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

‘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.”

What to read next

‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’

By John Portch

Back-to-Back Masters winner Rory McIlroy shared his preparation strategy in the aftermath of his second triumph at Augusta National.

“I joked last week that this place feels like my home course,” he said. “I haven’t played anywhere else in the last two or three weeks really. I felt prepared in that way. I felt prepared that wherever I hit it on the golf course, I sort of know what to do. I know where to miss. I’m pretty comfortable with all the shots around the greens.”

McIlroy, a six-time major winner, disregarded other PGA Tour events and even chose to ignore a back injury that had been hampering his performance. At one point he even carded a score of 29 on the front nine at Augusta.

“It’s a good blueprint,” he continued. “I’m not going to take three weeks off before every major, but to get to the major venues early, do your preparation, play. And not just play and look at things, but actually play. Go out there with one ball, shoot a score and try to do it that way.”

McIlroy’s successful strategy came not long after our Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy event at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where a range of guests, including Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and Lawn Tennis Association Performance Director Michael Bourne discussed how to build, stress-test and execute an effective performance strategy.

We know McIlroy wasn’t there because he was in Georgia, but he, much like yourselves, can check out the chief insights here.

And now on to other happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.

Quote of the month:

Personally, I don’t believe in skills coaches.

These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.

A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.

“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”

Read the full story here.

We also addressed some of the common tensions, challenges and opportunities in skill acquisition here.

Insight of the month:

British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information at hand.

As Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, they are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:

It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.

Reay-Kemp was one of six guests who brought the day’s proceedings to life.

Shock of the month:

We often hear informally of ‘bad’ environments, but we don’t necessarily expect them to be amongst those considered the very best.

Yet that was the experience of Alexander Campbell, the former principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet when he attended the Royal Ballet School in the early 2000s.

“I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.

He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.

“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.

When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”

His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’

Campbell, now the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, shared his full story here.

Good to know:

What’s the difference between a ‘change’ and a ‘transition’?

A ‘change’ is simply that, but a ‘transition’ refers to the human adaptation required in the face of change.

That is according to John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, who posed this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’

In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.

“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”

To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:

Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:

The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.

Finally…

Four common causes of tension between business and performance… and four opportunities for increased collaboration.

Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

Performance gains, as Dr Damian Farrow explained, tend to be rooted in movement, coordination and skill refinement.

“In general, the most positive experiences I’m sure anyone on the call has had are where a group of people come together and they just keep chipping away and asking questions,” said the AFL’s Football Innovation Manager, while co-hosting a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, the first of two to explore the theme of skill acquisition.

Farrow, also a renowned Emeritus Professor of Skill Acquisition at Victoria University, enjoys such conversations with coaches, who bring their own set of experiences to the conversation.

“The magic happens when you’re leaning on both sides of that equation,” he added.

The ‘magic’, as Farrow put it, was nicely captured by his co-host Dr Lyndell Bruce, the Director of Sport at Deakin University, who spoke of the sense of pride she feels when a training tweak pays off.

She said: “Whether the athletes pick things up quicker or that they just all of a sudden get it or we change something slightly and it just clicks, whether it’s for the individual or the group, we can then see the impact in what we’re all striving to do with our athlete cohorts.”

However, despite the centrality of skill acquisition to performance, it is often hampered by a range of systemic issues.

“It takes considerable time to improve skill,” said Farrow. “I think sometimes we just keep going around in this cycle going ‘oh, did that really work? I don’t know.’ But we probably, a lot of the time, didn’t give it sufficient time; we didn’t periodise it like we might do a strength training programme.”

Over the course of this first session, Farrow and Bruce led a cohort of Leaders Performance Institute members in a discussion about the challenges, tensions and opportunities in skill acquisition.

Beyond the time it takes to acquire a skill, the table noted several other challenges and tensions:

• Skill acquisition is multidisciplinary in nature. As Farrow said, skill acquisition’s “multidisciplinary nature is a weakness in terms of where it sits and where it resonates.” This can confuse decision-making rights and responsibilities.
• It is less visible and tangible. “I think one of the challenges for skill acquisition is it’s harder for coaches and athletes to see exactly what we do,” said Bruce. “If you go to a physiologist, they’ll tell you they could do their VO₂-max test. You go into a biomechanics space, you see the Vicon systems; they’ve got very tangible things that a coach and athletes can see.”
• Training can be unrepresentative of competition. Training too often fails to capture competition demands. “I had a student that looked at the representativeness of a particular aspect of Australian football and measured it two different ways,” said Bruce. “So we looked at the total frequency of counts and how often they were occurring in a specific training drill, which was designed to improve this aspect of performance versus looking at it as a proportion of outcome; so different technical and tactical measures. If you looked at frequency, it told one story, but if you looked at it from a proportional perspective, it told a different story.”
• Coaches can feel threatened. “There’s always been that issue and perception where coaches feel threatened sometimes by skill acquisition specialists; that we’re trying to take over,” said Bruce. One attendee, another skill acquisition specialist, added that their discipline “aligns really closely with some of the core roles of what coaches do in terms of session design, instruction and feedback – and that sometimes creates a perceived threat.”

Some opportunities sit at training session level:

• Ask athletes for their feedback. “Coaches may think a particular drill is challenging, but what are the athletes seeing?” said Bruce. “We’ve started to take in the player’s voice a little bit more. We’re looking at how challenging players perceive training to be.”
• Coach-centred reflective practice. “How do we embed some of these ideas better in coach development?” asked one attendee. In response, Farrow shared an idea. “We’ve adopted the term ‘game slicing’ to really talk about representativeness,” he said. “Take a slice of a game and then get the coaches to reflect on how they represent that within a training exercise, and look at the disparity between the two. It’s a really great exercise to do and it goes in all sorts of directions.”

Other opportunities sit at a system level:

• Earlier education for coaches. “We’re not meeting the coaches at the right point in their development to open them up to some of these ideas,” one attendee commented. “We need to expose people to these ideas earlier in their coaching careers.” They recalled a recent conversation with a coach on the topic of skill acquisition. “I remember asking this coach, he said, ‘in fairness, I probably wouldn’t have been open to it before now; the conditions weren’t right for it’. I said, ‘when would you have liked to have had the chance to explore this area?’ And the response was ‘20 years ago’.”
• Amplify success stories. “There are some practitioners that have had some great wins with coaches and do some great work, and it’s really trying to find a way to amplify those stories,” said Bruce. “Make sure they’re authentic, delivered by the people who are affected or impacted in a positive way by them.”

What to read next

‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’

By John Portch

Alexander Campbell, the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, does not expect his organisation’s teachers to have all the answers.

“The reality is that not any one teacher is going to know, if you’ve got ten people in front of them, what’s best for each individual person in that class,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey last year.

“It’s about having that humility or that understanding that it’s OK not to know that definitively, for it to be a work in progress.”

Campbell, who spent 19 years at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies, retired in 2024 to take up his current role, which gives him responsibility for the academy’s teaching across more than 80 countries.

It’s a position that grants him insights into the expectations, motivations and development needs of the next generation of dancers; and, as a self-proclaimed “sports tragic”, he was delighted to address an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at the Royal College of Music in London.

The Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music in London where we hosted Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey in April 2025.

Below, we explore, through the lens of Campbell’s own ballet career, his approach to meeting that challenge head-on with the RAD.

Meet students halfway

Campbell’s teaching mindset has been influenced by his underwhelming student experience at the Royal Ballet School, which he attended on a scholarship between 2003 and 2005.

The main problems were the teachers and the environment. “I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.

He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.

“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.

As Campbell explained in a 2017 interview with the Daily Telegraph, “we weren’t encouraged to ask too many questions. I think it took me too long to learn that, because I was naturally inquisitive, and wanted to know why we were doing certain things.”

When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”

His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’

Promote early sampling

Campbell followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandparents, Valma Briggs and Mario Desva, who had both danced with Ballet Rambert in London.

By the early 1990s, Briggs was teaching at Academy Ballet in Sydney; Campbell’s mother worked in the same school as a manager. He began dancing at the school at the age of five.

He played grade cricket too. If his dancing talent was no surprise then nor was his cricketing ability as his father Alan was a professional player.

Campbell might have gone down that path himself had circumstances been different, but there was no pressure from his parents to choose one over the other; his teachers at Academy Ballet were similarly minded.

Of his cricket and school studies (he was homeschooled from the age of eight), Campbell said, “my parents were keen for me to remain interested in other things so that I was ‘Alexander, a person with various interests’ rather than just ‘Alexander, the ballet dancer’.”

Much like the world of sport, the performing arts has increasingly moved away from the idea of early specialisation. On Campbell’s watch, the RAD promotes the type of holistic development he enjoyed; and he is not alone. “Thinking about and knowing certain conservatoires, thinking about their talent pathways and their talent identification, how they train people is being reconsidered.”

The shift towards co-creation

As Campbell explained, RAD teachers must be able to adapt to a generation of students that desire agency in their own development.

“As educators and teachers, it’s really easy to go, ‘OK, I have to have this knowledge and I have to demonstrate to them that I know how best to get from A to B’,” he said.

That isn’t true, of course, but it requires humility on the part of the educators; and much of Campbell’s focus is on equipping dance RAD teachers with the “understanding that it’s OK not to know things definitively, for it to be a work in progress, and that it is going to be different, not just for each individual, but for each year [grade] at the school.”

Campbell’s decision to persist with ballet beyond his experience at the Royal Ballet School was influenced by his “opportunities to work with other coaches and have different experiences” at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. When he joined the company in 2005, it enabled him to see “a different environment and different way of operating that felt much more aligned to the sort of experience that I’d hoped for and wanted to have.”

Campbell demonstrates a plié for an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members, who imitate his movements with varying success despite his words of encouragement.

Care is a baseline expectation

We know that wellbeing is a performance enabler; younger generations sense it too.

Campbell wants RAD staff to be role models of wellbeing. He said: “Educating our teachers on that and the importance of looking after themselves could have the most impact in a fairly short period of time.” It must start with him as Artistic Director; a fact of which he is “acutely aware”.

The RAD has also made efforts to improve safeguarding in its schools and increase the accessibility of its courses, particularly for students and participants with additional support needs. “We’ve got teachers who have parents saying ‘my child has additional needs but they love dance, they really want to be part of it; is that something you can do?’ And a lot of our teachers will find a way or have found a way, but a number of them feel nervous about the responsibility that entails. They don’t want to get it wrong.”

Campbell and the RAD are working to provide those teachers with the right tools. “We give them the support so they can say ‘this is how you go about it or if you want to find out more this is where you would go’. I think this is giving us the best opportunity to broaden our participation in ballet and dance.”

A broader definition of success

Campbell admitted that all his “Plan As” came off in his professional life. He is a prime example of talent meeting opportunity.

However, as he said, “my self-worth and my personality were not determined by whether I was successful in that pursuit.”

He makes sure this is reflected across the RAD’s curricula. “I don’t want to just provide for those people who want to get to the top level and be the very best.” Rather, he also wants to support the career aspirations of students who say, “I enjoy this, I’m quite good at it, but actually I don’t have that real drive to pursue this one very narrow thing.”

Their love of the art form might lead to a career in dance teaching or one of the industry’s that surround the performing arts such as lighting, set design or even physiotherapy with a specialism in dance. The RAD will support those aspirations. “It’s understanding that there are more opportunities than just being the dancer on the stage.”

What to read next

‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’

By John Portch

“Personally, I don’t believe in skills coaches.”

These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.

A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.

“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”

He feels that assigning skills coaches to coaching units risks diluting accountability. “When something breaks down, you’re not going to just look to the skills coach who’s sat in the room waiting for the moment to say ‘oh, that’s me’,” he continues.

“If the lineout doesn’t go well because of the throw, who’s responsible for that? Is it the lineout coach or the throwing coach that comes in once a week? I would prefer that my forward coach has understanding of the skill of throwing and takes responsibility for it.”

AS Béziers Hérault Head Coach Rory Teague. (Image: Rory Teague / LinkedIn)

Over the course of half an hour, Teague ponders the topic of skill acquisition from a coaching career spent as a skills coach, unit coach, and now a head coach.

Here are his six of his main considerations.

1. The difference between ‘skill’ and ‘technique’

“Ultimately, skill is technique performed under pressure,” says Teague, who has been influenced in his thinking by coaches including Rick Shuttleworth (a consultant at organisations including the Rugby Football Union and UK Sports Institute), Scott Wisemantel (Attack Coach at the NRL’s Paramatta Eels) and, of course, Jones (who is now in his second spell as Head Coach of the Japan men’s team).

“They were three incredible coaches who helped me along the way,” he adds. “They pushed me to go and find out what is ‘skill’; what is the difference between ‘technique’ and ‘skill’? Because there’s a big difference.” Skill, he suggests, is the ability to select, adapt and execute actions in a pressured context. There is little value in a player passing the ball ten metres to their teammate repeatedly at the end a training session. “They’re only working on their technique, because there’s no external cue for when they’re passing.”

It follows that skills in rugby develop as a consequence of an interaction between mechanics, cognition and match context. “If I stand in front of the player and they run towards me and I run towards them, they’re interacting with the environment i.e. me, them, and the distance – and then they’re performing the technique.”

There is also a psychological and emotional dynamic that goes beyond cognition and technical execution. All these elements can affect skill expression in a match situation.

“There’s no substitute for being in the saddle,” adds Teague. “Hot feedback in the moment can be so powerful because you’re living that moment with the player.” He will use the moment to talk them through a situation.

He will readily halt training sessions to allow kickers to practise too. “Get them to kick when their heartrate is up and their emotional state is variable rather than just doing 50 kicks at the end of the session – because that’s just technique.”

2. Implicit and explicit learning both matter

At the heart of discussions about skill acquisition is the dichotomy between information-processing approaches (skill acquisition as learning to plan and execute correct movements by processing information internally) and ecological approaches (skill acquisition as learning to perceive and act in context by interacting with the environment).

Teague is not a dogmatist, even if he leans towards the latter. “I like implicit coaching where the exercise and your questions give the player the feedback,” he says. “What exercises can you design whereby you don’t have to say anything, the player performs the act, and the exercise gives the player the feedback? If you look at, say, goal kicking or throwing, you want the player to self-regulate when they’re in the moment and feel the pressure.” He will look to ask a series of questions that “get the player to think about where they want the ball to end up, where they want the ball to go versus breaking it down too technically”. He will also be mindful of the timing too, both pre and post-match.

However, when it comes to explicit approaches, “it’s not that those guys you’re very direct with are not taking control of their own journey and development, they just need to be told.”

It comes down to knowing the individual athlete. “I’ve worked with some players where I’ve fluffed it up too much and asked too many questions and they just want you to go ‘tell me exactly what you want me to be doing, tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong, tell me exactly how I can get it better’. Whereas with others, you can ask ‘what do you think?’”

Skill acquisition requires the coach to understand what the best approach is and why. Additionally, while it may be ideal for the session design to act as the teacher, there will be times when the coach needs to check for understanding.

3. Ask yourself: what will help the player?

While it is important for players to be drawn towards training sessions, whether by coaches placing balls in their line of sight or by making sessions enjoyable, the guiding principle should be whatever will help the players in that moment.

“Do you want your players to think your coaching drills are really good or do you want players to think ‘you’ve taught me how to pass better’?” As ever, the answer “depends on where you are” with the players in question.

In any case, “sometimes you have to get through the reps and you can’t deviate away from repetition”. Teague says: “I’ve seen coaches try to do these fast exercises to appease players and sometimes they can be so complicated that the players don’t buy into it because of how complex it is.”

There will be times when a coaching intervention can harm a player’s development and Teague will consciously be less prescriptive as a game week develops. “As you get closer towards the game, you’re looking at confidence versus correction” because sometimes less is more.

4. The coach is only part of the player’s journey

Between 2022 and 2023, Teague worked as a forwards and backs coach with Racing 92 where he had the opportunity to coach Finn Russell, who is widely considered one of the best fly-halves in the world.

Teague reflects on that period and what he refers to as the “culture of extras”, which is the work that the world’s best players continue to do on their basic skillsets.

“Finn would ask to do some extras when he thought it was right for him,” says Teague, who explains that Russell’s experience guided their training interactions. “Sometimes he’d do them on his own, sometimes he’d ask a coach to be there to give him some feedback, sometimes he’d want a coach there just to keep him company.”

Teague has also worked at school and underage level where he employed a more directive approach but in an environment like England or Racing, “telling them what to do probably isn’t the most intelligent thing.”

Instead, “I think the more players take control of their own skill development, the more you as a coach just have to be part of that journey, not driving that journey for them.”

5. Be patient, it’s a journey

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Teague what he knows now that he wished he knew whilst working as a skills coach.

“Skill acquisition takes a lot more time than I thought,” he says, adding that it could take a season for a goal kicker to become 10% better. “I don’t know if patience is a skill, but I wish I understood more about the learning journey of the player in terms of skill; that each player can pick things up at different rates.”

It comes back to the player-coach relationship. “Players need to take responsibility around what they want to be working on; and that’s a shared process with the coach. Obviously, if there’s something the player has really not identified that they need to work on, and if the coach has to tell them, then so be it.”

Teague will decide when to intervene, when to step back, and when to change the task.

“If you’re clever in your design, you can keep pushing and changing the design incrementally as you see the player evolving and becoming better. Equally, you can take it backwards if the player isn’t getting it. So it’s that ability to move up and down the bandwidth of the learning journey where, ‘OK, I’ve set the start point here at three, I need to go back to one before I can move to four, five and six’.”

6. Data informs, it does not decide

When it comes to using data in skill development, Teague describes it as a question of “data versus feel”.

He says: “You can look at the number of passes per game, for example, but then I think you have to really sit down, watch the video, watch the technique, watch the context, look at the environment that they’re in at that moment in time in the game, conditions; there’s lots of different things.”

As ever data must inform judgement, not replace it; it must provide a meaningful talking point. “I think data can serve its purpose, but what we don’t want to do is go too much down the data route without looking at the individual data moments in the game.”

As a final question, the Leaders Performance Institute asks Teague what advice he has for coaches working in skill development.

“Go and find the theory behind skill acquisition. I think it will change you. It will change mindsets, definitely.”

What to read next

How Do you Develop the Most Expert Coaching Workforce in World Football?

By John Portch

In mid-March performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler led a virtual roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members on the topic of talent pathways.

For all the experience in the virtual room – members that have spent decades working with youth athletes – each struggles to balance the elements that help young athletes to realise their potential.

“You’ll never solve it,” says Brunnschweiler, who has worked on successful talent pathways in both football and cricket. “The interesting part is how we make decisions and deliver on a strategic approach that’s appropriate for the context of the athlete.”

For the benefit of the virtual table, he outlined five common tensions that he has encountered on talent pathways:

The list is not exhaustive, but it is representative.

“The headline feedback from everyone at the roundtable is that probably they’re weaving down that ‘versus’ line in the middle when they’re doing this well,” adds Brunnschweiler.

He explains each tension in turn:

1. Group/Team learning vs Individual development

“Within your programme, how much time are you spending on team tactics, team interconnectivity, team culture, etc. versus identifying individual work-ons, individualised practices, individual focused development, individual prioritisation?”

2. Process focus vs Outcome/Match focus

“This is very similar to the first in many ways but, in my mind, is distinctly different. How much are you focusing on the process versus the outcome? And this is really around how you’re monitoring development. So if there’s a pathway lead or an academy director: are you looking at whether teams are winning when it comes to competition or are you looking at tracking progress against process markers that are embedded either within training or within the game?”

3. MDT staff input driving decisions vs Coaching/Technical staff driving decisions

“This is about athlete programming. How much of your emphasis is put on the ologists, multidisciplinary staff, the scientists versus coaching and technical staff? Who’s making the final call? How are you looking to integrate? What are the processes or systems that allow those two things to collide effectively? This was certainly one of the tensions that strongly resonated with the group.”

4. Holistic development of well‑rounded humans vs Targeted development of ruthless performers

“There’s been a massive growth in talent pathways around understanding the holistic nature of development and the growth in player care, support, psychology support, performance, wellbeing, and education off the pitch. The common question is ‘how do we develop well‑rounded humans?’ And the tension is someone saying ‘but surely it’s just about game performers can we spend all of our time targeting development of that ruthless in‑game performance?’”

5. Staff‑led teaching and guiding vs Player‑led discovery

“There’s a perception that it’s slower to do the player‑led, but it might be deeper; whereas it’s quicker and can feel more rewarding to do the staff‑led. ‘Let me tell you, here’s some guidance. Let me solve the problem for you.’”

Brunnschweiler then reflected on some of the available support mechanisms:

1. Consider if the athlete’s experience of a programme matches your teams’ intent. Much will depend on the athlete’s prior experiences, plus how and when they came to your programme.

“There’s a lot of insight generated around young athletes in all sports now and it’s like, well, how do you harness that background information as well as that current information you’re getting on them in order to make decisions around their programming?”

It requires a shared mental model between the different disciplines.

“There were some good examples at the roundtable where team culture means people’s view are respected, taken onboard and valued. And that’s utilised as a part of a decision-making approach.”

2. Retain coaches with age-specific expertise. Too little value is placed on age-group coaches, which can lead to those individuals seeking employment with more mature athletes.

“If I’m the first team coach, there’s a perception I’m better than the under-12s coach; whereas they’re equally challenging in different ways. Someone who’s brilliant at working with 10 to 12 year olds may end up working with older athletes because they get paid more.”

They may or may not be equipped to make that transition but he argues that teams can make it less of a problem by asking:

“Can you manipulate your wage structure to ensure these academy coaches stay valued within the role they’re best deployed in?”

3. Remember: well-rounded athlete can still possess an edge. While there is a desire to ensure holistic approaches that promote well-rounded development, there is a risk in taking it too far.

“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways; and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”

4. Development support for coaches. There is a time when a coach needs to be instructional and clear as well as a time when they need to skilfully draw a decision from an athlete.

“How do we provide learning and development support for coaches and other members of the MDT in this space so they can be skilful at learning design and skilful at knowing when to provide which approach based on the context and the athlete?”

5. Give the young athlete a sense of agency. Let young athletes speak in conversations around their IDPs and help them understand why things may feel challenging.

“I’ve seen people saying we want to put on sessions that look slick. That may or may not be the objective. It might also be that we’re really clear as a club that we think the deep learning and progress occurs in messy sessions where it’s clunky and we’re allowing players to play and solve problems. As coaches, we should be the best problem-setters.”

What to read next

10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes