a plan and direction. To achieve that at a club, your academy staff need enough autonomy to operate and enough freedom, space and independence to go and move things and enough time to implement them.”
Good intentions
“The best and the worst thing about systems is the people,” says Barrell. “Those human elements are ultimately what makes sport so exciting, so involving, and it’s why we’re all here, for all its idiosyncrasies, but they’re also the bits that can derail it.”
Nevertheless, he is certain that no one ever approaches talent pathway questions with anything other than good intentions, as he has come to learn in recent years. “Early in my career, I probably did what lots of people do, which is I thought people who worked at the top of the game were wrong in their view of developing young players, they’d only worked in one part of the game, but actually, that’s just their reality and it’s not wrong,” he says, “this is my reality and it’s not wrong. What we know is not the same.
“So how do you become very good at joining up two stories, two views of the world that are and need to be different? I’ll always try and work out what someone’s intent is and I’ve never found someone who’s not done something with good personal intent, despite the fact that I might completely disagree. Ultimately, there are not any ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decisions.”
It comes back to clarity in principles and decision making. “At some point, someone’s got to make a decision and you have to trust that their intent is good. The conversation is probably around what were you aiming for and why. You can sabotage yourself in thinking someone has an ulterior motive and if you don’t understand people’s decisions that can be tough in this world.
“As an academy manager you have to be cognisant of that. What do I want people in service of? Where do I want them to go? Those sort of behavioural nudges are critical or you’ll lose people along the way and never be as effective.”
Leadership and people skills are essential. “If academy managers are not able to align people from all levels; boards, directors of rugby, head coaches, parents, players or, in football, your technical directors and managers and owners; if they’re not able to align those I don’t think they’d be able to make progress.
All of our new academy managers that now come on board, large amounts of their time is devoted to people management. We already know they can do all the rugby stuff and so we spend time with them, we give them business mentors and other resources because their programmes will fail off the back of them not having those skillsets – it’s more important than the sports stuff. They’ve got to be good at running multidisciplinary teams and maintaining independence. Outside, diverse views can be critical success factors for these programmes.”
Download the latest Performance Special Report, Psychological Safety: The origins, reality and shelf life of an evolving high performance concept – featuring the athlete, coach and academic perspectives.
Nov 16, 2020
ArticlesDan Clements of Welsh Rugby Union explains how appreciative inquiry leverages the strengths of individuals, organisations and cultures to drive and sustain change with the ultimate aim of enhanced performance.
I will take a bet that amongst some other things, at some point they nurtured you, recognised your strengths and made you feel valued. Strengths-based thinking has had a lift in modern times within sport as more and more people seek to learn and find an edge in their practice or their organisation as a whole.
The exploits of world class coaches have been extensively documented and have offered a small window into the potential of such an approach. World class leaders such as Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, British & Irish Lions Head Coach Warren Gatland and Richmond Tigers supremo Damian Hardwick have offered an insight into the possibilities within coaching when your starting point in a relationship with a player or a group of individuals is their strengths and what they can do, not what they can’t.
Delving deeper, October’s National Rugby League Grand Final in Australia between perennial powerhouse Melbourne Storm and 2020’s highfliers the Penrith Panthers highlighted the potential for strengths-based thinking.
The modern coach is no doubt used to the pre-game interview, they are part and parcel of the territory and give the avid viewer a sneak peek into mindset and the thrill of the occasion. It was interesting to listen to master coach Craig Bellamy of the Melbourne Storm that weekend when 20 minutes prior to kick off he was asked ‘what will your final message to your team be?’. With the watching millions no doubt expecting a small insight into a rousing Churchillian speech, it was interesting to watch the multi-championship winning coach answer simply and clearly that he would remind his team of who they are representing, what they do well and what got them there.
Now just consider that for a second, what they do well and what got them there. It might only seem small, but when you consider the narrative in performance sport in the main is about negating the opposition or working out how to solve problems you start to become intrigued about the differences between a strengths-based approach or a deficit finding lens.
Strengths-based coaching or thinking is clearly not a new thing, however what this article and lifts the lid on is the subject of strengths-based change through the medium of coach learning.
It is a topic covered in even greater detail with my colleagues Kevin Morgan and Kerry Harris in our research paper titled Adopting an Appreciative Inquiry Approach to Propose Change within a National Talent Development System, which was published in September.
Performance leaders are acutely aware that coaches play a vital role in the change process within any organisation. Now this alone might jump out as an interesting point when you consider change. The old adage ‘the only constant is change’ may resonate, as time and time again leaders in any aspect of performance sport seek to find a way to enhance performance, but they must do it in a way that engages and collaborates with their people.
Appreciative inquiry leverages on the strengths of individuals, organisations and cultures to drive and sustain change with an ultimate aim of enhanced performance
Change and people development has traditionally been approached as a top down ‘leader knows best’ scenario that leads to mixed results and ironically sometimes leads to even more change. What this article investigates is the potential for strengths-based change within performance sport, through the process of appreciative inquiry. Appreciative inquiry is an unashamedly positive change process borne out of the work of David Cooperrider, who sought to seek an alternative approach to the traditional ideas of change management.
Appreciative inquiry leverages on the strengths of individuals, organisations and cultures to drive and sustain change with an ultimate aim of enhanced performance. When you consider this in relation to performance sport, it paints quite a compelling picture for organisations that are constantly looking to improve to stay ahead of their competition whilst working in a collaborative manner. Why is this any different to traditional change you may ask? Well, it has been suggested that society has many years of experience in problem solving and have gotten very good at it. On the flipside though, we have very little experience in looking for what works and finding new and innovative ways of doing more of the same.
What our recent research paper uncovers is that the power of positivity within appreciative inquiry could play an integral role in designing change interventions within sport. Working with 12 talent coaches, we sought to discover what they do well and what gives vitality to the group through a series of personal and collaborative tasks. Why do they coach, why here, and what gives them the most satisfaction as a group? This built into an investigation of strengths, what they do well, and what gives them pride.
Interestingly, by allowing them to start from a position of strength it encouraged the participants to be more open to change as well as the identification of areas for personal development. Positive thoughts and positive thinking led to critical dialogue that fostered collaboration. An important element of appreciative inquiry then asks the group to imagine a preferred ‘vision of the future’ or simply put, what would great look like for you? Asking participants to articulate and share this vision drove creativity and engagement, as the group were eager to share.
Finally, with a vision laid out the group designed a route map to get there. Leveraging their strengths, the coaches identified areas of practice that they could tangibly develop in a quest to achieve the identified goal. This process highlighted the capacity within strengths-based change for innovation and collaboration as coaches worked together to build a framework for development.
The positivity principle that lives at the core of the process is something that cannot be ignored. It led to a heightened state of collaboration amongst the coaches which is often seen as utopia in performance sport both on and off the pitch. Australian coaching legend Ric Charlesworth highlighted this in his book World’s Best when he shared that as a team ethos starts to become embedded within any culture it becomes infectious and redoubles itself when evident and drives team members on to ‘do more’. The results highlighted that the positivity within the process allowed the coaches to collaborate and uncover new ways of working, or quite simply, achieve the holy grail of ownership and buy in to the change process.
This process highlighted the capacity within strengths-based change for innovation and collaboration as coaches worked together to build a framework for development.
Now anyone that is responsible for people development or learning within their organisation would know that things are never that straightforward. Learning and specifically coach learning remains a complex endeavour as organisations seek methods that make it a meaningful and worthwhile process for the coach. Results here showed that this scenario was no different, with coaches getting lost in rhetoric and semantics within parts.
What appreciative inquiry and a strengths-based approach did show though, was that a positive lens within the process encouraged participants to ‘break through’ stumbling blocks that stalled the progression and identification of areas to concentrate efforts on. This positive lens asked the group to imagine ‘what next?’ and encouraged the design of a ‘route map’ for change.
More and more in high performing organisations we are seeking the next advantage or area of innovation. Could that answer lie internally, within our people? The final point to consider relates directly to strengths-based change, as we will all go through or lead a change process as some point within sport. Have you considered where your strengths may lie? Are you an expert who will lead from the front and struggle to capture learning or innovation? Or is there a way where we can collaborate with our people and innovate and learn along the way? Perhaps starting with a positive focus will encourage this.
Dan Clements is the Performance Coach Manager at Welsh Rugby Union.
Click here for access to Adopting an Appreciative Inquiry Approach to Propose Change within a National Talent Development System by Dan Clements, Kevin Morgan and Kerry Harris.
