Alignment, the question of performance outcome vs performance growth, learning and adaptive leadership were all on the agenda of the Leaders Performance Institute in May.
Take the club’s 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth in early April, which was widely perceived as one of the team’s worst performances of the campaign.
The team looked and felt exhausted, which was not necessarily helped by their Manager Mikel Arteta’s ferocious work ethic and increasing demands on the training pitch. It was a period when injuries mounted too.
But as reported in the Independent, Arsenal attacking midfielder Eberechi Eze, approached his boss and told him in so many words: ‘we can do this, but we need a bit of space’.
To his credit, Arteta listened and though they lost at rivals Manchester City the following weekend, there were shoots of promise in that performance. Arsenal would win their remaining five matches and clinch the title by seven points from City.
They then came within a penalty shootout of winning the Champions League in Budapest.
Arteta swore in the aftermath that Arsenal will be back; and one suspects he might listen to his players a little more readily in the future.
Which brings us on to happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in May, where a consistent theme has been the prioritisation of athlete needs, hopes and expectations.
Let’s dig into it.
Quote of the month:
A lot of coaches are either overdoing the teaching so there’s not any learning taking place or there are too many missed opportunities for the teaching and learning. It’s also changing the perception of the teacher; I’m doing it to you versus facilitating learning.
So said the head of coaching at a British university. He then raised the question of timing. “Do you jump in straight away? Do you wait till the end of the session and reflect? Do you wait till the next day and do some teaching and learning?”
It was an important consideration for a Leaders Virtual Roundtable that focused on what it takes to create an impactful and effective learning environment.
Read the breakdown here.
Insight of the month:
We’ve actually had our coaches start to record 10 to 15 minute videos, send them to players beforehand, and then the actual talk becomes them being able to reflect and digest the information.
So said a player development manager from Major League Baseball at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable where members discussed working with younger people.
Younger generations of athletes (as well as coaches and other staff members) are digital natives and teams would do well to lean into this.
Another voice from MLB, a sports scientist, told the table:
I think there’s definitely a difference in terms of how I have had to learn to communicate with them and include them in various decisions and thoughts along the way — and I’ll be the first to say I fumbled royally multiple times at first.
Read the full session summary here.
Good to know I:
But not everything is collaborative. I think we oftentimes confuse it, but we don’t want collaboration all the time.
So says Teena Murray, the Senior Vice President of Integrated Performance Support at US Soccer. She made the point that when a team has a shared mental model, individuals understand their domain, they know where there’s overlap and where there’s room for collaboration.
She wants her staff to be able to ask themselves “when am I the leader? When am I working in collaboration with another area, whether it’s nutrition, mental performance or sports science with strength & conditioning?” The answers provide “a clear understanding of who owns what but ultimately knowing what it is that we’re trying to deliver upon and what are the target outcomes that we’re really trying to reverse-engineer with all of our processes.”
We caught up with Murray as US Soccer prepared to make its new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Atlanta operational.
She explained why US Soccer aims to be ‘radically aligned and seamlessly integrated‘.
Good to know II:
Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures hosted a virtual roundtable where he gave members some tools to help them become better adaptive leaders.
In part, it means recognising issues when they emerge and tackling them in a calm and methodical manner.
He shared with the table the two types of problem that tend to exist in high performance and what makes each distinct:
Pagliano then gave the table a series of hypothetical performance problems and asked them to decide if their nature was technical or adaptive. They were:
“These are the kinds of exercises I find to be really insightful because it helps me as a facilitator get a sense of where they’re coming from when they’re approaching leadership and change management,” said Pagliano.
Read more here.
Finally…
Paul Downes, the GM of Basketball New Zealand, described his approach to his first hundred says on the job. He argues that the idea that a new or transitioning leader can transform an organisation in the first 90 (or 100) days is unrealistic.
Read the first instalment of Downes’ miniseries here.
Image used courtesy of Basketball New Zealand.
Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members:
World Rugby’s Brett Robinson describes the treacherous path he navigated when delivering the global federation’s Impact Beyond 25 strategy.
Robinson, a former Wallabies international-turned-sports scientist and C-suite executive, beat France’s Abdelatif Benazzi by 27 votes to 25 in the second round of the election held by World Rugby’s Executive Council.
His narrow majority meant he succeeded Sir Bill Beaumont without a honeymoon period. Yet his achievements thus far, chiefly the implementation of World Rugby’s Impact Beyond 25 programme and building consensus around new laws of the game, have been commendable.
“I’m really proud of where we’ve got to as a game because, when I came into the role, we were fractured and divided,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in Brisbane in February.
There were factions within the World Rugby Council that could be divided into England and the Celtic nations on one side with the French and Latin nations on the other. Robinson, as an Australian, said he was “coming into a gunfight between the Celts, the English and the French.”
For all that, in September 2025, the 17th World Rugby General Assembly had endorsed Impact Beyond 25, its five-to-seven-year strategy for developing and promoting the world game heading into the men’s Rugby World Cup in 2027 and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2029 (both to be hosted in Australia) with the 2028 Olympic Games in LA sandwiched in between.
So what changed? Below, we explore Robinson’s approach to calming rugby’s internal strife.
Brett Robinson (centre) onstage at Leaders Meet: Australia with Rugby Australia’s Director of High Performance Peter Horne and Leaders’ Managing Director Laura McQueen. (Photo: Albert Perez / The Leaders Performance Institute.)
Firstly, he didn’t shy away from the problem
As Robinson explained, “some countries were incredibly frustrated; they wanted to revolt and blow everything up.” Others were about “organisationally working with the change and not being too destructive”.
Almost half of the 52 members of the World Rugby Council voted for Benazzi as Chair. Robinson, who will serve a four-year term, did not shy away from that fact. “We’ve got differences of opinion, we’ve got some challenges, and there’ll be some people that were disappointed after the election,” he said in the aftermath.
In December 2025, he expanded on his thoughts as a guest on the Rugby Unity Podcast. “The system upon which World Rugby is built has been in place for 30 years,” he said. “We have systems that simply don’t work and prevent us from reacting with the necessary speed.” It is worth remembering that he made those observations after Impact Beyond 25 had been launched.
Onstage in Brisbane, he further outlined an enduring sticking point: that France and England account for approximately 70% of the revenue generated in rugby union. This had led to political as well as economic tensions across the different factions; and the question was how World Rugby could engage and incentivise the other unions to align in pursuit of a more equitable distribution.
He ensured World Rugby’s new strategy was a collective endeavour
The Impact Beyond 25 strategy was unanimously ratified just days before the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final, which saw a crowd of 82,957 watch England beat Canada 33-13 at Twickenham.
The timing could not have been better. England 2025 was the most well-attended Women’s World Cup ever. World Rugby’s unions gave their blessing to a global impact plan that, in the international governing body’s own words, ‘is built around three core themes of profile and participation, careers and gender equity, and capability and expertise with the mission of inspiring more women and girls to get into rugby on and off the field of play.’
Most importantly, it bore the fingerprints of all those involved in its creation.
“It’s really important that, in my role, I bring the game together and we agree on what shared success looks like and we pursue it together,” Robinson told Rugby Unity.
He expanded on those comments in Brisbane. “We’ve built a collective plan where we’re all engaged, we’re all incentivised, and we’re all a part of that journey,” he said, adding that the plan includes taking All Blacks and Wallabies Test matches to the United States. Such moves “will help build the fandom that ultimately will drive the commercial outcomes and [increase rugby union’s] market share”.
He accounted for local complexity
“We are not going to do everything from Dublin,” he told the Brisbane audience, name-checking World Rugby’s base and then pointing to the man sat beside him onstage, his former World Rugby colleague Peter Horne, who now serves as Director of High Performance at Rugby Australia.
“What we do is only as good as what he [Horne] can deliver and vice versa.”
In some places, such as Australia and England, Robinson said, “we have an Anglo-Saxon way of governing; we’ve got strong boundaries around the role of the chair, the board, the CEO, the executive. In other parts of the world, they have very different ideas of the president or the chair being an executive authority.”
He cited the example of Argentine Gus Pichot, the former Vice-Chair of World Rugby. “He’s not the chair and he’s not on the board of the Argentine Rugby Union, but he is making every decision coming out of it; and so I have to work with that, acknowledging that I need to keep his chair informed and his CEO informed; but if Gus doesn’t agree with it, it doesn’t happen. And I could say, ‘well, that’s just a crazy way of governing’, but I can’t change it, so I have to work with it. The French are the same; Florian Grill is their president. He’s not the CEO, but he operates as an executive chair.”
On that last note, Robinson said: “I spent a lot of time before Christmas with the French in Paris. I’m going back there in a couple of weeks’ time.” These meetings have proven invaluable. “You have to work really hard to genuinely display that you’re listening and supporting, and they don’t necessarily say ‘yes, yes, yes’, but actually they can see the ‘why’.”
World Rugby is now reaping the rewards of his efforts. “Having the French and the Argentinians now with us, and rebuilding the relationship with the Celts and the English, was probably the biggest challenge that I faced; and now we’re there, we need to push on and deliver.”
He won’t rest on his laurels
“You’ve got to be systematic; from my experience, if you go randomly into anything like this, you are more likely to fail than not,” said Robinson. “You have to set up a proper process.”
He listed the necessary personal qualities of a chairperson: trustworthiness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. He balanced these against an ability to act and make tough decisions. All are essential in a world where alignment is predicated on retaining the trust of the individuals involved in the process.
Robinson then explained that the executive board of World Rugby had just undergone a review. He said: “I’ve been running a process over Christmas where we have a 360 on our behaviours; I’m getting a 360 on me. We’re having a discussion about board effectiveness; how that relates to the implementation of our strategy. We have some blind spots and weaknesses on our board, and we have succession plans that are coming. So those things are really important because it all rots from the head.”
What to read next
Why Change Only Sticks when you Lead your People Through the Transition
ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell discusses creativity and problem-solving in volatile environments both in space and here on Earth.
Main Image: European Space Agency
The video depicted a range of space-faring feats performed by the European Space Agency [ESA] as it enjoyed its 50th year.
Mundell, who is the Director of Science at the ESA , brought the room back to Earth again when outlining her efforts to bring together 23 European nations (more specifically their governments) in pursuit of the agency’s interstellar goals.
“Diplomacy is a contact sport,” said Mundell, who is a diplomatic veteran at this stage. She is responsible for a pan-European staff of over 45,000 people, with headquarters in five jurisdictions. You can also throw in the challenges posed by Brexit, the pandemic (when international diplomacy definitely was not a contact sport) and the war in Ukraine.
“The political churn at the moment is unprecedented,” she continued. “From one day to another, we don’t know whether our member state governments will continue to be governments or remain in place for another election.”
This volatility stands in contrast to ESA missions, all of which take decades to devise and tend to last longer than most political careers.
Then there’s the space-based challenges. In her time onstage, Mundell described a range of missions, from explorations of Jupiter’s moons to detailed observations to the surface of Mercury. All require incomprehensible precision.
Take the LISA [Laser Interferometer Space Antenna] mission. Its purpose is to detect gravitational waves in space; the ripples in space-time caused by cosmic events such as black hole collisions.
“They will have three spacecraft flying in convoy, with two and a half million kilometres between each spacecraft,” she said. “They will follow an Earth-Sun orbit and they will rotate and stay in that triangle.”
The lasers in question must be able to point with precision narrower than a proton.
““We’re going to measure the nature of space-time itself. It’s eye-watering technology.”
LISA measuring the properties of gravitational waves (Image: the European Space Agency)
Mundell has become adept at managing the external elements that could derail projects such as LISA. Thanks to her leadership, ESA’s creative and technical minds are able to do their best work in a climate of political uncertainty.
Psychological safety
In space, Mundell told us, things often go wrong. Take the Euclid mission, the purpose of which is to map the ‘dark’ universe. The lens of space telescope, which orbits the sun 1.5 million km from Earth, became contaminated by a strip of ice thinner than a strand of DNA. Mundell’s team had to find a way to defrost the ice without damaging the equipment’s sensitive optics.
Euclid begin its dark universe survey. (Image: European Space Agency)
But if you can reasonably anticipate microscopic space ice then you can devise a plan to defrost it.
“We did that last month,” she said almost matter-of-factly, but the ESA’s staff have built trust in their systems. “At a time of crisis, the first thing you do is check the process.” The system provides a layer of safety that goes beyond the interpersonal dynamics originally associated with the term ‘psychological safety’ (although these remain important; Mundell says: “Please create the best possible cultures you can. Please have the courage to really call out bad behaviour”).
“The cognitive safety comes from the fact that you know there is a process that you’ve all built together.”
This knowledge is also useful when navigating potential cultural differences present in a supranational organisation.
More creative, less expensive, more innovative
On her way to the Kia Oval, Mundell received news that one of an ESA contract negotiation was going backwards.
“My first instinct was to think of a solution,” she said. “And a very calm senior colleague said to me: ‘we don’t need to escalate this’. We don’t always need to go to the nuclear option.”
Such setbacks and budget cuts are par for the course. During his annual press briefing in January, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher revealed that the ESA budget for 2025 would be €7.68 billion. It was €7.79 billion in 2024, but Germany, Italy and the UK reduced their contributions by a collective €430 million.
“We have to continually innovate and make things more creative, less expensive, but more innovative,” said Mundell, who explained that the ESA must design to cost. While there is room for creativity in day to day problem-solving, the process guides the action taken. “We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”
Enduring purpose
The ESA was founded to enable European nations to explore the cosmos and further the continent’s knowledge and understanding. It’s an enduring purpose that continues to appeal. On 1 January this year, Slovenia became the 23rd member state, with several others still in the queue to join.
“Our missions are lifetime generational missions,” said Mundell. “You’ll see that people will give a significant fraction of their lifetime to develop, design and fly these missions, and ultimately protect them, to deliver science back to society. Children in school today will use data from our missions.”
She explained that once every three years there is a council meeting of ESA members at a ministerial level to decide the agency’s budget for the next three-year cycle. She shared an image from the 2022 meeting in Paris. It was taken just before she joined:
The official portrait of ministers at the 2022 ESA Council Meeting at Ministerial Level. (Photo: Stephane Corvaja / European Space Agency)
“This is a photograph of inspiration,” she said. “These ministers come from all different political backgrounds, they were facing various different challenges at this time. There was cost of living crisis and obviously the war in Ukraine was pushing all sorts of problems across these member states, and yet they all came together and they agreed that space is important.”
Hear more from Carole Mundell
In an exclusive column, Peter Hodgkinson, the former Head of Build at Mercedes F1, sets out the considerations that helped him to lead in one of sport’s most high-pressured arenas.
Main Image: Getty Images / Mark Thompson
Not only is it difficult to fully see someone’s body language, it also makes it near impossible to see a leaking water pipe at the front of an engine!
In my opinion, you need to be present in a high-performance environment.
I served as Head of Build at Mercedes between 2011 and 2019, an era when we won five driver’s and five constructor’s world championships. It was a period of unprecedented success for the team and for at least part of that time I worked out of a small, tired office in the middle of the team’s factory.
It was a terrible space. It had no natural light, the AC was incredibly bad, and the ceiling tiles were water-stained. Admittedly, I couldn’t see those tiles – or the worn-out carpet, come to think of it – as easily at 7:30am when six or seven people turned up for work and squeezed into a room that was more suitable for four.
I wasn’t sad when that office was finally knocked down as part of a factory refurbishment, but it had been a home away from home. For 20 years I’d spent more time there than I did at home.
Peter Hodgkinson holds the Formula 1 Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championship trophies in his ‘dreary’ former office at Mercedes HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire.
This story (at least my schedule, if not the dreary office) probably sounds familiar to many of you. I was routinely on the road at 5:15am and did not leave until 6:30pm most evenings. Of course, I left my phone on just in case.
Such scenarios in high-performance are not going to change any time soon, but there are several things that you can do as a leader to protect yourself and your team from excessive workloads while still delivering the required work.
There are sure to be other things, but these five considerations make a good starting point.
I believe it was important to be seen and to say at least ‘good morning’ to as many of my team as possible. I wanted them to feel that I cared for them and I was interested in what they were working on and the issues that they faced; and it was another opportunity for information gathering.
When we were in the build period or working on a big update, I would try and get to work in time to talk to the nightshift in Build, Compbond, Inspection etc to get an understanding of the current status and get a head start thinking about what I had learnt. This floor walking – asking questions, providing challenge, learning about the current status and building relationships – as I said, I don’t think you can do this as effectively on Teams or Zoom.
I’ve touched upon this before. I never tried to plan more than 30 percent of my day. Most days, meetings were added into my calendar which I needed to attend and, if I had a big gap, I would try and block it out for my work.
We think of work as writing plans, answering emails, attending meetings, doing things, etc but floor walking and talking to people is just as important and is part of the job. It might not feel like work as you have nothing physically to show for it, but it is so important as you are building relationships with your team which is an essential part of the trust equation.
As a leader, you cannot be chained to your desk doing work, looking at your feet and never lifting your head to talk to your team.
Manage your job list by focusing on getting things done. But don’t just keep adding to the job list. Create movement.
Trying to have 70 percent of my day unplanned also meant that I had a pretty good chance of achieving the 30 percent that I did have planned, so I felt like I got stuff done and when I went home, I felt that I had achieved something.
This is important. We all like big, long job lists. It makes us feel valued, but if we just keep adding to them it is soul destroying, as you never feel like you have achieved anything. Try and get three things done each day, completed and finished. This is movement, placing a real mental focus on a task to get it completed. This is what I attempted to do from 6:00am to 8:00am each day. With the 30 percent rule, if there is a crisis that does require your full attention, then you should have some capacity to manage it without impacting too much of your day.
Dr Ceri Evans got me thinking about tasks in this way:
Name it: What is the technical task you are undertaking? Give it a name.
Time it: Add a deadline for when you are going to get this task completed. This adds pressure which gives us energy to perform.
Move it: Time to step in and perform. Complete or complain, it is your choice. Try three times a day for 15 minutes to focus on a task and get it completed. This is movement.
Trust is at the heart of any team’s performance. Trust is choosing to risk making something you value, vulnerable to another person’s actions. It happens in small moments when you have the opportunity to increase your trustworthiness.
For example, I tried to keep meetings to a minimum as I wanted to walk around and talk to people and follow up on issues. It was important to me to be connected to what was going on in the workshops and for the technicians to know that I cared deeply about what they were doing and the effort they were putting into their piece of the puzzle.
After clearing as many emails as possible, I would try and get out the door by 6:30pm and leave the Team Leaders to it. As I said, the phone was always on but, on the whole, it didn’t ring that much in the evenings or at night because the team knew what to do and what was required.
In short, they had my trust. I believe trust is made up of the following:
Reliability: You turn up at the same time every day, you deliver the work, you can be counted on in a crisis to be there. You are present.
Competent: You are knowledgeable and you know how to do the work to the best of your ability.
Relationship: You need to have a relationship with the people you are interacting with. Find out about what they like and dislike; be curious about them as a person.
In F1, I tried to get to a position where 80 percent of what we did was planned and 20 percent was chaos. The chaos makes the job both challenging and fun. It’s one of the reasons you get out of bed in the morning.
When the chaos hits 40 or 50 percent, this is too much and it leads to overload and overwhelm. Cracks will start to show in the team’s behaviours and the quality of the work will decline.
As a leader, you need to manage this carefully and do everything in your power to protect your team as much as possible from the really impossible requests.
Peter Hodgkinson on the factory floor at Mercedes HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire.
Sometimes you have to say ‘no’, but make sure you have other alternative options ready to present. You can’t just say ‘no’. There is a very fine line between protecting your team from excessive workload and delivering the required work to support the plan so if you do push back, make sure you can fully explain your concerns with facts, not just emotions.
Peter Hodgkinson is a leadership and performance specialist skilled in helping high-performers become better at what they do. As an accomplished manager and mechanic, Peter has enjoyed almost three decades of success in elite sporting environments. His work in motorsport, as part of winning teams at Le Mans and Daytona, culminated in seven Formula 1 driver’s world championships won at Brawn and Mercedes, where he led car-building operations. Peter was Mercedes’ Head of Build during Lewis Hamilton’s era-defining run of six world titles. After a spell serving as Mercedes’ Head of Employee Engagement, Peter returned to the Factory Floor as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team when Mercedes supported their quest for the 37th America’s Cup.
If you would like to speak to Peter, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.
