By John Portch

A few years ago, the US Air Force invested a year of time and substantial resources to better understand why nearly a third of its pararescue candidates were self-eliminating within the first 72 hours of entering the training pipeline.

“It would be like you’re already through the NFL Draft, you show up to training camp, and 30% of your draftees say: ‘I thought I wanted to be an NFL player, but now that I’m actually doing it, not so much’ and they just walk,” says Andrea Tullos.

It led to a period of introspection, she tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “We realized we didn’t believe we were bringing the candidates to the camp that had the greatest potential to be exceptional performers across a career versus just successfully getting them through the training,” she continues. “And those can be two very different things.”

Tullos, a retired Air Force lieutenant general now leading strategic advisory firm Outperform IQ, felt a moral obligation at the time to provide the Air Force with the best possible candidates. They decided to “go down that road less traveled,” which meant reweighting assessments towards attributes harder to measure such as will or imperviousness to discomfort rather than versus counting pushups or swim times over pool lengths.

It made some Air Force people nervous, but they pressed on. “We learned a ton through the process too,” says Tullos. “That’s what I believe is an attribute of a learning organization; when you’re not afraid to go down these rabbit holes that might not end up where you think they were going to end up.” It could not have happened by accident. “Being a learning organization is a choice,” she adds.

It was also a triumph of imagination, a point raised by Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer at the US Air Force, who has joined Tullos in the conversation to discuss their six years working together. Walsh made a similar point in part one with regards to the 9/11 Commission’s warning about a “failure of imagination” and, here, commends the Air Force for confronting the possibility that their system was solving the wrong problem.

“So don’t get stuck in a data story that is not taking you to a possibility that you want to imagine,” Walsh tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Is there something else that we can notice, that we can investigate, that we can try?”

How organizations learn and help their people to learn is at the heart of learning engineering, a topic introduced by Walsh when the duo spoke onstage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York. “It’s a new one for a lot of people,” says Walsh. “It’s been emerging over the last decade.”

Learning engineering asks how information moves between the learner and the teacher within an environment. Walsh uses AI as an example of what is risked when learning is not engineered. “You can give a teacher AI, but if you don’t teach them how to utilize that and give them that psychologically safe space to investigate and to actually learn it, when they bring it into a classroom, especially a classroom today where people have been utilizing it, the technology risks becoming a source of anxiety rather than learning.”

In part one, Walsh and Tullos explored the threats that can cause leaders to lose sight of their people’s development needs. In part two, we turn our attention to what happens when we have the person in our sights: how do we identify and develop their potential?

Learning engineering explained

As Walsh says, learning engineering provides “a rigorous rubric to understanding the variables of learning so that you can optimize.” It asks: do we understand this person well enough to help them become who they could be?

She simplified it to three tenets:

1. Human-centered design: understand the learner

“We really want to start with the learner,” says Walsh. Understand the person before designing the intervention. Coaches, for example, can ask:

• How does the athlete learn?
• What support to they need?
• What environments help them succeed?

2. Interdisciplinarity: no single discipline sees the whole picture

Interdisciplinary collaboration broadens that understanding of the learner by bringing together multiple perspectives. “Different disciplines can have different theories, different scholarship, that are valuable to achieving the outcomes that we want.”

3. Evidence: test your assumptions against reality

The findings then feed back into the learner’s experience to create a cycle of improvement.

“Learning engineering is an empowerment structure for the learner too,” says Walsh.

“Using the evidence not just to have somebody tell me what I need to do or to assess me, but for me to know how I’m going to be assessed, how I can gain those reps and sets or learning that needs to happen for me to move forward.”

Tullos, for example, says she is “not good at being the first person in line if I hadn’t seen it” but, once she’d seen it, “I was on.” She echoes Walsh in emphasizing the importance of understanding how someone learns and, if you have a firmer grasp of the required learning methodology, “you can prepare before the player even shows up.”

She adds: “You don’t want to structure practices and then realize that for 90% of the team it just went in one ear and out the other because it was delivered in the wrong format.”

Choosing to learn

Tullos is keen to address the elephant in the room. “In certain sports today, the incentive structure is not to be a learning organization, because your coaching turnover is too high, your player turnover is too high, and you’re designed to be a stepping stone,” she says. “You’re trying to get the talent that you have optimized to win once.”

The fact is, she adds, “you can win without being a learning organization”. However, “the dynasties, the ones that never get relegated? My hypothesis is they are learning organizations.” They have more stability and are “continuously feeding that family tree of great coaches to the outside because they’re investing in them. Everybody wants to go to that organization.” By contrast, where it’s obvious that athlete and coach development aren’t priorities, “you want to go there, but God, you want to get out of there too. You want to take what you can get, win a championship, and move on.”

Walsh has been listening intently. “It takes practice to be present, how we respond to uncertainty takes practice,” she says, adding that no leader can assume that learning just happens naturally.

As a practical tool for tracking learning, Tullos recommends “disciplined debriefs” that happen win or lose. She suggests three questions as a starting point:

• Were we as prepared as we could have been?
• What happened that we did not expect?
• What can we do better tomorrow?

At the heart of these is the notion that success is not proof that your preparation was perfect and failure not proof that everything was wrong.

“It’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better,” she says. “It’s a two-way conversation between coaches and performers that happens after every single competitive event, whether it’s the best performance you’ve ever seen or the worst.”

Andrea Tullos is a retired Air Force lieutenant general and founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Her views are her own and do not represent those of the Department of War or the Department of the Air Force.

Read part one

Training for the Known, Learning for the Unknown: Why Imagination Matters in High Performance

By John Portch

“One of my favorite lines is: imagine a future you want.”

Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer at the US Air Force, believes that people all too often get trapped in existing narratives and assumptions, which can come at the expense of their imagination.

“Imagination is an incredibly powerful tool that is totally underdeveloped once you get past the sixth grade,” she continues. “Then you’re told ‘this is how you do things’. And so we start to learn in different ways and some of our imagination can atrophy.”

She cites the 9/11 Commission Report as a grave example of missed possibilities. In making its conclusion, the Report stated that ‘the most important failure was one of imagination;’ that US policymakers, intelligence agencies and other institutions did not sufficiently imagine that al-Qaeda would use commercial airliners as weapons in a coordinated attack.

“That really stuck with me,” says Walsh, who entered federal service not long after the attacks. “How do we continue to develop and strengthen our imagination?”

The practical answer is to build people capable of responding when those possibilities arrive, as suggested by Andrea Tullos, who is the Founder and CEO of strategic advisory firm Outperform IQ and a former lieutenant general in the US Air Force. She also served as the Commander and President of the Air University.

“We train people for the circumstances we know they’re going to face and we educate them for the things that are the unknowns,” says Tullos, who has worked with Walsh for six years and joins her in conversation with the Leaders Performance Institute. “When an unknown happens, they’re going to default to that well of knowledge, experience and wisdom.”

The duo stepped onto the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York to discuss how organizations can become better at learning.

One route is through a renewed focus on individual learning and development but, as Walsh and Tullos explain in the first of two articles, there is a series of threats that can cause leaders to lose sight of their people’s development needs.

Below, we outline four threats in particular that may stifle an individual’s potential.

1. Technology

In sports, there is a firm focus on athlete management systems, wearables and, more recently, AI as the route to a competitive advantage. This trend is also visible in other industries and, as Tullos says, “it’s consuming an extraordinary amount of both time and resources compared to the human focus.” She likens a leader’s time to a pie chart; and “the time sports leaders would normally spend in direct contact with humans is being consumed by the technology, figuring out how to use it, apply it, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.” The result is that the “art is being drowned out by the science right now.” That balance needs to be restored. “I’m a big believer in leveraging technology, but I think that slice of the pie still needs to be relatively small compared to the amount of time I’m spending on the humans.” She sums it up with a striking metaphor: “We don’t want leaders so connected to the technology that the human is just withering over here. They still need sunlight and water.”

2. Data and analysis

Data analytics can only ever be part of a holistic understanding of an athlete. “Don’t get stuck in a data story that is not taking you to a possibility that you want to imagine,” says Walsh, who cautions against seeking new datasets without good reason. “Rather than thinking ‘okay, what is missing from this?’ Actually do some critical thinking,” she continues. When seeking to make decisions on an athlete, a leader should be ready to ask questions such as: “Why are these numbers so much different than they were before? Are there any variables that I might be able to find?”

Clearly, some menial tasks can be automated by what Tullos calls a “digital wingman” or a “coach in your pocket” but critical thinking cannot be lost. When this is your mindset, a new tool such as generative AI does not lead to a much-feared cognitive offload, as Walsh puts it, but to the posing of better questions. The key for Walsh is to learn “how to be a good human in the loop with new technology”; and neither she nor anyone else has cracked it. She says it is “going to take patience, grace, an open mind and forgiveness.”

3. Excessive planning

If leaders exert too much control over an athlete’s performance, it can undermine their development. “If you’re so rigorously planned, you don’t have the ability to adapt on the spot,” says Walsh. She points to a discussion she heard among announcers covering San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, who they felt often performed at his best when he would “get out of his head and just go.” Whether or not that was the explanation, preparation should build an athlete’s confidence to adapt.

“A leader should understand that while they can’t control complexity, they can manage it,” says Tullos, who returns to her idea of training people for the knowns and, in doing so, educating them for the unknowns.

It is critical to build an athlete’s familiarity with uncertainty. “Maybe you haven’t hit that specific situation, but you’ve done enough to know how to successfully adapt,” adds Walsh. “It doesn’t mean your strategy will be successful, but I’m a believer that the more routinized you become, the more adaptable you become to the craziness that happens.”

It is also a question of teammates establishing a shared understanding of risk, which is not always the case. “It’s even more powerful if you have a shared rubric across teammates so other people can anticipate how you might respond as well, rather than adding in another variable of surprise with your adaptation.”

4. Blind spots created by expertise

Experience and expertise are ideal traits for filtering out noise and executing the task at hand, but, as Tullos says, it can be a “double-edged sword”. She explains that the brain develops expectations based on previous experience and, most of the time, this is a helpful trait, but “after a while, it’s not that it’s lying to you, but it’s going to tell you what it has seen the last 300 times.” An athlete in the heat of competition, for example, needs to be prepared for when the pattern changes. “That’s the value of the iPad on the sideline or even an experienced quarterback,” she continues. It ties into the threat posed by excessive planning. “They’re going to have to get their brain to rethink that and calibrate what it is that they’re selectively looking at.”

None of these threats undermine the value of technology, data, planning or expertise in performance, but there is a case for keeping them all in proportion. The next question, discussed in part two, is how leaders can create learning environments that support athlete and coach development.

Andrea Tullos is a retired Air Force lieutenant general and founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Her views are her own and do not represent those of the Department of War or the Department of the Air Force.

By John Portch

Rachel Vickery is a high-performance specialist who helps teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

These teams tend to ask two questions. Firstly, “What are some techniques that we can use in the pressure moments to be able to handle pressure?” and, secondly, “How do we replicate pressure so that we can train our people to be able to be comfortable with it?”

Neither is the right question, as Vickery explained. They are “looking at the wrong part of the evolution of how pressure comes about,” she told a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “Probably 90% of the time, when I’m seeing an individual or a team not executing well in the pressure moment, it’s usually got almost nothing to do with the performance arena itself; it’s more to do with what’s going on everywhere else.”

Success is less about teaching people in-the-moment coping techniques and more about ensuring they arrive at the pressure moment with sufficient physiological and psychological buffer to absorb it.

“The reality of the environments that we all operate in is pressure is the constant,” she continued. “We shouldn’t be surprised that it shows up and that people feel elevated and escalated.” However, “we don’t do a good enough job of explaining to people that that’s normal and it’s really okay and ‘here’s how it could potentially impact your performance if we don’t give you the skills and the techniques and the ways to handle that’.”

Allostatic load and ‘buffer’

Vickery explained that performance under pressure starts with an understanding of an individual’s allostatic load – the accumulation of stressors and demands over time that push a person into a heightened state of physiological arousal.

“What they end up seeing in finals is not a sudden, unexpected failure of performance,” she said. “It was something that was actually built because of that accumulation in the system as a whole.”

Stressors can include:

• Relationship breakdowns
• Family illness
• Financial concerns
• Major life challenges
• Ongoing personal worries
• Poor physical foundations
• Sleep deprivation
• Constant organisational pressure

Any combination of these factors can push an individual over their threshold for coping effectively; and, on the last point above, Vickery said: “unfortunately, most organisations are unknowingly creating organisational allostatic load.” They create a constant background level of pressure that steadily consumes the buffer of athletes, coaches and staff long before the critical performance moment arrives. One participant also noted that mundane organisational barriers (or simple “inertia”) can become a chronic source of frustration, uncertainty and stress.

The goal should be to increase ‘buffer’ – the spare capacity between a person’s current arousal level and the point at which performance starts to deteriorate. When someone has plenty of buffer, the pressure can rise naturally, their arousal can increase, and they can still stay below their threshold.

Vickery argued that many organisations make a fundamental mistake by treating sleep, recovery, relationships and gratitude as wellbeing initiatives rather than as performance interventions that create buffer.

From there, the discussion turned to the ways buffer is most commonly depleted in high-performance environments. Vickery and the group identified five recurring challenges and a series of practical solutions.

1. Pressure first reveals itself through communication breakdowns

Leaders should treat communication breakdowns as early warning signs that people are operating close to their threshold. When pressure mounts, athletes and coaches withdraw, communication deteriorates; assumptions replace curiosity; body language changes, eye contact disappears and conversations become more directive and defensive. These behaviours are not personality traits but predictable consequences of the threat response.

The solution: When teams encourage open conversation, curiosity and honest dialogue, they are better able to identify pressure before it becomes a problem. “We’re feeling beings that think, not thinking beings that feel,” said Vickery. “Our thought processes are actually more driven by our physiology than the other way around.”

2. Outcome supersedes process

Too often success is linked to winning, with people pulled towards KPIs, rankings and results. One participant described an environment in which almost every meeting ended with the message: ‘we just need to win this week’. The danger is that a constant focus on outcomes increases allostatic load and elevates pressure long before competition begins. The result is an environment where people become fixated on consequences rather than execution.

The solution: Clear plans, role clarity and process-based language serve as anchors when pressure rises. The stronger a person’s connection to the process, the more pressure they can absorb without becoming overwhelmed.

3. Personal stress follows people into performance

There is a persistent belief that high performers should be able to leave personal issues at the door but, as Vickery observed, people may compartmentalise mentally and emotionally, but “we can’t compartmentalise our physiology”. Sleep deprivation, family pressures, financial concerns and relationship difficulties all consume buffer. She illustrated the point through the example of an elite military operator who missed a critical threat after a sleepless night following a relationship breakdown despite being regarded as one of his unit’s most reliable performers.

The solution: Individuals must address their biggest sources of allostatic load rather than ignoring them. Leaders must also provide support and understanding.

4. Neglect of the fundamentals

Several participants reflected on how neglecting sleep, recovery and self-management had eventually caught up with them despite operating successfully for long periods.

The solution: As Vickery said, “do the common things uncommonly well.”

5. Fear-based thinking narrows performance

When pressure rises, performers become consumed by consequences, avoiding mistakes and protecting themselves from failure. In this state, people hesitate, become defensive and interpret feedback as criticism rather than information.

The solution: Reframe pressure as an opportunity. Gratitude in that moment redirects attention from fear towards problem-solving. Vickery said: “It turns the fear brain off and it opens the [part of the brain] that’s going to be much more into curiosity and ‘how do I solve for the problem?’”

Vickery then shared her framework for managing pressure across an entire season:

Off-season

Pressure audits: Organisations should identify where performance broke down under pressure and then reverse-engineer the causes. The objective is to uncover where pressure was created, accumulated and left unchecked. It is not about apportioning blame. Vickery said: “Often what we see is where the pressure was set up is actually quite a long way away from where it actually showed up.”

Intentional design: Once the pressure points have been identified, systems, communication practices and organisational habits can be redesigned to preserve buffer rather than consume it.

Mid-season

Big rocks: When competition is underway, teams should not try to fix everything at once. Instead, organisations and individuals should identify and address the largest contributors to accumulated pressure and allostatic load.

Post-season

Add pressure analysis to your after-action reviews: Too few AARs examine the role pressure played throughout a season. Discussions should reference arousal state, allostatic load and buffer alongside technical, tactical and operational reviews. The real challenge is whether individuals and organisations have preserved enough buffer to absorb pressure when the moment arrives.

What to read next

Athlete Performance Under Pressure: why Systems and Culture Matter

By John Portch

“Are we trying to win the next match or are we trying to build an environment that keeps winning for the next decade?”

Performance specialist Darren Shand, the former General Manager of the New Zealand All Blacks, posed this question at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable.

He continued: “I know if you hold a leadership role, it’s probably a conflict that you fight pretty regularly as you go through a season or a campaign because they can sometimes pull against each other, these two competing priorities, and depending on the type of leaders you have within your organisation, it can create a tension.”

The Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance were invited to think about where they sit on the spectrum between performance outcomes and performance growth.

Teams, as Shand explained, tend to oscillate along the spectrum. “Traditionally, early season tends to be growth-focused and, as we get further into campaigns, outcomes tend to take over.”

This presents a series of risks. “If there’s too much focus on outcomes alone it often creates fear, short-term thinking, and sometimes even stagnation caused by that fear. But if you’ve got too much focus on growth only, you start to dilute standards.”

He is in no doubt that “championship environments require both” and, over the course of 30 minutes, delivered a presentation to provide the members in the virtual room with practical ideas to strengthen their approaches to building sustainable, high-performing teams.

Aspire or inspire? Prove or improve?

Shand illustrated what he sees as the distinction between outcomes and growth.

‘Outcomes’ is what one aspires to win or achieve, while ‘growth’ is based on the desire to improve and develop (or “inspiration”, as he put it).

Both are essential. “The best environments don’t choose one – they learn when to lean into each,” said Shand. “They ask what’s the appropriate time and moment in a campaign, a season or an event.”

He posed two questions: “Which philosophy dominates your environment when the pressure increases? As expectation, scrutiny and pressure rises, where do you go?”

Teams under pressure tend to focus more on outcomes and, as such, they risk falling into what Shand called the “outcome trap” i.e. the negative consequences that come with an excessive focus on outcomes.

It usually starts when success is defined by results, trophies and external expectations. He noted a series of signs of which to be cognisant:

• When people start trying not to fail rather than striving to improve.
• Increased conservatism and narrow thinking.
• An absence of learning and, therefore, innovation.
• When organisations lose sight of long-term development.
• When mental fatigue builds as the pressure rises.

At the All Blacks, Shand, his colleagues and the playing group sought to separate outcomes and growth.

Firstly, their ‘why’ (their vision) was a deliberately “uncontrollable aspiration”: to be the most dominant sports team in the world.

Their mission (‘to develop self-reliant athletes’) and purpose (‘to enhance the All Blacks’ legacy’), on the other hand, were determined by their behaviours and their ability to learn and develop. This combination enabled continuous improvement even when under pressure.

Shand then explained that his work is guided by four principles:

1. Winning is never enough

“I often hear the myth that you have to lose to learn, but I don’t agree with that,” he said, adding that the All Blacks would ask themselves: ‘are we still learning or just winning?’. Your environment should incentivise learning because “growth will actually protect your future performance”.

2. Clarity drives alignment

Shand posed a question: “What are you currently not saying clearly because it creates pressure or accountability?” In his experience, “most teams under-communicate ambition because they fear the discomfort, tension and challenge”. This cannot become an excuse. “If there’s ambiguity, it destroys execution in the end.”

3. The more pressure increases, the more simplicity matters

When the pressure mounts, complexity can harm performance. Learning and growth come from simple structures and consistent reflection. The key for the All Blacks was everyone to become what Shand called a “doer” – someone that can make decisions based on available information. “We took this notion of being ‘productively paranoid’ so that by meeting little and often we’d connect, we’d continue our growth, and we could help each other grow too,” he said.

4. Sustainable success requires both outcomes and growth

“We’ve got to have that outcome discipline,” said Shand, “but we’ve got to couple it with a growth mindset.” He added: “The best teams don’t choose between outcomes and growth – they create systems where growth drives outcomes.”

When Shand concluded, the table had the opportunity to share their reflections. The conversation brought several themes to light:

• There is no fixed process for measuring whether your focus needs to be on performance outcomes or performance growth. His work with the All Blacks was rooted in the cultural and behavioural rather than the structural. “It just became part of our DNA; we could see or we could hear it more than we wrote it down.”
• Recognise competing pressures rather than forcing a solution. “I’d come back to what’s the environment like.” One must identify what’s going wrong first.
• Performance is about continuous improvement (‘editing’). Shand suggested filtering out noise (both external and internal) by focusing on the “critical few” factors that truly impact success rather than the “important many”.
• Performance needs to be fun (but not too much). If there’s too little fun, the environment becomes heavy and draining; if there’s too much fun, learning is compromised. With this balance in mind, Shand’s All Blacks tried to build fun into their weekly sessions. He said: “Once it became part of the normal structure, people started to look forward to it, and they knew they had permission to be themselves.”
• Do not be seduced by quick fixes. When one attendee noted the negativity around their athletes, Shand spoke of New Zealand’s ignominious quarter-final exit from the 2007 Rugby World Cup. “We had a very strong programme with the community and the fans; and we knew as long as we kept that connection with them that was real and authentic then we could deal with people making opinions and noise about us,” he said, “because we knew they cared and they knew that we cared because we gave them our time. The consistency of that alignment really allowed us to work through those periods.”

What to read next

Darren Shand’s Three Key Principles for Building Effective Performance Strategies

By John Portch

“We know it’s hard to measure learning, but also, how do you measure challenge in this space?”

That observation and question, posed by a skill acquisition specialist at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable, neatly captured the challenge of optimising athlete skill development.

“I think we can say with confidence that it’s actually hard to measure all of these elements,” she continued. “Coaches can see changes in athletes over time, but how do we know that it’s actually stuck?”

To illustrate her point, she spoke of a recent university research project in Australia where athletes were asked to train within a set of fixed constraints. As part of the project, both the athletes and their coaches were quizzed on their perception of the level of challenge.

“One athlete found it harder, one found it easier, and it was the same constraints, same drills.”

There is nothing unusual in that fact, but it does highlight the importance of coherent, context-specific approaches if teams are to gain a handle on skill acquisition in sport.

Last month, members of the Leaders Performance Institute – all skill acquisition specialists or coaches with decades of experience in elite sport – shared their views on the challenges they face and the potential opportunities to pick “low-hanging fruit”, as another participant put it.

Challenges

Skill acquisition is fragmented

“We’ve got pockets of really great work, but there’s not necessarily a systemised approach to being able to embed that knowledge across coach development, across coach education,” said another skill acquisition specialist working in the Australian system. He added: “We need to take a systems approach and be able to influence all those different pieces. At the moment, they probably don’t talk well to each other.”

Unclear understanding

The aforementioned fragmentation is a direct consequence of the way skill acquisition is perceived more widely.

“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is help athletes become more skilful,” said a coach development specialist based in the UK and Ireland. “People are doing things so differently; we use lots of different words in this area to describe much the same thing.” He then hinted at the solution. “What I think would be really useful for everybody is just going ‘what is it we’re trying to achieve?’ And then be clear; ‘what is it we actually mean when we say these things?’”

Overstated certainty

“One of the things that I see is that I think that often the concepts that are associated with skill acquisition get stated with too much certainty; that there is really clear, solid evidence that everybody should do a certain something,” said the coach development specialist. “That worries me because I just don’t think that there is the strength of evidence to support some of the statements that are made.”

One of his skill acquisition-focused peers concurred. “We can probably have confidence that the research often doesn’t reflect the complexities of the environments that our coaches actually work in,” he said. “I spent 10 years with Paralympic sport in Australia, and I remember the first time I went in. I was young, keen, had all this knowledge, all these ideas; and I remember going into the environment for the first time and thinking ‘I’ve got nothing because nothing from my academic background translates directly here’.”

Cultural barriers

Of all the challenges discussed thus far, the coach development specialist cites cultural context as perhaps the most significant for coaches. “We can probably have confidence that coach education in this space is mixed at best,” he said.

“Coaches are very often taught to think in a different way than what might support skill acquisition,” he added.

This is a problem because, as a coaching lead in the British system observed, “the expectation for coaches to be exceptional in this domain is not what it should be.” He then went further. “I think even the phrase ‘skill acquisition’ may put people off. No one wants to feel incompetent in the domain in which they’re employed.”

He also spoke of the challenge of managing athlete comfort, beliefs and expectations. “If they want to do something and you’re not giving them what they want to do, you’re on a sticky wicket.”

A skill acquisition coach admitted there were times when “we would have lost the athletes; they wouldn’t have been ready; it was too quick, too far away from their norm, it made them too uncomfortable. We had to continually iterate and play at their challenge level.”

Practice design

The coach development specialist cited challenge point theory – essentially pushing athletes beyond their current ability – as useful but limited in isolation. “The deeper challenge there is, well, when do we use more of it? When do we use less of it?” he said.

Is an error-strewn session better than one where athletes sharpen their existing skills? “I’m not sure we’re at a point where we can say we understand the value of repetitive drill-like practice,” he added. “If we introduce this level of variability, what’s going to be the impact? If we dial it back, what’s going to be the impact? I think that’s probably the next frontier, not just for research, but for coaches.”

Opportunities

Coherent systems (and language)

“It doesn’t sit with one group,” said another skill acquisition specialist. “We need to take a systems approach and be able to influence all the different pieces. At the moment, the different disciplines probably don’t talk well to each other.”

It requires a shared understanding and sharper definitions. ““What is it we’re trying to achieve?” asked the coach development specialist, “and then be clear, what is it we actually mean when we say these things? We use lots of different words in this area to describe much the same thing.”

He added: “I think that we might be better off going, ‘well, to what is it that we can actually anchor?’ What are the things that we could consider to be good practice rather than saying ‘do this all the time and everything will be better?’”

One trend is for skill acquisition to be implicit, as a coach working at a major European football club explained: “skill acquisition is a little more hidden and less explicit here – I don’t know whether I’m cheating the system by not trying to shout from the rooftop.”

A skill acquisition lead suggested there may be an opportunity in some instances “to be a bit more explicit and reflect back on how do we actually design the best skill-learning environment?”

As if to underline the complex nature of the problem, the UK-based coaching lead responded to both by saying: “I like the concept that it’s hidden, it’s implicit, but equally, I like the idea that it’s really transparent. There’s some solution somewhere between those two things.”

Better transfer from training to performance

“The more contextually relevant we can make the skill development, the more likely we are to get transfer into performance environments,” said a skill acquisition coach.

The coach development specialist then built on this point. He said: “I think we ignore the context around an athlete and a coach. If we’re going to make an impact with this work, we need to zoom out and look at the context around the coach and athlete rather than saying ‘do this all the time and everything will be better’.”

The coaching lead felt there was some “low-hanging fruit” to be found in this area. “We don’t do systematic analysis of training sessions to understand stimulus and response,” he said, while admitting he has yet to find the right tools or metrics.

For all that, athletes must have some agency too. The All Blacks of the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cup-winning vintage were a prime example of a mature, player-led approach to the transfer of training to competition, as their former GM told the table.

“We had players that wanted skill acquisition,” he said. “We had a mission as a group that come game time, we needed self-reliant athletes. And the only way we could build that was through them getting themselves ready to play. So coaches became the support rather than the lead. Skill acquisition was built into every session, but the player would design how they utilised that period of time.”

There is, of course, a balance to be struck. The coaching lead noted how frustrated his players once were with a monotonous session, yet “the transfer 36 hours later was unbelievable” (he also noted that his observation was “non-scientific”).

Improve how coaches think, not just what they do

“There tends to be a frustration that some of these ideas aren’t adopted more,” said a skill acquisition specialist. “I would encourage people to think about, well, what are the systems that we’re putting around coaches? What are the environments we’re creating to actually enable coaches to be more open, more curious, and make it more accessible? And what are the multiple nudges and ways in which we can do that?”

He also noted one coach lamenting the fact that there was little coach education in this space two decades ago (even if he admitted he might not have been receptive in the early 2000s). “How do we actually create systems so that more coaches more often can start to access these ideas and get support in this area?”

He added: “What we want to do is help coaches become good decision makers and designers of that environment and have a rationale and intent for why they’re making those manipulations.”

Connect training, data and performance

The coach based at the European football club spoke of their work with analysts to ensure better transfer of training to performance. “We have a database of all of our training sessions, logged what we’re doing, and then the analyst gives me a monthly report of like, ‘you’ve covered this, you’ve covered this, you’ve covered this’,” he said while emphasising that his club is only at the start of its development in this space.

“We also have a research and innovation team that feed back to us on our game performance and highlight any dips or trends such as ‘actually your counter-attacks are down in the last month’. Then I go back to the training library and go ‘okay, we’ve not done enough counter-attack practices or actually we’ve done loads of counter-attack practices, but they’re down, so why is there not a transfer?’ And so we’re trying to attack it that way.”

He then reflected on his ability to influence his coaches. “When we break off and do unit or individual work, I’m constantly trying to nudge them into making the practices a little bit more relevant, game relevant and asking themselves how that is transferring to what we’re doing.”

What to read next

Skill Acquisition: Tension, Challenges and Opportunities

By John Portch

Arsenal’s 22-year wait for the Premier League title came to an end in May, although there were moments during the campaign when it seemed as far away as ever.

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:

• Performance is consistently dropping off in the last quarter due to competitors fatiguing less
• Despite having the same athletes and same coaches, attack strategies are no longer working as well
• Increase in pre-season training is leading to more injuries
• You have a new gameplan which the team buys into, but they are struggling to execute consistently

“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:

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

‘The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.’

So wrote Arie de Geus in the Harvard Business Review in 1988 while serving as the Head of Strategic Planning at Shell.

This idea was amplified by systems scientist Peter Senge in his seminal 1990 book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organisation.

They both emphasise the idea that learning is not a mere ‘nice to have’; it should be woven into your environment and enable your people to strive for continuous improvement.

They also discuss a problem that persists nearly four decades later: that learning in numerous organisations is inconsistent, unstructured, individualised and event-based.

This idea set the premise for a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable where members convened to chat through their challenges in this area and potential solutions.

“In some quarters, we get caught up on a single event; you go to a conference or someone comes into your environment and we see that as a learning moment,” said Luke Whitworth, the Sport Performance Team Lead at the Leaders Performance Institute. “Whereas it’s really what we’re going to talk about today, which is how we embed this in what we’re doing.”

Firstly, he shared a selection of eight primers for the session ahead:

The table then conferred on the areas where learning currently breaks down in their systems and the challenges that prevent the creation of effective and impactful learning cultures. They raised a selection of common themes:

Time pressure and competing priorities

This was the most common challenge at the table. The struggle was succinctly captured by three attendees who have all worked in Major League Baseball. “The breakdown is typically the perception that I don’t have time for this,” said one. “The to‑do lists take precedent over the to‑be list.”

“You’re just constantly on to the next day and there’s not a ton of time to pause and reflect,” added another.

“Coaches think learning is getting in the way of getting the job done,” observed the third.

A lack of (the practice of) reflection

This is intertwined with the lack of time.

“The reflection piece is where we see a breakdown a lot,” said the Director of Player Development at an MLB club. “They probably don’t allow themselves enough time to review and reflect,” added an L&D manager at a British sporting organisation.

There is no consensus over “when is the right time to do all of this teaching and learning and, therefore, we simply don’t do it,” said a coaching lead at a British university.

Basic performance pressure

“There is a need for performance in the now rather than the development piece over time,” said a coach working in English football. “The managers are under real pressure.”

That coach was not alone. “The environment praises immediate results,” said another coach from the world of MLB. “There’s this pressure to produce over learning.”

This has engendered fixed mindsets when it comes to learning. “This is how we’ve always done it,” said the coach in English football citing a typical excuse.

A lack of clarity

As the Director of Player Development in MLB explained, “our group really wants to learn but is trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none.”

“It probably confuses coaches,” said the manager working at a British sporting organisation. “What do they want to be learning?”

As a consequence, that learning often happens in silos.

A lack of role modelling from leaders

“If leadership is not only supporting but modelling this, others then feel like they can take the time,” said the NCAA performance specialist, who explained that learning may be on the agenda of the lower ranks but “it stagnates at those middle tier leadership positions.”

Another leader based at a British university asked both the table and himself: “Are we doing enough as a manager to drive that thinking and priority?”

Poor quality teaching or coaching

“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,” said the head of coaching at a British university. “It’s also changing the perception of the teacher; I’m doing it to you versus facilitating learning.”

Then there is 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?”

Then Whitworth invited the table to share what they need to do to make learning a competitive advantage in their organisation. As before, there were some common themes:

Space for ‘failure’ and ‘messy’ learning

“Learning is messy,” said a coach working for the NBA. “Learning is not ‘you learn it, you go and execute it, and everything’s beautiful’. If we don’t allow the space for mistakes then learning won’t happen.”

And, as an individual working in MLB, said, “it’s going to be messy, it’s not going to be pretty and we have to be okay with that.”

There also needs to be a shift in tone and content from negative to positive, as another coach working with the NBA noted. “A coach will highlight, ‘okay, you did this wrong’, but there is not too much focus on what you can improve.”

Psychological safety is further built through clear scaffolding. “If I’m dedicating time, how does it apply? How can I put it into play? How does it connect to my role?” asked a performance specialist working at a US college.

Crucially, messy does not mean unplanned. “We need to be more intentional in planning it,” said a nutritionist based at a British university. He was supported by a colleague who added that we need to “put it front and centre in objectives and appraisal meetings.”

Leaders that role model learning behaviours

“You’ve got to create that psychological safety,” said the Director of Player Development in MLB. “It goes back to modelling.”

“Do we give it time?” said the nutritionist. “Do we prioritise it in conversations and in meetings and in one-to-ones? Do we celebrate it when it’s done well? Do we hold people accountable when it’s not done?”

Embedded learning

“What about consistency and integration?” asked a performance specialist from an NCAA college. “Is learning aligned with the daily fabric of the organisation? It cannot be those one-offs. We’ve all been to those workshops, and it gives you a little energy boost, but what’s the lasting impact? What’s the follow up? How do we actually put it into play?”

Self-directed learning

“How can people take accountability for themselves and identify where they need to go?” asked a coach working in the NBA. “How can you create those spaces for self-reflection or guided discovery for them to self-assess against the framework or anything else; to use a reflection-type tool to think about those things so that they can then identify and take ownership themselves?”

Facilitated learning

“Are we really coaching if we’re not teaching or are we just hosting sessions?” asked the coaching lead. “There is that skill of being the facilitator of learning rather than just being the teacher.”

Collective learning

As De Geus and Senge argue, organisations achieve sustained advantage when individuals learn faster together. A performance expert working at a US college echoed their thoughts, noting that “the competitive advantages are the creativity, the collaboration, innovation, and the consistency.”

This reflects Senge’s concept of collective intelligence, where the quality of thinking across the group exceeds that of any one individual. Collaboration enables better shared thinking, faster learning cycles and better decisions, which ultimately allows organisations to adapt more quickly than their competitors.

Balance the short, medium and long term

“What do you need to change now and where can you take a longer view?” It was an important question, that was posed by a coach working in the NBA. “I think it’s being comfortable with the different timelines and knowing what the objective is and then being able to work through that with your staff and in your one-to-ones.”

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

By John Portch

Iván Gil-Ortega, a former principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet, remembers his ballet teacher smoking in class.

“She used to ask us to hold her cigarette while she was lifting your leg and then putting you in the right position,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in February.

“The pianist was smoking too,” he added, “and we were called names.”

Gil-Ortega, who is approaching two years as the Artistic Director of the Queensland Ballet, was responding to a question from moderator Keith Sharpe, the Head of Coaching & Leadership Development at British Cycling, on the cultural shifts that have occurred in education since Gil-Ortega himself was a student.

Though neither an advocate of smoking in class nor bullying children, he nevertheless believes that the teacher-student relationship has shifted “a little too much”.

His views are of interest because Gil-Ortega oversees an academy of more than 200 students who are aged anywhere between seven and 18 (the company also has a pre-professional programme currently made up of 16 students).

“I think we went from one extreme to the other and what I try to do is find that middle way.” Though his criticisms are never personal (“everything I do is to get the best outcome for them”) there can be a tension between Gil-Ortega and his students. He attributes this to expectation management. “They want to get there immediately and, when you do something like this, there is no way of avoiding the actual path you need to go down to get there.”

To Sharpe, it speaks of kindness. He said: “I’m a big believer that the next competitive advantage is kindness; and kindness wins. So the courage to trust, the willingness to listen, the openness to just succeed and learn together is really important. Kindness isn’t nice, is it? It’s not about just being nice. It’s being honest.”

Gil-Ortega concurred. “Something that I found when I got here is they kept on saying to me: ‘you’re very direct’ and I said, ‘no, there is no “very direct”. There is “direct” or “not direct”. I try to avoid the bullshit. I try to be honest with them so that they know what is expected; and the more honesty you can have with your dancers, with your team, in the long term, that’s the best outcome for them.”

The Queensland Ballet is, he believes, a good environment, “but it doesn’t mean that we’re all hugging and we love each other because we don’t. Let’s not forget: it’s a cutthroat job.”

You may not wish a fellow dancer harm, but the simple fact of the matter is that you are vying for their job. “So that’s your competition; you’re competing within your team.”

Nevertheless, “we have to have an environment where everybody can work and have opportunities.” It begins with honesty, which is rooted in care rather than cruelty. “I try to be honest because the more honest you can be then there is no false expectation.”

Over the course of 30 minutes, Gil-Ortega explained his efforts to help students navigate the cutthroat environment of a ballet academy.

Below, we pick out four factors that define his approach.

1. He tries to balance individual ambition with collective learning

“Every single dancer is thinking of themselves. They’re not thinking of the person next to them,” said Gil-Ortega. Yet ballet is still a collective endeavour and individual flair must serve the company. The principals rely upon the soloists, corps de ballet and junior dancers etc.

“Even if I have the best Romeo and the best Juliet, unless everyone else plays their part, you won’t see the performance,” he continued. “We’ve had great dancers where the company wasn’t really into the whole process. So it didn’t really matter how great they were because the show didn’t come up to that next level.”

Therefore, “if you’re giving feedback to someone, the person beside them needs to listen; it is not just personal feedback, it’s for everybody.” Nevertheless, this can be a difficult experience for students, which is why Gil-Ortega must be careful to balance challenge and support.

2. Psychological safety doesn’t mean lowering standards

Gil-Ortega asserts that ballet is “not a job and it’s not a hobby – it becomes a lifestyle”. He said: “The dancers are dancers from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed; and even in our sleep we’re dancers because you’re twitching, because your body is.” He tailed off while trying to find the right words to end his sentence. “I mean, it’s horrible.” And to top it off, ballet is a short career; and not the kind that can set you up for life through lucrative contracts or brand endorsements. “You come to a certain age towards the end of your 30s where you’re considered an old person and you just started.”

This is a world in which Gil-Ortega admits he risks offending some students. “But getting offended doesn’t mean that you’re right,” he said. His tone was strident, but the simple fact is that uncomfortable feedback is sometimes necessary to ensure progress.

As for finding that balance, his feedback is “never personal”. He seeks that aforementioned “middle way” that inspires development but does not bully or belittle. Self-directed learning is critical in this regard.

3. He encourages self-directed learning

“I’m always open to being proved wrong,” said Gil-Ortega, who stressed that dance students have the space to change perceptions through their own hard work and development. “I think they have a lot of ownership.”

The steps will always be the steps in ballet, but the dancer can bring a unique artistry to their performance, which is where the space for development exists.

He continued: “I think it’s important when people come to me and say ‘I’d like to do that role and I haven’t been tested’. That’s entirely up to you if you want to be in the room; there is always another skill or another way of movement that you can learn on your own. That’s why I give them the freedom to see if there is something you see that you want to do, you want to learn. I’m always up for it.”

The choreographer may hold a different view, but Gil-Ortega will “try to empower them by saying ‘okay, they might not see you there, but you can prove them wrong’.” As he sees it, the worst thing would be that they meekly do what they are told. “Yes, you have to conform because the creative way is like that; the choreographer has the choreography in their head, they use a certain dancer; but then make sure that when the next one comes you’ve gained some more knowledge, so maybe you’ll be chosen then.”

Furthermore, to reach the point where talent and musicality meet the requisite luck (“you have to be in the right place at the right time”) requires hours and hours of repetition. “It’s all about doing it over and over and over and over.” Oftentimes it also means moving on.

4. He also provides exit routes

“There are people in our academy, in our school, that I know they’ll never make it to the company,” said Gil-Ortega, “but they will be good for other companies. So on that path, I try to tell them before it’s too late.”

It does not mean they lack talent; some may be better suited to other dance forms. Gil-Ortega tries to do right by them by suggesting a new focus in a manner that preserves their confidence and opportunity.

“Last year, we had a dancer that really wanted to stay with us; and I said, ‘I do appreciate the energy and everything, but I think it would be better for you and your career due to your physicality of the way you move and the way you dance to go elsewhere’.”

He actively supports dancers making such transitions. “I have contacted other directors when I say, ‘I have these people here, I think they would work very well for you, for the kind of work you do’. I think it’s just making that path accessible.”

What to read next

How to Work with Younger Generations (and by that we Mean Athletes, Coaches and Staff Members)

By John Portch

When we talk about the next generation, it is not just athletes but coaches and other staff members too.

“I work primarily with staff on a day‑to‑day and they are very young,” said a senior sports scientist working in Major League Baseball.

“They’d be Generation Z; and 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.”

This individual – whose experience is far from unique – was speaking at a recent virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the challenge of working with the next generation. Several in attendance spoke of the different beliefs, values and attitudes that can exist within a single environment.

Over the course of an hour, the table discussed how to better understand those generational differences in a way that meets the needs of all their young people.

The session host Luke Whitworth, the LPI’s Sport Performance Lead, challenged participants to move beyond generational stereotypes. He said: “If we’re going to manage these multi‑generational teams, it comes down to the leader’s ability to understand the behaviours, values and beliefs of younger people.”

A top-down approach, he argued, is not going to cut it; and he posed the table two questions:

1. How are we adapting and evolving our environments to meet those needs?
2. What do those environments need to look like?

The first question set up the second; and collectively the table alighted on five themes.

1. Pursue co-creation

The consensus is that athletes want to have a louder voice in their own development.

As an attendee who coaches at a Premier League academy said, even boys as young as 11 “continue to want instant information; they want more challenge; they want to know what’s next.”

He added:

“At the moment, we are searching for more autonomy and ownership from young players around some of their developmental needs. We’re sitting down with a young boy and having conversations around what are some of the things that you’re really good at; what would you like to achieve this year; what do you think you’re not so great at and could be working on.”

While the player is encouraged to express their views, they are still guided by their coaches.

“We will tell them: ‘whilst we understand that you feel you need to work on these developmental areas, there are definitely other areas that we need you to continue to work on.’”

In several cases, the priorities of younger staff members mirror young athletes’. A sports scientist from a different Premier League club said:

“The younger staff want quicker progression. They want to know what is happening for them to progress into more senior roles.”

A coach from the US system has observed similar ambitions in their context. He said:

“They won’t take ownership if they’re not included in the process.”

It’s a similar story in a military setting, as another attendee observed from their work:

“You have to be really intentional, really painfully deliberate with junior staff members to make sure that they’re engaged and they feel like they’re part of the process.”

2. Make sure individualisation is rooted in identity and purpose

In several key respects, individualisation underpins efforts to co-create the development plans alluded to above, but sometimes, as a player development manager in Major League Baseball pointed out, the players need a helping hand to prevent them from “climbing the wrong mountain”.

He said:

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve really tried to dive in on the first question. And I think our feedback loops have changed because of that. The four things that stood out at the beginning were reflection, ownership, collaboration and impatience – four things that we feel like our players really struggle with.”

As for the solution:

“We’ve started to dive more into identity and their North Star. Why do they do what they do? What are their values? How can we help them? And they’ve really opened up to us just in terms of who they are, where they’re going, what they want to do. And that’s opened the conversation to their actual on-field performance things that we want them to work on.”

3. Be comfortable with digital delivery

Younger generations are digital natives and teams would do well to lean into this.

The player development manager from above said:

“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.”

He is not alone, as another attendee from a US NGB explained of her organisation’s approach to identity:

I’m not a coach, I’m not in performance, I’m in operations, but our data analytics team started talking in a really structured way with our 13 to 15-year-old athletes here at the training centre. They ask them what’s their preferred game style, what kind of player they want to be, who they look up to, and have them sit down and make a video of it. And that has been a really cool exercise.

Meanwhile, at the aforementioned Premier League academy, independent video learning is the norm. The coach said:

“We record training sessions and games that go straight onto Hudl for young players to go and watch. They can engage in it however they want.”

4. Promote peer-to-peer learning

Peer-to-peer learning is also essential. Another academy manager, this time in the world of basketball, said:

“The players have discussions internally between themselves and they come back to us with a conclusion as a group.”

At this juncture, he explained it is important to work out who are the key influencers in the playing group.

“We are living in an era of influencers, TikTokers, YouTubers. So who is the guy who has the biggest influence here in our team? And he’s going to be charged with talking to us and delivering the message to the rest of the group.”

Once again, this peer-to-peer dynamic is just as relevant to staff. A programme lead in the US spoke of their ‘zillennial’ staff i.e. those who could reasonably be classed as older Generation Z and younger millennial.

He said:

“When we have to make a big departmental decision, everyone has to bring a piece of paper. They have to write their own ideas down first before they hear anyone else’s and then walk it through as a group. By the end of it, we all come to the agreement like, ‘hey, this is what we’re doing as a team’. That way it’s everyone’s idea versus ‘that wasn’t my idea’.”

5. Re-evaluate staff reporting structures

A senior sports scientist at a Premier League club explained that his club restructured how staff members report to their line managers. He said:

“We added more layers in. Part of the reason for that was to allow some of the younger staff to get more regular feedback, more regular development. We’ve also tried to limit the number that any one clinician will line‑manage so that actually those conversations can happen more readily.”

What to read next

Four Questions those Working with the Next Generation Should Ask Themselves

By John Portch

The complex nature of skill acquisition was nicely summed up by Mo Bobat, the Director of Cricket at both Royal Challengers Bengaluru and London Spirit.

“It’s about how skills are practised within context, how they’re practised in an environment of graded exposure to challenge and pressure,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute when we caught up with him for our Trend Report.

“[It’s about] pressure-testing the skill, rehearsing it, with enough repetition for it to become and feel a little bit more instinctive and automatic. It’s also the right decision-making and execution and relationship with risk.”

The importance of skill acquisition is obvious when you spell it out, but often it is misunderstood or underappreciated.

Last month, we hosted the first of two virtual roundtables focused on the topic. The Leaders Performance Institute members present identified four common tensions and challenges:

1. Skill acquisition is multidisciplinary in nature: a weakness in terms of where it sits and where it resonates.
2. It is less visible and less tangible: it’s harder for coaches to see progress.
3. Training can be unrepresentative of competition: fail to capture competition demands and you fail to prepare your athletes.
4. Head coaches can feel threatened: they feel skill acquisition specialists are treading on their toes.

Coaches and practitioners have encountered each of these tensions in some shape or form and the solutions sit with everyone, not just those tasked with skill development.

Below, we bring you examples from the worlds of Formula 1, rugby union and netball that address those tensions that can hinder skill acquisition through a combination of environmental, structural and personal approaches.

More than Equal: the search for Formula 1’s first female world champion

More than Equal, which was co-founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and philanthropist Karel Komárek, is a global talent identification and development organisation that has set itself the task of finding and developing Formula 1’s first female world champion.

You can read more about the challenges that face any young female driver here. Skill acquisition is certainly part of it. “The idea of identifying talent based on building a whole profile of a driver, physiologically, cognitively, psychologically, that hasn’t really existed to date,” said Fran Longstaff, the Head of Research at More than Equal, at Leaders Meet: the Talent Journey in 2025. That goes for all drivers. “We don’t know what a racing car driver should be doing and look like at 16 versus 18.”

Such profiles – for male and female drivers – would be multidisciplinary in their scope, help make the vague tangible, and enable coaches to design training scenarios more representative of a racing environment.

More than Equal also commissioned two PhDs; one to research the impact of hormones on performance, particularly cognitive function; another to build “physiological, psychological, cognitive training and anthropometric profiles from drivers all the way from karting to F1.”

More than Equal, as Longstaff explained, is “building the road as we walk”. As more and more useful datapoints emerge, those different threads will have to be woven together to help paint pictures of progress (or stagnation) for each athlete.

England Rugby: how progress is tracked from talent pathways to the senior team

England Rugby’s coaches and performance personnel can call upon a range of objective and subjective datapoints. It is partially the role of individuals such as Kate Burke, the Lead Player Development Scientist, to draw them all together in a meaningful way.

“Everyone has a different role to play, from our coaches and medics to strength & conditioning and the psychologist. Having those people in the room to talk around everyone’s IDP is key,” Burke told the Leaders Performance Institute.

Rugby is a world where the outliers – those destined for great things and those who aren’t perhaps good enough – stick out.

Burke was particularly keen to help those who occupied the middle ground; neither outstanding nor struggling. “Typically, pathway staff have tended to spend time talking about the players that are doing well or the players who are not doing as well. How do we ensure that we are talking about the players who are just staying constant? What do they need for their development?” she continued.

“We’ve got a lot of data in this space, but the pathway especially is hugely context-driven around where the player is in a lot of areas – technically, tactically, psychologically and physically.”

Again, it’s a multidisciplinary concern; and if Burke and her colleagues can find the metrics that matter, there will be implications for training design.

“We also need to look at where they are, where they’re playing, what their playing programme looks like in order to monitor and plan for the player effectively.”

Leinster Rugby and the Northern Mystics: self-reflection for athletes and coaches alike

Longstaff, a chartered psychologist, and Burke, a sports scientist, illustrate the importance of the athlete experience in skill acquisition, but it is not always something that coaches clock.

Too often with coaches, as Simon Broughton explained, “everything’s been delivered, the meeting’s happened and then we’re straight outside.”

The Academy Manager at Leinster Rugby was speaking at Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching at Millfield School in 2024. “We don’t actually give the players the space to reflect.”

The implications for skill development can be significant. “Reflective practice helps with recall and then planning for what they want to get better at next.”

Reflective practice is vital for skill development; and it’s not just critical for athletes either.

Helene Wilson, during her time as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics netball team in New Zealand between 2017 and 2022, organised reflective sessions with her players and staff that enabled the group to reach a consensus (known as ‘wānanga’ in Māori).

“My orientation as head coach was always what do others know first rather than bringing my expertise to the table. I needed to be the last one talking in the room,” she told the audience at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance in 2023.

“It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and wānanga happens in many ways,” she continued. “I put a concept on the table, a picture of performance that I may see as a head coach, or someone else may put it there depending on who’s taking a lead that day, and the wānanga takes the form of questions, from multiple perspectives, and we keep going until we get some sense of alignment. It doesn’t come with any level of expertise or experience, it comes with everybody’s level and everybody contributes.”

Wilson had cultivated an environment where neither she nor anyone else in the Mystics setup felt threatened. They would also go on to win the ANZ premiership in 2021.

“My learning was to sit at the back and know that my knowledge was not sufficient; that the knowledge was in the room and I was there to sense the problem and the wānanga would sort out what that problem was.”

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