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“There’s more evidence to support what we do but, at the same time, there’s more perspective, but certain things don’t change,” says Jimmy Wright.

“If you chase the science, if you purely chase the literature, and you forget about experience and what has traditionally delivered the results you might just miss the diamonds.”

Jimmy Wright, the Team Biokineticist at the Durban-based Sharks, who compete locally in the Currie Cup and internationally in the United Rugby Championship, is the first guest on the latest series of the Keiser Series Podcast.

Jimmy has been with the Sharks for 23 years – in fact he was the first individual to hold his position at a franchise in South Africa – and has seen both his role evolve as well as the needs of the game.

He discusses those developments and also touches upon:

• His belief in focusing on growth between Monday and Friday [14:30];
• The concept of ‘ubuntu’ and selflessness that informs his work [17:00];
• How his style as a leader developed from his background in track & field [20:00];
• The advice he would like to give his younger self [26:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Luke Whitworth

Recommended reading

What Does Cultural Mapping Look Like at Ulster Rugby?

In an Era of Player Power, How Can you Protect your Team’s Culture and Vision?

High Performance Environments – What the Research Is Telling Us

How Winning Organizations Last 100 Years

Framing the topic

Across the Leaders Performance Institute network, the number one topic of interest is culture. Everyone is striving for a strong and high performing culture and it’s fair to say some are better placed than others to succeed around this. A couple of anecdotes from friends of the network ring true around the topic of culture:

• You have to really work at it.
• Those organisations that have sustained success over a long period of time, take culture incredibly seriously. Dan Coyle’s work in The Culture Code brings this to life in a stark away.

Across this virtual roundtable conversation, we explored the following question: knowing the importance of culture, how are peers in the group evaluating, reviewing and subsequently, evolving their culture across their respective organisations? Below is an account of best practices and considerations outlined by the group.

Discussion points

• Have a Culture Health Check Process: a couple of organisations on the call do an annual survey amongst athletes and staff to measure the strength of their culture. Another organisation from a different sport shared that they have introduced more frequent reviews and health checks, leveraging those every three months.
• Consider Subcultures: many of us work within larger organisations so there is an overarching organisational culture that surrounds us which we embody parts of, but there is also the challenge of implementing a coherent culture across different sub-groups. There is a balance to be found. Is one standard culture wise or is there value in providing some autonomy to those sub-groups? Are you evaluating both the wider organisational culture and the natural subcultures that are present in our environments?
• Measurement: there is some push and pull between the nuanced face-to-face, anecdotal evaluation and the data-orientated angle systems (culture health check). Does steering too far in one direction or the other have the potential to throw you off?
• Wrestling with Tension: we have to find the balance between wanting something concrete that is easy to understand (quantitative insight) around our culture and how relevant and useful that is versus the awareness and insight of the culture that occurs through sitting, listening and talking to people (qualitative). It’s critical to be aware of the tension between these two aspects in how we evaluate culture because it can be easy to jump to the measurable part of the evaluation and determine the health of the culture on that – be aware of what the data doesn’t show us. There is a gap between these two factors that is often present within organisations.
• Creating the Need for Change: there is value in using best practices such as culture health checks to create the space for facilitated conversations around culture. This is where the creation of actual need for change arises. How are you effectively doing that? The tool can never be as valuable as the conversation that is there to create – use this as a reference point.
• Expansion of Staff: the inclusion vs. exclusion membrane becomes a really important aspect of cultural influence. How are you celebrating with the expansion of staff to create that sense of inclusion and belonging?
• Feel It & See It: we often talk about a metric-based approach to culture, but often you can feel it and see it, making it difficult to define. ‘Whether it’s air for humans or water for fish, you notice it when it’s not there’. This builds on the point relating to the separation between measurement, implementation and action – if you are taking the temperature measurement, what are you doing in the second and third phases to move things on?
• Culture & Interaction: you need to invest in the direction you want the culture to move in, but if you don’t have the right level of interaction around it, the culture is dead. The challenges of the pandemic have naturally reduced the cultural interaction and engagement. How can you heighten the level of interaction?
• What is a Culture’s Openness to Change: this can be an interesting question to ask yourself when considering the evaluation of the culture. This can be an integral measure to understanding how robust the culture is. Change is one thing in life that is guaranteed, but there is tension that exists as people often don’t like it, so is there a growth mindset and adaptability that exists within the environment? What do you think you are losing if you are to engage in the change?
• Language: we can engage in measurements, but as mentioned earlier, you can also see it, feel it and, most importantly, hear it. Are your people and staff using the language that aligns to the culture we want to live by?
• Values: there is a sweet spot – there can be too many values and also that notion of being stuck on a wall without being truly lived – this is not doing the work of culture and bringing it to life is much harder.
• Pain Points & Disruptions: are you identifying and evaluating these, as they will have a direct impact on your culture? Wellbeing for employees in particular, not just mental and emotional but also financial. Mapping the pain points provides more opportunity to review and reflect.
• Focus Groups: how are you garnering feedback from those in the organisation who perhaps don’t get the same attention? Create focus groups to ensure you are providing opportunities for their voice to be heard. Bridge the gap between exclusion and inclusion.
• Mission, Values & Cornerstones: when we consider the evaluation of the ‘culture in practice’, are you also frequently taking the time to review and evolve the mission, values and cornerstones of the culture? Are they still relevant, has the environment evolved where something is more aligned to the culture? Doing this will allow you to stay more on the pulse of how the organisation is living and breathing.
• Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: it’s important to review the context of how your culture is established. In many environments where practitioners are working with younger talent, it tends to be top-down. In other environments, bottom-up will be the direction. Because they are context-dependent, there will be different questions and measurements to consider, there shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to how you evaluate.

In partnership with

By Matthew Stone

The focus of our fourth Leaders Meet of 2022, which took place at the end of July at the NBPA in New York City, was how creativity and collaboration play a crucial role in high performance, and how failing to innovate in these areas will put organisations at risk of being left behind.

We heard two case studies from leaders in their field about what innovation and creativity means to them, and how to change the mindset to ensure it’s a priority on a daily basis.

Session 1: Creativity & Collaboration Pt 1: High Performance Innovation Under Pressure

Speaker: David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation, Mount Sinai Health System

The neurobiology of creativity

• “Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context” – Jonathan Plucker, Ronald A Baghetto and Gayle Dow in ‘Why Isn’t Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research’, published in Educational Psychologist, June 2004

• A creative organism is an adaptive organism. An adaptive organism survives. That is why we need creativity.

• Our brains have vast inhibitory networks that act as buffers between brain regions. If we didn’t have these networks in place, we would:
  • Smell colour
  • See sound
  • Hear flavours
  • Probably some other bad stuff…

• The theory of over-inclusivity states that creative minds don’t filter out all the random connections as much as non-creatives. This makes a creative brain able to think in ways that neurotypical ‘caged’ brains can’t.

• You can be creative in lots of different ways. We’re also not lateralised in the same way, so creativity can come from different places. You can work in a field/industry that you would assume is quite linear (e.g. accounting) but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be very creative individuals within that field/industry, too.

How can we be more creative?

• • Step 1: Place your brain in a learning state

• • • Salience: Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why does it matter?
    • Engagement and motivation: Engagement is the action of performing an assigned task. Intensity of engagement is your level of motivation.
    • Enjoyment: The extent to which someone is taking pleasure in an activity

• • Step 2: Expose yourself to novel and unfamiliar experiences

• • • Travel: Can increase creativity by up to 25%
    • Biophilic spaces: You are up to 15% more creative in biophilic space
    • Use psychedelics: Check with your doctor, and be controlled and responsible.

• • Step 3: Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. Build it into your life

• • • Our brains are designed for ‘in group’ / ‘out group’. Our brains want to lead us toward groups that look like us. This is the path of least resistance – In-group is “easier” for our brain than out-group. Inhibition remains intact
    • Diversity changes things: Deep relationships with someone from another country will lead to high levels of creativity
    • MBA students who dated fellow students from another culture had more creative work breakthroughs
    • Even ‘thinking’ about a deep relationship with someone from another culture will cause a temporary boost in creativity

Key takeaways

Creativity is trainable when we:

• Break routines
• Engage in tasks that open our mind to learning
• Place our brains in novel situations
• Surround ourselves with differing opinions and cultures

Questions from the audience

Is there a limit to how much creativity you can foster?

• There will be a limit due to internal processes and what works for them etc. Creativity is not a positive trait that everyone needs to have. If you are an athlete that needs consistency, you don’t necessarily want to change the routine by thinking and acting more creatively.
• You will become less creative as you age, because you will become more set in your ways. So it comes down to personality traits.

How can you foster creativity in an environment where motivation is low and there are time constraints?

• Firstly, you have to explore why motivation is low. Then it is important to get everyone re-engaged on the mission, and make it a collective goal across everyone in the room/team. On the flip side, if anyone that doesn’t want to do this, get out of the room/team. Then start collectively working towards the goal.

Session 2: Creativity & Collaboration Pt 2: Leading Innovation

Speaker: Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Rivers of thought

• We accept the status quo as reality, and cease to challenge it. Ideas, knowledge and experience all make up the ‘river’
• Up to us to develop new streams of thought to continue to innovate

Five key skills of innovation

1. Step change thinking

• Set a very stretchy goal.
• How can we reach for that?
• x10?

2. Ideal world

• In an ideal world what would be happening?

Assuming we can’t do that…

• How could we replicate that in another way?

3. Redefining or reframing the problem

• How can I express this problem differently?
• How might we resolve this new problem?

4. Related world

• Stay open to insights from outside our sector.
• Who addressed similar challenges? How did they do it?
• How has nature resolved this?

5. Mind mapping

• Draw a map with the problem in the centre.
• What are all the different solutions we can generate?

Group challenges

For this section of the day, the group split into four groups to discuss four challenges posed by members of the audience. Below are some thoughts and takeaways of what was discussed.

1. How do we create interconnection amongst silos when individuals are routinely separated?

• Zooming isn’t the same as being in the same room – ensure you don’t approach both in the same way and adjust accordingly
• It’s important that everyone is on the same starting page – put time aside to prepare
• Geographic differences make things harder – work hard to overcome that barrier or make it easier to do so
• Volunteer your spare time to spend with the team
• Planning out self-development time for staff in the same way you would with players
• In an ideal world everyone would all be together, but they can’t also be, so take advantage of time in camp, spend time getting to know each other, and let the other bits play out
• Reframe as an opportunity rather than problem – revaluate collective values, prioritise being connected

2. How do we bring continuity across different locations?

• Ensure there is clarity of the ‘why’
• If rolling out initiatives and programmes without the ‘why’, there’ll be less buy-in, investment, and interest
• Project outcomes and desired outcomes need to be shared
• Provide a framework versus cookie cutter approach – then allow for flexibility and creativity within it
• Make sure you are setting the atmosphere and showing the ‘how’ when together – with tangible examples that they could attempt to replicate
• Provide support, guidance, check-ins regularly
• Be in the trenches with them. Show them you’re all on the same team and working towards the same goal
• Recognise the reality and embracing the subcultures. Train people to be able to provide guidance and leadership within these subcultures

3. How do you get people within a department to successfully buy into change when they are already performing very well in some areas?

• Prioritise building trust from the off
• Take a gradual approach and be patient
• Decide which processes you want to change. Then approach changes by overcoming small things, rather than wholesale changes
• Invert the question – what are you trying to solve for? – success is currently happening, but is it sustainable and repeatable? (Reframe the question)
• Consider John Kotter’s ‘8 step process for leading change’
• It is important to understand motivations of people involved and making sure you and they are aligned on goals
• Everyone is likely working towards a unified goal, but it is good to define it, and to talk about it often
• We shouldn’t think and assume that people don’t care
  • Peel back emotional response
• What are you onboarding people to? What’s your anchor? What do you want people to be measured by?
  • If you manoeuvre in the right way, you can implement guidelines without restricting intellectual freedom and individuality

4. Cognitive training & evaluation within high performance

• 10x approach – it can impact all elements of performance
• Differentiate between elite and developmental athletes
• Find benchmarks at elite level – take trainable factors to develop their level
• More stringent the closer you get to elite level – ensure you are prepared for that and have plans to approach it correctly
• Attributes – outcomes – confidence. e.g. focus, resilience, competence, awareness or handling pressure
• Cultural factors consist of psychological safety, resilience and performance fitness
• Skills that are workable – mindfulness, self talk etc.
• Sport specific skills – visual tracking, reaction time, DM ability
• Traits, outcomes, situational factors

Session 3: Creativity & Collaboration Pt. 3: Teamwork & Innovation in Practice

Speaker: Kevin Abrams, SVP of Football Operations & Strategy, New York Giants

Innovation and collaboration at the New York Giants

• Naturally in a big organization, there is a temptation for people to work in silos. In the past being innovative wasn’t a necessity, it was a by-product. But as time went on, the Giants have made sure that it is a priority and something that is considered.
• Innovation leadership is probably what has brought the departments together. That didn’t always exist, but the team is a much more sophisticated organization now because we started to encourage being proactive with innovation and creativity a long time ago. It takes time.
• There have been low points and high points during Abrams’ 23 years with the organization. In the lowest points, it was difficult for him personally as a leader because of the performances, and then nature of the performances. As a leader within the organization he has to take responsibility for that. It also means he has to ‘roll up his sleeves’ and make suggestions on how to innovate and implement new ideas to get out of a rut.

Barriers to innovation / ensuring staff and coaches are allowed to get into an innovative mindset

• Honestly, sometimes you luck into it. The Giants have tried to mandate innovation throughout the calendar and throughout the building, but when you mandate things, there is sometimes resistance and push-back, so it doesn’t always work. It has to be organic. People have to want to buy into an idea and a state of mind.
• If you start with a small initiative, get the buy-in, get people to believe in the project and the outcome, you’re on the right road. Then they start to want to innovate, and want to be in a positive, creative mindset more often.
• Set up the small wins, enjoy them, and celebrate them. Then build from there to bigger projects and bigger conversations.
• The status quo can be very comfortable, so we need to make sure that every day you have an element of discomfort, and you’re comfortable with that. It keeps people on their toes, as it’s easy for people to stay in a safe space. The Giants want to push people outside of that to achieve more and always strive to be better on a daily basis.

Ensuring staff are comfortable and feel at ease when new regimes/leadership starts

• The Giants want to ensure there is an ongoing conversation and ongoing feedback about how people are feeling. Whether that is regular check-ins, or something different, the important thing is that there is openness and a safe environment to share.
• It’s also important to ensure there is a feedback process and ongoing conversation when the times are bad/challenging, but it’s just as important to do so when times are good.

By John Portch

• Do you have cognitive diversity within your team and are diverse people given the opportunity to lead?

• Are you able to meet your athletes and coaches on an experiential and emotional level?

• Do not guess – talk to your people to find out where they can improve

Inclusion allows for credible diversity

Inclusivity creates the conditions for diversity to flourish within your ranks. In October 2017, USA Swimming named Lindsay Mintenko as the Managing Director of its national team. She was the first female to take the role, which was created in 1988, but the groundwork had been laid for the appointment of a woman. “It brought a change of thinking. A different way to think,” she told an audience at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. “There had been three men in the role – all coaches – and so I was the first female athlete and so I bring a different perspective to the role.” At the time, Mintenko explained that just 6% of the United States’ elite swimming coaches were female, which was “awful”. She said: “We’re working hard and doing a lot of programmes and initiatives in USA Swimming to increase [opportunities] for our female coaches as they try to climb.” She cited the examples of Teri McKeever, who coached the US women’s team at the 2012 London Olympics, and Catherine Kase, who was the nation’s Head Coach for Open Water Swimming at the 2016 Rio Games and would go on to fill the same post at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Games.

Find the same wavelength as your athletes

Diversity necessarily extends beyond gender, which in itself is no guarantee of cognitive diversity. Mintenko is a three-time Olympic medallist, including two golds, and a ten-time US national champion, which no previous managing director could claim. She said: “The ability to communicate with the athletes and be on the same wavelength as them [is significant]. I’ve been in their shoes and I’ve sat in the ready room and been in front of the blocks at the Olympic Games; and so [it is important] to be able to talk to them about what that looks like and how you feel and how you deal with that.” The athletes can feel that they are listened to within the USA Swimming environment. “I also feel I’m able to communicate and have more one-on-one conversations, not only with the athletes but with the coaches.”

Learning from lived experience

Mintenko’s pride in her ability to speak to coaches and athletes has been part of a wider development of openness within USA Swimming, which her appointment further supports. She explained that she is able to speak to coaches, ask what they want, and accept their feedback. This was essential following the 2016 Games, where the US topped the swimming medals table with 33, including 16 golds. The 2020 Games were the first in 20 years where the Americans travelled without serial winner Michael Phelps. A robust review was essential to retaining the United States’ winning ways. It lasted six months – much to Mintenko’s surprise – but a wealth of good information emerged. “One of the things we implemented straight away was instead of USA Swimming telling our coaches and athletes what we thought they need to do to be better, we changed it to being more individualised,” she said. “They told us what they needed to be better. We’re not with them every day, we don’t train in one location, everyone trains throughout the United States, and so we started to have a lot more conversations with our coaches and athletes, a lot more open communication.” Learning from that lived experience proved to be the making of USA Swimming’s mental health programme for athletes, which launched in 2019. “It was talked about in several sports and we hope to expand upon that as we go into the 2024 quad.”

By Sarah Evans

• Listen to those in your organisation / sport

• Understand how people feel

• Use data to prove a performance benefit

Data collection is key in understanding where you truly are

In order to build an ED&I strategy it is critical to truly understand where you currently are and what measures need to be brought in. This was something that was brought up time and time again by our members, and is the starting point for influencing ED&I in many high performing environments. One Premier League Football club emphasised the importance of having focus groups, so they could understand how people within their team were feeling and how they could support them further. They also conducted exit interviews which helped them to really understand unconscious biases. Data collection also isn’t just something you do to start the ED&I strategy, you need to constantly check and assess how you are tracking. The same Premier League club explained how they conduct annual surveys but also they break down the data from the survey by area and demographic so they have the most in-depth data and can be really targeted with their actions moving forwards.

Using data to prove a performance benefit

Within tennis, one organisation conducted some research which identified that within the performance coaches, only 12% were female. In the first instance the data was able to give them an accurate picture of the landscape of coaching, but then they thought, ‘what is the performance benefit of having a diverse coaching staff?’ They then conducted further research and interviewed every female player who passed through their doors in the last 20 years and found that 72% of them were strongly influenced by a female mentor. By collecting this data, they had evidence proving the performance benefit of a diverse workforce and this evidence actually helped secure more funding for the organisation.

Focus on inclusion before diversity

One insight which several teams, including those in cricket and football, highlighted was that attracting diverse talent means nothing if you don’t have an inclusive culture. The teams explained that through utilising data and gathering feedback, they found that the diverse talent that they were trying so hard to attract, would often leave soon after arriving because the environment wasn’t inclusive. Therefore, if teams and organisations can work in the first instance to understand how to foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels comfortable to be their authentic selves, when they then diversify, they are more likely to maintain a diverse workforce and get the best out of everyone.

What to do when the data pool isn’t diverse

One interesting challenge highlighted by a leading UK governing body, was how to utilise data collection when traditionally data has been from the same groups, and posing the question ‘does collecting this type of data help?’ It is a challenge to understand what data need to be collected and how to effectively utilise that information. However, they again explained that they are engaging in focus groups to help better understand what data would be beneficial for the sport, and how best to use it moving forwards.

By John Portch

• How do you check and challenge yourself that the message received is the message perceived?

• Developmental or motivational feedback – what does each of your athletes require today?

• What can you do to ensure the collective efficacy of your team?

What the research is telling us about high performance environments

David Fletcher, who is the Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University and a Leaders Performance Advisor, shared a high performance model with an audience at Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments in 2021. In making his presentation, Fletcher drew on varies studies, including the 2009 white paper by Graham Jones, Mark Gittens and Lew Hardy titled ‘Creating an environment where high performance is inevitable and sustainable: The high performance environment model’. That paper formed the basis of Fletcher’s onstage exploration of leadership, performance enablers, and people within a high performance model.

He said: “Although I don’t think it provides the definitive answer, what I do think it does is provide a nice starting point.”

Three important aspects of effective high performing leadership

“What does effective high performing leadership look like within a high performance environment?” asked Fletcher.  Jones, Gittens and Hardy identified three main considerations for leaders:

1. Establishing the team’s vision then role modelling and communicating that to followers.
2. Challenging their followers to make their contribution to fulfilling the vision.
3. The leader must support their followers in making their contribution.

“They argued that it wasn’t enough to be good in two of these three areas,” said Fletcher. “In fact, it could be catastrophic if you’re only good at vision and challenge but no support. It’s going to be a relentless environment where burnout is going to prevail.” He also mentions the important distinction between what coaches perceive they give their athletes and the message the athlete receives and perceives. “There needs to be checks and balances in place to let leaders be aware of how they’re providing support across the high performance environment.”

Developmental v motivational feedback

Part of a leader’s role, as Fletcher said, is to provide environmental enablers that offer the support for people to operate in a high performance environment. The research points to the importance of information [feedback, clarity, support], instruments [tools, frameworks], and incentives [meet the athlete’s need for competency, autonomy and relatedness].

Fletcher honed in on the difference between developmental and motivational feedback. “Developmental feedback is the type of feedback that says ‘you are here. In order for us to be here, this is what needs to happen’,” he said. “But the other type of feedback you get under social support is motivational feedback; and motivational feedback is slightly different. ‘This is where you were, this is where you now are. Look how far you’ve come over the last six months.’ The best leaders are able to balance the motivational and developmental support appropriately for different individuals within the performance environment. It’s where the science shifts towards the art of coaching and high performance leadership.”

Attitudes, behaviours and capability

The research discussed by Fletcher also highlighted the traits needed by those operating in ever less hierarchical high performance environments. It identified three buckets. Firstly, the question of attitudes, from trust in one’s leader to organisational commitment via collective efficacy and job satisfaction. Secondly, Fletcher delved into the necessary behaviours, including being helpful, engaging enthusiastically and volunteering when possible. The third bucket was capability, specifically the ability of people to support talent development, provide emotional intelligence and develop mental toughness.

‘High performance cultures don’t just show up’

We asked Leaders Performance Advisor Rachel Vickery to reflect on Fletcher’s findings and to share her thoughts on the move away from hierarchical models and the ways that leaders can make a distributed model work for their high performance teams.

Rachel, how common is a dispersed/distributed leadership model in high performance sport these days?

We are increasingly seeing organisations and teams embracing more of a distributed leadership approach, even if they don’t identify with that model by name. We are seeing teams collaborate on things like values, and more importantly how these values are ‘lived into’ in an individual’s role. For example, ‘courage’, ‘integrity’ or ‘excellence’ will be expressed differently by front office staff, compared with board members, or coaches, or athletes or support staff. This sort of approach empowers each individual of a team, irrespective of their role, to take ownership of creating a high performance environment in their area and as it feeds into the collective organisation; rather than defaulting to expecting that it is someone else’s job, or a subconscious belief that a high performance culture just shows up. And we are seeing more individuals within an organisation understanding the importance of modelling high performance culture, leading by example and holding others accountable to agreed standards by having courage to have difficult conversations.

What tips do you have for leaders seeking to make a distributed model work? Any pitfalls to avoid?

The three points identified by Jones, Gittens and Hardy in the article above still hold, and as David wisely points out, it’s essential to include all three. Regular open and transparent communication ensures the model constantly evolves, rather than being a discussion at the beginning of a season that fades into the background once the daily grind kicks in.

Developing a high performance environment is everyone’s responsibility, so leading and interacting with others in a way they understand their individual and collective value to the shared goal is essential for ongoing buy-in. Perhaps this model evolves more organically in team-based sports, where many different roles interact daily under the same roof. Olympic and individual sports where people might be spread around the country require more intentional focus on implementing these steps for the model to work, but the effort is worth it.

Avoiding pitfalls revolve around ensuring as a leader that you are living by example, not paying lip service to it or just telling others to do so. It’s not uncommon in organisations with a poor culture to hear coaches, boards or support staff harshly criticising athletes for not having an excellence mindset, integrity or willingness to do the one percenters; yet not living the same in their role. That’s about the fastest way to undermine respect and a high performance culture! And remembering that people will follow the strongest energy in the room (or team, or on the field), which is great when that energy aligns with high performance traits; but destructive if the strongest, most influential energy is toxic. So it is important to call out toxic personalities or actions quickly.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Psychological safety is the biggest difference between the top and lowest performing teams

• It requires intentional work on the part of leaders

• Is it ‘failure’ or simply a problem to solve?

Quick recap: what is psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson, an organisational behavioural scientist, coined the term ‘team psychological safety’. She defined it as: “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” When Google announced the results of its Project Aristotle, which sought to understand the characteristics of effective teams. Psychological safety was identified as the biggest factor. The others were ‘dependability’, ‘clarity,’ ‘impact’ and ‘meaning’. But psychological safety stood out.

“This is a little bit of a clinical-sounding term but this is the best one we have to describe this sense of ability to take interpersonal risks in a work setting,” said Abeer Dubey, Google’s Director of People Analytics, who led Project Aristotle. Dubey was speaking to an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at 2021’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance.

He continued: “We have all been in a situation where somebody senior in an organisation or the hierarchy suggested something and we may or may not agree with that; or some acronym has been thrown out there in a team meeting. Are we in a culture where we feel comfortable raising our hands either in terms of pushing back on a decision made by a senior leader or asking a question that may seem like a stupid question in the context of the meeting?

What does that look like in practice?

Dubey painted a picture of psychological safety at Google. “Teams that were good at doing this had that safe environment where people took small interpersonal risks on a day to day basis,” he said. “They will jump or chime in. This wasn’t just something about feeling good. We could actually see a direct impact on our revenue performance, especially in our sales team.” Teams that feel safe are more effective. “Through this comes this process of learning quickly and this translates into a direct impact,” he added.

How can you help your teams to get better?

Google instigated its gTeams programme, which was designed to help the organisation improve across the key characteristics identified in effective teams by Project Aristotle. Of gTeams, Dubey said: “It’s very difficult to even bring up a topic like psychological safety unless you have a term for it. If there’s no formal construct for that then these things can easily go unnoticed, so I think an explicit practice of going through this type of review is something that can help thousands of companies.”

From failure to problem solving

For astute leaders, there is the potential for failures to become problem-solving exercises for teams to coalesce around. Dubey cites the ‘pre-mortems’ carried out by the Google X innovation lab under its CEO Astro Teller. “He got the senior members of his team and he said ‘OK, imagine if we had actually failed in a project,’” said Dubey. “If you think about today and what’s working, people always get in defensive mode. He said: ‘OK, think about it yourself. If we had failed, what could we have done better?’ And it completely changed the dynamic where the thing that could have been defensive became like a problem-solving exercise and everyone came together. He calls this exercise a ‘pre-mortem’, which is where you imagine that you have already failed and this is what we could have done about it. That’s the kind of thing we ask people to think about. Small things in a day to day setting that can have a huge impact.”

Is there truly room for psychological safety in sport?

In 2021, we published a Special Report that reflected on psychological safety’s journey towards being acknowledged as a competitive edge in sport and, in bringing those pages to life, we spoke to Leaders Performance Advisor, David Fletcher, the Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University.

These are an excerpt of his reflections at the time:

“What I think will be very interesting looking at the next five years, is the whole wellbeing and welfare movement in elite sport because that’s definitely gaining momentum and traction, with good reason. How do we sit that alongside the demands for high performance and wanting to win? That’s not going to go away either. The best athletes and the best coaches are going to have a real need to win.

“We’ve seen in the past, whether it be Lance Armstrong or Michael Jordan, this burning desire to succeed at all costs, spills over. There’s a real recognition in elite sport that that does happen and has happened.

“The question now is how can we manage that will to win at all costs? I’m not sure you can do that in people who really want to win; like the people who are training for an Olympic gold medal. They’re totally single-minded. It’s not necessarily about taking the edge off that, it’s about juggling that to a point where it’s not winning at all costs – it’s winning hopefully without other costs.

“That’s where I hope psychological safety will play a role within that, where it becomes a more sophisticated culture and climate where we can strive to excel, we can strive to win, but not at the cost of cheating, bullying, abuse, fear of failure.

“It’s very easy for me to say it but it’s a lot harder in the cutthroat nature of elite sport. When you start losing people’s jobs and positions are on the line; that’s when this really gets put to the test.”

By Sarah Evans

• Reconnect with your roots.

• Align to a bigger purpose.

• Empower and trust the athletes to make decisions.

Reconnect the playing group with the club’s history

Quins were languishing in sixth place in the Premiership in January 2021 and were without a head coaching figure. Six months later, their player-led squad were champions and this season reached the semi-finals again. The club’s Head of Rugby Performance Billy Millard took the reins and would hand control back to the playing group. Before that, he needed to restore confidence and re-establish a sense of purpose. He understood the need for the team to go back to their roots, to understand their history and culture. “Quins have always been entertainers, that’s why we’re ‘the Jesters’, and we had to tap back into that,” Millard told an audience at the 2021 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. The team created a clear vision which underpins everything they do, and means they are all aligned and striving for a greater purpose. They understand their history and what it means to play for Quins – it is more than just winning and the team is worth more than any individual. It is everyone’s responsibility to bring success to the club, everyone has their part to play, and therefore the sense of a team is embedded and felt even stronger.

Foster a sense of belonging

As soon as you understand and buy into the vision, values and culture, you are part of the Quins family and part of a legacy of Quins players who want to keep this culture alive, explained Danny Care, the Quins and England international scrum-half, who spoke onstage with Millard. Every player is there to bring Quins success, and to do that every individual must give 100% for the good of the team. “One of the key reasons we were successful, was having 45 players fighting for the same goal”, explained Care. It was a whole squad effort, not just the 23 playing at the weekend. Each player also has the freedom to be themselves, and is not put in a box, they are accepted and allowed to express themselves as they are aligned to the higher purpose, and belong to the group. Enjoying the process and feeling part of something bigger is often more fulfilling than simply winning, and Care stated emphatically that winning at Quins, where he has played since he was 19, “was the proudest moment of my career”. It is the sense of winning with your team who have been pulling towards the same goal for a higher purpose that adds to the achievement and success.

Trust, respect and empowerment

The staff value demonstrated that they valued the players’ opinions by asking them to take ownership of the programme and how they wanted to act within it. “I’ve never known an environment where we’ve felt more empowered because we were asked questions,” Care said. The players are empowered to think about what will get the best out of them, what they want, the most crucial piece being that their input is listened to and therefore they feel respected and trusted. This allows the players to feel valued but also in turn holds them accountable to their actions and decisions. The players must be able to understand what gets the best out of themselves as individuals and as a team. The support staff are also listened to and empowered to make decisions on the running of the programme. “Everyone was accountable and empowered and they really enjoyed it,” explained Millard. They are given autonomy and their expertise is listened to, therefore further increasing their feeling of being trusted and respected.

Have a family-first approach to people

Care emphasised the importance of making each individual feel seen as a human and not just an athlete or part of a machine. They took a family-first approach, knowing that whilst, yes, rugby and winning is important, people have lives outside of this and family is everything. Millard gave a brilliant example of one player’s mother being unwell during the week of the most important game of the season. The coaching staff and team’s response was “family comes first, just go,” says Millard. The player came back for the weekend and played exceptionally well – he had been understood and cared for as a human. Care highlighted from a players perspective, that decision from the coaching staff “filtered through the rest of the squad, and we feel empowered, trusted and listened to.”

Operating from a sense of belief not fear

The player-led approach to training and taking ownership breeds a sense of confidence that you have done everything in your power to prepare correctly. Confidence that the game plan is the best way for you to be successful, and trusting the processes in order to achieve your outcome goal. This is critical mid game when things might not be going your way, “by sticking to what we believe, what we’ve trained” explained Care. Having a unified approach is the best approach for success, and players not going off script trying to solve the problem individually.  If you lose, which any team is bound to do, believing and trusting in the team’s process and not panicking. This is embedded from the owners and filters down the club giving everyone confidence that their position isn’t under threat from one or two negative results. Operating on a sense of belief and confidence rather than fear. Belief in the individual’s ability but also that of everyone around them.

By Sarah Evans

• Treat people and groups fairly

• Personalise your approach for the individual

• Leverage the thoughts and experiences of diverse groups

Deloitte’s initial research into the character traits of inclusive leaders, which began in 2011 and concluded in 2016, was the key stimulus in our recent Leadership Skills Series Virtual Roundtable. The multi-professional service company’s research delves into an inclusive leadership model where the ‘inclusive leader’ is at the centre of a circle and their six signature traits are listed around the outside. This signifies that each trait is of equal value and the leader is placed in the middle, bringing people together.

Here, with the help of excerpts from Deloitte’s research, we illustrate each of those six signature traits and detail how leaders who want to manage diverse teams equitably can bring each trait to life.

1. Commitment

‘Highly inclusive leaders are committed to diversity and inclusion because these objectives align with their personal values and because they believe in the business case.’

If the leader has personal values which are aligned to inclusion, they will treat all of their team members with fairness and respect, they will take action to ensure each member feels like they belong in the team, and connected to the group, and they will proactively adapt their way of leading to the preferences of each individual. If they believe in the business case of inclusion, they will treat diversity and inclusion as a business priority, taking personal responsibility for inclusive goals, and allocate resources towards making sure the workplace is equitable.

2. Courage

‘Highly inclusive leaders speak up and challenge the status quo, and they are humble about their strengths and weaknesses.’

The leader will have high levels of self-awareness, acknowledging their own personal limitations and seek out understanding from others or look to those who have strengths in the areas of their own personal limitations. They will also need to be brave to challenge often entrenched ideas and opinions that uphold the status quo, and to hold others to account when they exhibit non-inclusive behaviours.

3. Cognisance of bias

‘Highly inclusive leaders are mindful of personal and organisational blind spots, and self-regulate to help ensure fair play.’

Again, the leader will be highly self-aware and be able to be aware and accept their own biases based on their life experiences. They will take time to understand the moments when they are most vulnerable to bias and have processes in place to ensure these do not influence decisions about others. They will also do the same for organisational bias and address the ones which are inconsistent to inclusive environments. They will utilise transparent, consistent and merit-based decisions around talent and provide clear feedback for the decisions made and process behind it.

4. Curiosity

‘Highly inclusive leaders have an open mindset, a desire to understand how others view and experience the world, and a tolerance for ambiguity.’

The leader will be constantly open to learning and actively look to understand the perspectives of others with different experiences to their own, withholding judgement from this person. They will actively listen when another person voices their point of view and they will engage in curious open questioning to help better understand their perspective. They have to be agile and adaptable, coping effectively with change.

5. Cultural Intelligence

‘Highly inclusive leaders are confident and effective in cross-cultural interactions.’

The leader understands the benefits of learning about different cultures and seeks out opportunities to experience culturally diverse environments. They have good knowledge of differences and similarities between cultures and can adapt to the different needs of the individual.

6. Collaboration

‘Highly inclusive leaders empower individuals as well as create and leverage the thinking of diverse groups.’

The leader will create a safe environment where the team members feel empowered and confident to contribute. They ensure that the teams they work with have a diversity of thought and experience, and manage the group so that there is respect amongst all, taking appropriate action when that respect is not there.

By Sarah Evans

Real Madrid Head Coach Carlo Ancelotti is the first coach to have won each of Europe’s five major leagues.

On Saturday, he will also attempt to win the Uefa Champions League for the fourth time as a coach (to go with the two he won as a player with AC Milan). His track record is all the more remarkable given his longevity. The La Liga title he won with Real earlier this month comes 18 years after his Serie A triumph with Milan.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores five attributes that explain why Ancelotti is still at the top of his game.

1. Ever the democrat

Ancelotti states that his leadership style stems from his character. He is a democrat that doesn’t like to simply impose his way of being on others. “My style is not to impose,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2015. It is a belief to which he holds firm. “I would like to convince the players of what they are doing”. He believes that this way of operating earns him the buy-in of the players, which means they are more likely to get behind him and give their all, rather than if things were simply forced upon them. This approach also makes the players accountable. Ancelotti will often ask the players tactical questions and opinions on the match strategy, knowing that they will understand the strategy more if they’ve been involved in the decision-making process. He wants the environment to be that of adult to adult, and allows players and staff to have opinions, feel valued, and help in designing both the vision and the strategy of the team.

2. Process over outcome

Win or lose on Saturday, Ancelotti always analyses his methods systematically, and if his team have lost but knows he couldn’t have done anything else to change it, then he is able to compartmentalise the defeat. It is this process, rather than outcome, focus which makes him so consistent. Perhaps his most notable loss was the 2005 Champions League Final against Liverpool in Istanbul. His team at the time, Milan, were leading 3-0 at half-time, but Liverpool pulled off one of the most historic comebacks in football history and eventually won the match on penalties. However, Ancelotti was seen chatting cheerily in the bar later that night. He believed his team had played well and so didn’t dwell on the defeat.

3. A cultural chameleon

Ancelotti – who has coached some of Europe’s most illustrious teams, including Milan, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid (across two spells) – stresses the importance of getting to know the characteristics of players, the culture and traditions of a club, and then integrates his leadership style within that. Even if something has made him very successful at one club, he won’t just come in and assert that style on another. Ancelotti understands that there are many cultural differences from club to club and within different countries, and he has to adapt his style to get the best out of the players and team he is currently at.

4. Humility and professionalism

He has won almost everything as player and coach, yet he still wants to listen to what you have to say. People enjoy talking to him, he values what they say and that helps him build relationships with the athletes. He is the ultimate professional and has an unquestionable desire to win, which makes him so well-respected. He protects the team from the stressors of elite football by not showing the pressure he’s under. He takes the situation – but not himself – seriously, and can often be found telling jokes in the changing rooms before a big game to help diffuse the pressure.

5. A refreshing sense of perspective

Ancelotti has a strong sense of the big picture. He has the ability to take daily updates of physical, mental and emotional energy levels of people and align them with the group’s daily needs, as well as the team’s overall season objectives. By ‘staying in the moment’ with individuals, he is able to prepare for and think about the bigger picture. As he said: “football is the most important of the less important things in the world.”