Strategy, skill acquisition and change management were just some of the topics on the agenda at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.
“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
Artistic Director Alexander Campbell explains his academy’s approach with reference to his own experience as a professional ballet dancer.
“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
AS Béziers Hérault Head Coach Rory Teague ponders the question of skill acquisition and delivers his six considerations.
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?
Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler addresses the complex world of youth sport.
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
Ben Ashdown and Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University are working on a research programme aimed at providing an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.
Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images
“Even within the same football academy we’ve seen staff have different views of what resilience is,” Ben Ashdown, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Lead Researcher at Nottingham Trent University, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.
“They’ll say ‘resilience is a really important part of our philosophy but actually we don’t really know what it is, we don’t really know how to measure or assess it, we don’t really know how to track it’,” says Dr Mustafa Sarkar, who also joins the call. He is an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent and Lead Supervisor of the research programme.
Together, alongside Dr Chris Saward, Dr Nathan Cobb, and Dr Julie Johnston at Nottingham Trent University, they are leading a research programme to identify behavioural indicators of resilience in English academy football and develop a resilience behaviours observational tool. As part of the research, they have worked with academy stakeholders including coaches, psychologists, scouts, and analysts. They are also conducting a season-long study at a Category One academy (Derby County Football Club).
Based on their research, they have found that resilience behaviours can be categorised under six themes:
At the end of this research programme, they hope to have developed a tool for sport psychologists and coaches primarily, with some benefit to analysts who might contribute to the tracking of these behaviours through video-based analysis.
Sarkar says: “We don’t necessarily see it as a tool for identifying talent. I think it would be more as a conversation-starter with a player for player development purposes.”
Resilience: a behavioural response
As the exploration, measurement, and assessment of resilience in sport has tended to rely on self-report alone, myths and misconceptions have emerged (such as resilience being related to endurance and the suppression of emotion), and there is a gap between what resilience truly entails and what practitioners witness on the pitch.
“Coaches and support staff are starting to recognise that both physical and mental rest are critical to sustained resilience over time,” says Sarkar who has spent time with academy stakeholders dispelling those myths and misconceptions. “Part of resilience is about helping individuals to develop their thought and emotional awareness. It is not about encouraging people to hide their emotions”.
Additionally, “resilience requires more nuanced (context-specific) language because a person’s resilience in relation to being injured might be quite different to their resilience in relation to a loss of form”.
The behavioural elements of resilience lay at the heart of their research programme.
“We see resilience as a behavioural response,” says Ashdown, “but, up till now, there hasn’t been any literature that has actually asked what do these behaviours ‘look like’? How do we observe them? I think our work, in a behavioural sense, gives us some directly observable, reliable and valid indicators of resilience in football.”
The appeal for coaches, psychologists, and analysts is clear. “They’ve really bought into this idea that we’ve got something to look for on the pitch, and if we can see it [resilience], then maybe we can then develop it and track it over time,” Ashdown continues.
Their initial 2025 study/paper identified 36 behaviours (across six themes mentioned above), which have since been refined to ten. “We retained at least one across the six themes, which is another indicator that they’re pretty reliable.”
These behaviours include: demonstrating supportive actions during pressure or adversity (support-focused behaviour); positive body language in response to stressors (emotion-focused behaviours); and regaining focus in the face of challenges (robust resilience behaviours).
How might coaches approach these behavioural themes in their resilience development work?
The Leaders Performance Institute asks Ashdown and Sarkar about each of the six themes and they give consideration to each in turn with the caveats that a) they should be viewed collectively in order to develop a holistic view of an athlete; and b) the data collection and analysis of their research programme remains ongoing.
When players support or encourage teammates in stressful moments, especially after mistakes.
Ashdown admits that the relational aspects of resilience are more significant than he initially thought. “At times I probably assumed resilience was an individual capacity that you developed almost by yourself without realising that social support (through your teammates) is really significant,” he says.
“Through the work of Ben and others we’re starting to find that resilience is very much relational,” says Sarkar. “The development of resilience is dependent on cultivating high quality relationships. The interesting bit about social support is that we’ve found that it’s not necessarily about getting social support, but it’s about the perception that that support is available to you. From a resilience perspective, the perception is more important than receiving the actual support itself.”
Ashdown then shares a story of academy training drills, at Derby County FC (work led by academy sport psychologist, Lyle Kirkham, and supported by Ashdown), where players had a “secret support partner”. “We tasked some players with, right, when your teammate experiences some adversity or stressor or when they’re under pressure, find ways of offering them support,” he says, adding that the process raised the players’ awareness of how they’re reacting, responding and interacting with their teammates.
When players attempt to regulate their own emotions when encountering pressure, errors or frustration.
While there isn’t yet the data to support a definitive conclusion that emotion-focused behaviours depend on age and phase, as Ashdown explains, “there’s so many points where the participants said ‘we would expect to see a different response from a 10-year-old than one of our under-18s’.”
Emotional maturity is sure to be a factor. He adds: “How these players react and respond to things, particularly at younger ages, it’s a lot more visible, whereas maybe the older players tend to try and disguise how they’re feeling.”
This is a behavioural theme where interdisciplinarity comes to the fore. “We’re working with performance analysts to try and identify these behaviours through video footage and I think we’ll end up with a bespoke set of behaviours based on the phase [foundation, U9-U11; youth development, U12-U16; professional development, U17-U23].”
Displays of physical and psychological effort used to cope with setbacks, fatigue or demanding situations.
What does making an effort ‘look like’ in any sport? “There’s a danger of making assumptions because every player is different,” says Ashdown with reference to both physical and psychological indicators of effort. Their work has talked of pairing GPS data with observations but, as he admits, “this is where we need to be careful and cautious of not mislabelling players based on a perceived lack of effort and we must be aware of individual differences”.
For Sarkar, again, it is more about setting the terms for a player development conversation. He says: “You might come up with a resilience profile to say one player has got hypothetically high effort-focussed behaviours and lower teammate-focussed behaviours, but we see this observational tool more holistically across all six themes”.
These reflect a player’s ability to bounce back quickly after a mistake or negative event.
These need to be channelled. It is no good if a player makes a mistake and runs around like a headless chicken for the next 10 minutes and is sent off.
“One of the participants in our research mentioned that exact point in relation to effort-focused behaviours,” says Ashdown, before echoing Sarkar’s earlier reflections. “The most value in this behavioural approach is the opportunities that it creates for player-coach or player-psychologist reflection.” This, Sarkar suggests, could be a joint review of game video clips where the coach and/or psychologist says to the player ‘talk us through your thought process. What were you thinking and feeling at the time? How might you react and respond differently?’ or it a series of ‘what-if’ questions and scenarios. ‘What if this were to happen in the future? How would you react and respond?’
Sarkar adds that any intervention should be context-specific. “If a player has done that once are we then making an assumption that they’re doing that all the time – is this a one-off occurrence versus a pattern of occurrences? If it’s a one-off, like Ben said, then it’s probing that player about what they were thinking at that particular point in time. But we have to be careful that we’re not intervening based on a one-off versus a pattern.”
The ability to maintain stable performance while under sustained pressure or after setbacks.
Ashdown and Sarkar make the point that robust resilience behaviours risk being conflated with youthful inconsistency – and all its causes – at academy level.
“One of the participants in our research said it’s not about consistency of performance but the consistency of behavioural responses to things. So performance will fluctuate but is there some consistency in the way they’re behaving, reacting and responding?” says Ashdown. “What some of the coaches are after is a flattening of the curve emotionally and the way the players are managing things on the pitch.”
Sarkar believes coaches may be able to use the resulting observational tool as a means of evaluating the efficacy of pressure training scenarios. “What are you, the coach, actually seeing in terms of their reactions, responses, certainly from a behaviours point of view, and as a result of that pressure training, are you actually seeing an increase in some of the resilience behaviours in relation to these themes?”
When players learn from mistakes and adapt their actions rather than repeating ineffective responses.
Pressure training also presents an opportunity for self-reflection and learning through its video component – this is the ultimate purpose of this resilience behaviours work. “If we’re aware of that, can we support them in navigating those more effectively when they’re inevitably going to come up on the pitch?” says Ashdown.
“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Sarkar, paraphrasing the American educational reformer John Dewey. “Pressure training shouldn’t just be about putting people under pressure in training and then automatically assuming somehow that they’re going to develop their resilience to future situations?”
At Derby County, led by Kirkham and supported by Ashdown, they have also introduced a series of gamification principles in delivering education and feedback at the academy through a resilience behaviours lens. This includes FIFA-style cards for players, and a football-specific version of snakes & ladders to mirror the ups and downs of the academy journey.
The future of resilience tracking
When it comes to resilience, coaches are acting on intuition, which is valuable but ultimately has its limitations.
“We’re trying to make that process more objective and systematic; hence this is where the interdisciplinary piece comes in,” says Ashdown. “We wouldn’t expect coaches in the moment in the game to be thinking about necessarily tagging or noting these behaviours. We might ask the analyst, with support from the psychologist, to do live coding or tagging of these behaviours or retrospective tagging based on the recording. That would then lead to conversations with the players. With this work, there’s a big opportunity to bring together coaching, performance analysis, and psychology.”
Sarkar explains that they are using the behavioural data to create a resilience profile for players across the noted behaviours. “That gives you a holistic viewpoint,” he says. “A player might have higher team-focused resilience behaviours and slightly lower effort-focused resilience behaviours and a medium level of learning-focused resilience behaviours. So, it gives you a nice overall resilience profile of an individual.”
The hope is that their work will eventually provide an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.
“It can also then become part of the everyday conversation with multiple staff. So rather than just a conversation in relation to psychology, it’s a broader conversation about player development.”
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