By John Portch

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Rohan Taylor how he stays in touch with his instincts as a coach.

“I’m on that journey, to be honest,” says the Head Coach of Swimming Australia. “I’m very comfortable now, today, to say it’s my number one skillset that I think I have to keep front and centre. I see instinct and intuition as a collection of knowledge and experience that touches me on the head and says ‘have you seen this before?’ so I need to stop and listen and tap into it.”

Taylor explains that he welcomes data but that he “won’t let it override what I feel”. “When I made the most successful moves or the most successful decisions or things that I’ve done really well, it’s been driven by my instincts with information informing me,” he continues.

It is not just decision-making around Swimming Australia’s programming either. “In a room when I’m talking to a group of people, I’m looking around to see is there a connection happening here and I rely on my instincts to tell me where to pivot if it’s not.

“My instincts tell me ‘you’re probably not hitting the mark’. I rely on them heavily and I’m very confident in them. And if I make a mistake, I make a mistake. It doesn’t faze me. I learn from that and it’s all about continual improvement for me.”

Taylor, who is currently with the Australian Dolphins at the 2023 World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, was a major contributor to our March Special Report Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions. Here, he reflects on his style as a leader and where he can continue to improve and develop.

Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is the key to getting the big decisions right and managing them effectively?

RT: I’m always a big believer that I’ve got to surround myself with people smarter than me and build that trust. Getting a big decision right is speaking to the right people to tell me what I need to hear and not what I want to hear; getting the right feedback. Because you can go to people and say ‘yeah, that’s the way to go’ but then they’ll ask questions and make me think a little bit more. So I’ve vetted my decision-making with trusted people around me. I think that’s a really important part. But for the piece I’m doing, is I’m trying to influence a greater number of people. Now I can’t go and have those conversations with everybody. So what I do is, those people around me are my influencers, they’re the ones that if they agree, the likelihood is that everybody else will follow along because they trust them even if they don’t trust me. So my decision making is making sure I spend the time informing and collaborating with the right people and then we’ll move forward together and be aligned; and if I don’t do that I usually find myself having to eventually do that anyway. So if I make a unilateral decision, I likely have to follow up by going back to those people to bring them onboard. So I spend the time talking to them before I go out and do that.

Is that when you feel at your most confident and in command?

RT: Absolutely, because you know you’ve got buy-in from the right people. Also, the thing is that I’m quite comfortable to make flexible moves on the go, but I’ll do it through the right people who will influence me, but it’s a two-way street. I’m very confident in saying ‘hey, here’s the direction’ but I’m also confident that if there’s a need to move one way or another that I’ve got people around me who will help me to make that adjustment if I need to. And they trust me.

How carefully do you choose your words? What can you say to an athlete? What do you prefer not to say?

RT: In this day and age you’ve got to be very careful. That’s the challenge and that’s the learning that all of us in leadership; and the coaches, who are leaders in their own right, are having to check their language, their feedback, because it’s a different world we live in now, from the point of view of sensitivity. For me, it’s the level of trust with the person you’re giving feedback to has a lot to do with it as well. Even then, I err on the side of caution more than anything. There’s times I’d like to say ‘pull your head in, you’re being a dickhead’ and although I want them to hear that, but I have to deliver it a different way. I think about what I feel like saying, and then I think ‘OK, I’m going to walk away and re-frame this and is there a message I need to try to deliver and then work it out?’ It takes a lot longer, to answer your question! You’ve got to take time to deliver things if you want to be impactful. At times it’s exhausting, to be honest.

How do you ensure you are protecting your own time and mental resources?

RT: Well, I moved where I’m living now. I moved 400m from the beach on the Sunshine Coast. I relocated for environmental reasons and that was absolutely a targeted move for my family. At some point today, I’ll be in the surf having a swim or go out on a jetski. I’ll go and play and that’s giving me to have that hour to myself or with my wife or walk or whatever. That’s simplistic me. I have targeted times where I just lock in on things and I’ve learned to disconnect now; I’m better at that. So I either physically remove myself or put myself in a different space or I go and read a book or something – usually I’m reading books about leadership so I’m not really getting out of that space! But I am actually refreshing my mind around re-engaging in that learning. I go and watch my girls do sport and that’s always a great little release. So I think I’ve got the balance right. The big thing for me is the balance is not about 50% this or 50% that, it’s 100% this and 100% that. So if I’m going out for an hour to spend on the jetski and go wave-jumping or surfing, I’m 100% into that. I’m not going out there thinking about something else. That’s to me is balance. That’s utopia to get to that point. Then I feel that I’ll be fine.

By John Portch

“I do feel a little bit sad for the players I had 20 years ago. They could have benefited from the experience I have now.”

The Leaders Performance Institute is on the phone to David Sammel, a tennis coach with more than 30 years of experience coaching men’s ATP Tour players.

This week, Sammel is at the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club in Wimbledon to coach Britain’s Liam Broady in both the gentlemen’s singles and doubles at The Championships.

We are speaking on Wednesday 5 July. It is the day after Broady’s first round defeat of Constant Lestienne and the day before he dispatched fourth seed and three-time grand slam finalist Casper Ruud. It was an ideal moment for Sammel to reflect on his development as a coach.

“I have different tools that I’ve developed over the years and I feel sad for those players in the past because there’s situations I look back on and I would have dealt with them differently now to how I did then,” he says. “But that’s part of the learning process as a coach and the other side of the coin is that I would hate to look back, even in five years’ time from now, and say I’m exactly the same as I was five years ago.”

Broady, the men’s world number 142, was due to play Ruud on the day of our conversation, but the rain put paid to that idea. Inclement weather is just one of a number of disruptions that players can routinely expect at a tournament.

“These days are tricky to manage because their stress and anxiety is there as the build-up to the match continues; and keeping someone in a holding pattern is not easy. The job almost shifts to keeping the player entertained in different ways and being light-hearted in practice,” adds Sammel.

“The work is really done beforehand and once you get into the tournament it’s just a bit of maintenance, a little bit of sharpening and keeping the player relaxed between matches. At majors it’s a little different because you always get a day off in between and, of course, like the rain at Wimbledon yesterday, we now get two days and, possibly, depending on how the weather is today, three days off.”

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute details five factors that underpin Sammel’s approach to coaching during a competition.

1. The fundamentals don’t change

During a tournament, Broady will aim to rise at his usual time, whether he is playing or not. Routine is important, although practice times will depend on the availability of practice courts.

Nevertheless, the fundamentals should not change because a player is competing at the All England Club. “What I’ll say to players is the court is the same size, you’re playing against people you can play anywhere in the world, and it’s just a label that this is the best tennis tournament in the world. You need to go out there and play tennis – not Wimbledon. It’s trying to keep the head in a place that, at the end of the day, it is your job to play tennis – it is not to play different tennis because it’s Wimbledon. It’s to play the best tennis that you can put on the court on the day.”

That said, “You’re not ignoring the fact that this is something a little bit different, but you’re saying ‘this is why you’ve done all the work. You dream about these things as a kid and now you’re living it and that’s amazing’.”

2. Help players to find their rhythm and confidence

Practice at a tournament is primarily to give players “a feel of the ball”, as Sammel explains. He speaks often about the need for players to find their “rhythm”. He says: “There’s nothing you really want to be working on unless there’s a couple of specifics because you’ve scouted the opponent and say something like ‘let me feed you a few balls, you’re going to get quite a few of these during the match’.

“The problems come if the player starts to miss a few balls and gets a little uptight – they feel the magic is disappearing.” The key in those moments is to talk the player “back down off the ledge”. “You’ve got to say ‘look, let’s have a drink. Relax. Let’s not think about this for a moment. Maybe let’s hit a few serves.’ And when you feel like they’re truly relaxed go back to it and hopefully they find some rhythm.

“On bad days, that’s when it’s important for the coach to be there and not show any stress and just be relaxed. That often calms a player. You also need to remind them that there’s nothing they’re going to face tomorrow that they haven’t faced before. They just need to go through your history and know that they’ve dealt with whatever adversity has been directed at them because that’s where real confidence comes from.” Confidence is key. “With great athletes, the difference is their belief and confidence to perform and bring a level no matter how they’re feeling.”

3. How is the athlete’s body language? How is your timing as a coach?

Sammel has learned to trust his instincts as a coach. “The one big thing that coaches are there for is feeling the moment and the timing of when you say things. Give very few messages, important key ones, and do not overload the player – when a player has too much to think about that really hurts their performance,” he says. It is also essential to read their body language. “When you’re talking to an athlete, you can tell in their eyes whether you are actually connecting and they’re hearing you or whether it’s just being blocked out. They’re nodding yes, they’re saying yes, but you know it’s not going in. That’s when you really need to change tack or understand that this is just not the right moment and then you’ve got to be looking out, pretty much all day, for the right moment when they’re open to having a different approach and you go again at trying to get your message across. That is one of the big things that comes from experience, that timing.”

He adds: “If you overload a player that’s going to kill them, but if you have an important message, you’ve got to find the right moment and know that it’s actually gone in. That can take two or three attempts but not in the same way; if you try to bulldoze a player with the same approach their resistance will grow stronger and then you’ve got no chance of getting the message in.”

4. No ‘victims’

Sammel stresses the need for “adult conversations”. He says: “When you’re in a good place, where you can go through a couple of things and you can see it’s going in and the player will ask a question like an adult, not like a victim.”

According to Sammel, a ‘victim’ would say thing such as: “‘I don’t know if I can do this’ or ‘what you’re asking is impossible right now’ or they’re dismissive. You know they have a worry, they have a stress and they’re trying to pretend that it’s not there. You have to try to have a conversation. ‘Look, let’s talk about whatever is bothering you, let’s get it out in the open, and that way we can deal with it before you go out there’. Because when a player has something bothering them, if they don’t take care of it before they go out there then you’re looking at disaster.”

5. Win or lose, generate optimism for the player

Defeats are inevitable but there is always something a player can take into their next tournament and upsets, such as Broady’s defeat of Ruud, can happen.

“After a disappointment, the coach’s job is to immediately shed light on what the next step is for the player to progress and go forward,” says Sammel. “You need to be going to the next tournament with optimism. ‘If we put a couple of things right, we practise a couple of things and get a bit better at those, that makes you even tougher. Let’s take that to the next tournament and see what happens then’.

“I have a saying that I’ve used for over 20 years, which is ‘do the work and good things will happen – you just don’t know when’. I’ll say: ‘This major is over and obviously we were hoping for more, it didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the next major. Let’s keep working and the good things will happen. It’s not our job really to know when because that’s the excitement of sport’.”

By John Portch

Wales have made a positive start to their 2023 Women’s Six Nations campaign, with wins at home to Ireland and away to Scotland in their first two matches under Head Coach Ioan Cunningham.

A stern test awaits them this weekend in round three, with England travelling to Cardiff Arms Park on Saturday (15 April), with Wales’ schedule wrapped up back to back away matches. They will face France at Grenoble’s Stade des Alpes on 23 April before ending their Six Nations campaign against Italy at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi in Parma on 29 April.

Cunningham explains to the Leaders Performance Institute that, instead of coming home after the France match, the team will then make the six-hour coach journey to Parma and spend the week in Emilia-Romagna preparing for Italy.

“You don’t lose two travel days [returning to the UK and setting out again] and it gives you the best chance to prepare,” says Cunningham, who recently contributed to a Leaders Performance Special Report on how teams can manage their preparations for major competitions.

“We can set up camp in Parma ready for the week,” he continues. “Already family and friends are looking to come out and spend time with the players.” He indicated that the players would have some free time in Parma on the Wednesday. “They get to see their friends or family and spend some time outside the camp. The weather will be decent in Italy in April and they can feel good; ‘the sun is good, I feel I am in a good place, and I’m getting ready to play Italy at the end of the week’.”

Cunningham also emphasises the importance of fun. “We created mini teams within our squad with different responsibilities or creating games. We asked the girls to name their teams. They chose famous Welsh people and had t-shirts made and, suddenly, you have an identity and you’re part of a team.”

What were some of the names chosen? “Duffy, the singer, was one,” he says. “The Nessa character from [British sitcom] Gavin & Stacey. So you’ve got a t-shirt with the picture on front and it’s quite funny when you get those up and running. What was really good, you had an opportunity then where I might say there’s a trade opportunity here, ‘do you want to trade anyone out of your team because they’re not pulling their weight?’ And those are quite funny when they’re trading players and there’s an opportunity to draft. It was quite fun.”

Connection and downtime are essential too, which is why friends and family were invited to Parma, just as they were for Wales’ 2022 Rugby World Cup campaign. “If you’re away from home and family and friends have travelled to watch you, making sure the players have contact time with their family and friends and also inviting the family and friends into our environment is massive. On those downtime periods, parents are always welcome to come into our hotel and team room to spend time with the players, as well as the players going out.”

Cunningham also spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute about the development of his newly professional squad. Here, we turn attention to Cunningham as a leader.

How important are your instincts? How do you prevent yourself losing touch with your intuition?

IC: Instincts are huge. Your gut feel. Your coach’s eye as well as your gut. ‘I’m not feeling this today, it’s a bit off, I need to have a chat with this person’. Another part of instinct, as well as data, if you have a short turnaround and you haven’t had much in the tank in that week, we might do a 20-minute run through on a captain’s run day [usually a Friday, although Cunningham’s team do not undertake this traditional rugby practice in a typical fashion; see below] but the majority of the time we won’t. But it’s having that feel, even at the start of the week, if you’ve come off a good win, for example, they think they’re in a good place, they have just beaten one team but there’s another team coming after us, so maybe it’s bringing their feet back to the ground and why. Instinct is huge, not only on players but on management; feeling if they’re a bit fatigued. We did something last year when we felt people were tired and we’d been in a long time; ‘right, let’s cut tomorrow. We won’t come in tomorrow’, just having a mental recharge away from the environment or we know someone who’s very friendly with us in the group and he’s got a coffee van so we put a coffee van up inside the training field, so we’ll finish the session and then go have a coffee at his van; just spending time together, having a chat, we put some music on, and then just having those connections then. It just recharges us and makes us feel like we’re ready to go again.

Must data back your intuition?

IC: 100%. It’s got to be aligned to everything we want to do. Regarding rugby stats, our main page is stats that are important to us in the game and which change behaviour. So if we want to get off the floor quicker, we’ll stat that up. Say with that, ‘60% speed of feet, we need to get to 70%, then. How do we get off the floor quicker?’ That’ll change behaviour. But then there’s other data regarding volume and load from a GPS point of view, which we know now the type of load we want to put into the players in a test week; ‘if we want to cover 22k, we need to get this amount of high speed metres into the players’. That’s all important and relevant to the game we want to play.

What is the key to getting the big decisions right and managing them effectively?

IC: Regular communication with the right people, constant drip effect of the same message; ‘why we’re doing it, this is the game we want to play, because it’ll give us this’. Those conversations in a week are huge for me. We’ll always wrap up the day with ‘how did it go? ‘it went well’ ‘do we need to change anything tomorrow?’ We’ll run through tomorrow’s sheet and we’re constantly working a day ahead, then we’ll look to the week ahead. It’s really important.

Do you reflect on your own decision making and communication skills?

IC: Some of that could be better, if I’m honest. When you’re in it, you’re entrenched in the work and when someone asks you a question you’re into something else, but I do deliberately try to give myself time to reflect on ‘did I give that message correctly? What tool did I use? Did I react well to that? How do I want to come in tomorrow? I need to speak to this person and how do I do it?’ I do try to deliberately reflect on my day and what I’ve done. It’s a huge part of performance. I like to have good relationships with some key members of staff as well that will give me feedback on how I’ve done; or ‘how was our meeting? Were we happy with it?’ Those things are important for me as well.

How do you protecting your own time and resources?

IC: You can turn around and, before you know it, the day’s gone and there’s so much happened in that day that sometimes the car journey or just driving the car is good, reflect, and put something on, music or a podcast, just putting something on to reflect is good.

What do you do in lieu of the captain’s run?

IC: We do a walkthrough and we do this exercise called ‘walk the map’. So the map is our pitch. We’ve got this five-metre pitch that we roll out and we walk through everything that we’re taking into the game both with and without the ball. We’ll do ‘what-if’ conversations. ‘What if we concede in the first two minutes? What do we do? What does it look like? What if we get a yellow card to a nine? Who steps in?’ We cover those sorts of things as a team as we walk the map. On the captain’s run day, we’ll actually walk the ground from try line to try line with our leaders just walking and talking through what we’re going to do and the kickers will kick and that’s it.

Ioan Cunningham is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Welsh Rugby Union, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Hockey Ireland. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By John Portch

Lisa Jacob has worn several hats during the course of her sporting career.

She is a former dual international athlete, having represented Ireland at both field hockey and rugby sevens. In hockey, she accrued 139 caps and scored 17 goals between 2006 and 2014 and, upon retiring from hockey, took an 18-month contract to play sevens.

In her post-playing career, she returned to hockey and coached the Ireland girls’ under-16 and under-18 teams. She also worked as a coach developer. Then, in 2019, Jacob was appointed to Hockey Ireland’s board of directors and she became the organisation’s Strategic Director later that year. It began a run of several swift transitions.

In 2020, Jacob became the women’s programme’s Team Manager, in charge of logistics and operations – “the glue that gets things moving” – as she puts it. “I had no career plan – I just ended up as Team Manager perchance,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I did that into the Tokyo Olympics and then we had a couple of coaches who finished up after the Olympics, but the team had a World Cup qualifying tournament maybe eight weeks later. So I went from Team Manager to an assistant coach. I knew the group and I had a coaching background anyway.

“I had that critical choice of ‘do I go towards coaching or do I go towards something else?’”

Her decision was ‘something else’ and she became High Performance Director in September 2022. It is a role she discusses in the first half of a two-part interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“I sit overarching all of high performance over the men’s and women’s programmes and the pathway,” she continues. “My role is trying to support the head coaches to enable them to focus on their role and take away some of the stakeholder management and fight for resources, and go between the institutes.”

Hockey Ireland identifies, develops, trains and selects players from across both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which means that Jacob works closely with Sport Ireland, Sport Northern Ireland, the Sport Ireland Institute, the Sport Institute of Northern Ireland, as well as the Olympic Federation of Ireland.

“They would all be big stakeholders with whom I work directly and my piece is as a kind of advocate; planning; doing all of the policies and proposals.

“The performance director’s role is important because that fight for resources always exists, so there needs to be somebody who’s always separate, who can oversee everything and go ‘hold on, if we join these dots we can get more bang for our buck’ or ‘this is more important than this space, even if you don’t like it, and this is why’, ‘this is the bit that’s important for you’ etc.”

Working under the programme’s head coaches (Mark Tamilty on the men’s side and Sean Dancer on the women’s) is a mixture of Hockey Ireland employees and institute service providers.

“There’s a lot of staff around the team, which can be great, but it can also cause a disconnect,” Jacob says. “I see my role as checking where everyone is at. I feel by listening that you really get a feel for it, where things are at, what might need to happen. It might seem small but I am helping people with their performance challenges as they see them.

“I also have a role in working with the athletes. By and large, I work with the leadership group to address any issues. In some ways, I need to be separate enough but also connected enough to understand if there are issues or changes of direction needed. I need to be approachable enough for those to come to the fore.”

What have been some of her reflections on her first six months in the role? “I’ve learned that the role is quite hard to define,” she says, adding, “there’s more than one way to do the performance director role, certainly in Ireland. You take the piece around how you can position and engage yourself and engage everybody in a way that you can shift the dial.”

There is not always unanimity. “It’s certainly not always an easy one but there’s a lot of really good people in the programme and my job is to get the best out of them, make sure that things are working well, so they can do what they’re best at.”

At the time of writing, both the men’s and women’s programmes are placed thirteenth in their respective FIH World Rankings (“that’s probably accurate enough”) but the women’s team exceeded all expectations to finish runners-up at the 2018 FIH World Cup. It was a breakthrough moment for the women’s game in Ireland and, in the subsequent time, the programme has enjoyed an increased range of, and access to, service providers. “That has allowed us to professionalise the programme for the girls. They get more direct support to be able to commit to hockey as well as pursuing work or study. They’re not scrambling to make things work.”

While that silver medal provided a watershed, there have not been wholesale changes, and there will not be any on Jacob’s watch.

“The programme is in place and has had a really clear plan over the last four years or so,” she says. “We’re now in 2023, which is a key year for qualifying for the Olympics. You might sit down and look at something with the coach but it’s really now small tweaks with a few key questions such as ‘are you going to go on a warm weather tour?’ So I’d work with the coach to set the direction of the programme but it’s not from a blank page or throwing out everything we’ve been doing.”

To wrap up the first part of her interview, the conversation turns to social support for athletes and staff and how Jacob can make an impact. She discusses her role with regard to the Ireland women’s programme, stating that the squad is a “really good group of friends” and “sometimes that can be good and sometimes that can make it harder to have honest conversations in the performance space.”

This is why the team have placed an emphasis on building relationships in the truncated time between the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games. “When we have lunch, we need to sit together, you need to be asking your mate what’s going on in their life proactively rather than just hoping it will happen just because we’re in the same training base for two days a week.”

Players and personnel may not always talk about themselves but they may tell other Hockey Ireland staff about a teammate or colleague. Jacob explains that the work of Hockey Ireland’s head of performance services is invaluable in that regard. For her own part, she is sure to have contact points within the staff.

“I have realised in the last six months that there’s one or two people who sit very naturally in the space of supporting people through performance challenges.” She must ensure the right person is available for each challenge. “If you’re on the ground observing, you can send the right support towards someone or even follow up with them yourself – but there’s so many people I that I literally cannot do it all myself – with me, there are key people I try to keep across because I tend to be the glue for everybody else and it’s made me think quite a lot about how you structure and support people’s wellbeing and mental health in a high performance environment.”

Lisa Jacob is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Hockey Ireland, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: Building Winning Organisations, hosted alongside the Toronto Maple Leafs, was our first physical North American event of the year. Throughout the course of the day, we engaged in case study sessions, an observation experience, roundtable discussions and skills-based learning centred around some key ingredients that contribute to building a winning or high performing organisation.

These are the highlights from a morning programme that featured Simon Timson, the Performance Director at reigning Premier League champions Manchester City and a Leafs’ training session followed by a session with their General Manager Kyle Dubas.

[Already up-to-date with the morning? The afternoon takeaways are available here.]

Session 1: Insights from a Winning Environment

Speaker: Simon Timson, Performance Director, Manchester City

• It’s important to remember that there is no silver bullet or magic formula in creating winning environments.
• A considered formula: any formula related to winning requires great people. Complementing this is creating the right environment, having a clear plan, knowing the plan and being disciplined in sticking to that plan.
• Starting point: understand the environment and situation you are coming into, both the internal and external dynamics. What can you control and what levers can you pull to create the right environment?
• Confront the brutal facts: where is the programme in its life-cycle? In Simon’s experiences from the different sports he came into, he encountered a range of phases, including start-up (skeleton) / turnaround (tennis) / accelerated growth (UK Sport) / sustaining success (Man City).
• Evidence-based situation analysis: we often here the quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ – something from Simon’s experiences he doesn’t particularly agree with. You can’t deliver success or sustain it without a strong evidence-based strategy and a strong culture.
• Psychological safety: do people in your environment feel psychologically safe and open to be vulnerable where people can express what they are thinking and feeling?
• People work hard & together in good cultures: something that Simon has experienced is the power of a transformational approach = engaged, motivated and valued people.
• Good environments: Simon’s belief is that he doesn’t think you can succeed with just a good environment where people feel psychologically safe – if you don’t have the right strategy and tactics, it will be difficult to execute against.
• Good strategy provides clear direction: evidence-based strategy = right direction and tactics.
• Strategy delivered transformationally: evidence-based + transformational approach = high performance culture.
• Evidence-based strategy: this concept is about gathering the facts and not collecting the perceived wisdoms. There might be clues from those perceived wisdoms, but also red herrings woven in.
• Assumption is the enemy of excellence: do we know the things where the evidence tell us how to win? Having a What it Takes to Win model that is complemented by key concepts and underpinning principles. This alone isn’t the solution but it points you in the right direction and how to most effectively allocate resource.
• What it Takes to Win in practice: an example of this is live coding every game against those factors in the What it Takes to Win model.
• World-leading environment (British Skeleton): Simon’s arrival in the British Skeleton environment, with a clean slate, provided an opportunity to build a strategy from scratch.
• British Skeleton performance formula: Athletic Potential x Maximum Ice Time x World-Class Coaching x Cutting-Edge Equipment.
• Contributing factors behind formula: Clear vision / empowering / nature and nurture / role efficacy / equal expertise / individual support / rewarding excellence / being reflective / demanding / process-driven / high support / high expectations / process vision / integrated services / fierce internal competition.
• Beware the implementation dip: this concept comes from business strategy. ‘No plan survives first contact’.
• Stick to the formula and constantly evolve the plan: have a clear defined formula and game model with clarity to execute. At Manchester City in particular, the coaching team have a clear plan, are prepared to listened to the evidence and prepare to adjust as required.
• Transformational delivery: rigorously recruit and develop great people. Role model behaviours you want from your staff and players. Invest in the long-term development of coaches and practitioners in the same way you do players or athletes to help to retain your best people, make them feel valued, and get more out of them.
• The leader’s behaviours impact on performance: two theories – support and challenge. Challenge is far better received when followed by support.
• Research: a colleague of Simon’s looked at the relationship between leaders challenge and support behaviours – it is predictive of performance. High Support & High Challenge – outperformed. When walking into the facility everyday, ask your people how they are doing, feeling; then provide support.
• Zero tolerance of precious professional boundaries: cross boundaries, don’t stay in your lane. Value everyone’s opinions. Debate, discuss and ask good questions.

Summary:

• Confront brutal facts: understand the dynamics of your organisation’s situation by gathering and confronting the facts.
• Establish an evidence-based strategy: relentlessly focus resources and effort on what the evidence says it will take to win.
• Stick to the formula and continually evolve the plan: prepare everyone for the possibility of an implementation dip and logically adjust your plans.
• Role model the behaviours you want to see: challenge is better received when it’s preceded by support.

Session 2: Toronto Maple Leafs – Training Observation

Transitioning from the insight shared in session one, we switched our attention to an immersive session, watching a light training session for some of the Toronto Maple Leafs players. The purpose behind the session was to observe a live environment, in particular a team building towards success.

The group were posed three questions to consider when observing:

• What stood out?
• What impressed you?
• Room for improvement?

What stood out:

1. There was pace and fluidity in the session which allowed it to be short, sharp and efficient.
2. It was clear that the session was player-led. The coaches were not overcoaching, there were purely there to support and fine-tune.
3. There was a high coach-to-player ratio.
4. Lots of changes in the drills to keep the session fresh and energetic.
5. Every drill that took place was done so with a clear purpose that sat behind it.

What impressed you:

1. The group were very impressed and surprised by the coach-to-player ratio on the ice. This notion fed into something that followed in session three, where there is a clear culture of development within the organisation, and this was a good example of how that is being lived in the daily training environment.
2. Players leading the session and being focused on what works for them. Not much coach interference as well, only small pieces of feedback to provide input.
3. In some sporting environments, the Head Coach wants to be involved in every session that takes place, but the head coach wasn’t present at this light session. It was a good sign of empowerment and trust in both the players and the coaches to do what needs to be done and to not overcoach within the group.
4. Impressed with the appetite of those players involved to hone their craft, even on the morning of a game where the tendency can be to rest and not engage in too much pre-game priming.

Session 3: Building Towards Success

Speaker: Kyle Dubas, General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs

• Mission: upon taking the General Manager role in 2018, a key part of that mission was creating an environment for younger players to move into the next phase of the development of the team and complementing them with new talent.
• Convention: it’s often safest to stay close to convention vs. going against it. In the sport of hockey, there is a lot of tradition, so the organisation has tried to challenge established conventions. Be okay when things don’t quite go to plan when you have tried to innovate thinking and, instead, use those lessons to inform what happens next.
• Player development: an opportunity Kyle saw was that in a number of hockey environments there was lack of operational plan around player development. Traditionally, players are lectured on how to become a pro, so when shifting into a leadership role at the Leafs, the creation of individual plans and imparting those on the player became a key focus. There was an emphasis on measurement, particularly technical and tactical aptitude. The organisation have backed this up with a higher ratio of staff per player, who are responsible for the specific development plan.
• Scouting operation: combining the scouting and analytics lexicon was another big focus, particularly working with scouts to embrace technological tools and imparting their wisdom back into the system.
• Silos: first several years, departments weren’t collaborating and focused on separate opinions. Now there are more robust conversations. Credit is really centred around those who have been around a long time and have embraced this new way of working.
• Getting commonality: providing time and space where groups saw how they benefit one another is a simple but effective way of breaking down silos.
• Alignment: being steadfast in the philosophy that we will get the scouting and analysis departments working together – the reality is that data and objective information is going to be missing some contextual information. Don’t try and outsmart other departments and instead look at it as a source of competitive advantage.
• Player personnel and scouting: what do all of those in the process think are their weaknesses? Tried to shift language towards ‘our picks’ versus different departments taking credit for someone who is brought in.
• Learnings: in coaching and scouting, one of the things Kyle would go back and try to do differently is if you have this feeling of someone not quite working out in a role, there is a little bit of arrogance in trying to continue to make it work. Make a decision sooner when someone isn’t going to be a fit, as often they feel it as well. Being more definitive and helping people out by others having to go through that difficult stretch. Vice versa, be patient and show confidence in those you think are a good fit.
• Today vs tomorrow: you have to have the long range in mind. With every decision you make or consider as General Manager, coaches and others are only thinking about the game today versus you. Have conversations and generate clarity.
• Small things, big impact: taking feedback from players that have retired. Their opinions were that if you have a more direct interest in their individual development as a player versus just tactical coaching, it means a lot to them as you are investing in them more holistically. Looking at them as the person and not just someone on the ice.
• Characteristics: in staff, empathy is a key characteristic. We have players from different cultures, so being empathetic to who they are as a person and their culture in order to understand what they need.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the afternoon here.

By John Portch

How useful are the buzzwords and phrases that emerge as the hallmarks of great leaders?

“Everyone’s goal in team sports is to have their team perform at a high level and to get to the top of their league or division,” Jack Easterby told the Leaders Performance Institute via email.

“To do that it seems only common sense to most that there are initiatives, mantras and banner sayings that need to be uttered from the mouths of leaders upon the launch of the program for everyone to buy-in and begin to improve. After all, most teams don’t have new leaders unless the previous leadership was not executing what ownership wanted them to.”

The performance specialist, who most recently served as the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans, goes further. “The truth is that most leadership sayings, catchphrases and quotes are better lived out than uttered! Good leaders know that sayings are the least of the problem when they take a new assignment.”

As Easterby said in the first instalment of our interview, asking great questions is a good starting point, but you can also rephrase those buzzwords for better effect, as he tells us here in part three.

He argues that something such as ‘work hard’ could be tweaked to ‘outwork our opponent’. “At the outset of a leadership post,” he wrote, “great leaders simply schedule work, presentations and meetings in a way that demand everyone to earn each other’s respect while working hard, and then they ask ‘did we outwork our opponent?’ which ultimately becomes a core fabric of the team and a calling card for preparation in every area.”

He later meets with the Leaders Performance Institute to build upon his point [he discusses dealing with systems failure elsewhere]. Think of it like this,” he says. “You’re at the front of a room of 300 people and you say to everybody ‘work hard’, what does that mean? It means something different to every person. You may have said something that sounds great but it means nothing. But if you say: ‘are you willing to do what’s best for the team?’ That’s a ‘yes/no’ question. Now, if someone is ducking out early or not sending you things on schedule or maybe not communicating efficiently then you’re not doing what’s best for the team. It’s clear.

“Behaviours are a lot more digestible when you’re trying to create culture than slogans. I think slogans should be later – let that come later – I think you want the beginning to be behaviours. That’s why I mentioned instead of saying ‘work hard’ you’ve got to schedule meetings to show people that you care, and they should care. The meetings should be productive, where everyone has a voice and ‘we’re all working together here, let’s go’. So when you schedule a meeting structure you are actually working hard and not just telling everyone to work hard.

“When you say ‘think about the team’ what you’re saying is that ‘if this person is not willing to stay 20 minutes extra to help break down the training room, then they don’t really care about the team’. That’s as simple as that. That’s what I was saying in my email.

“Digestible phrases are good for t-shirts and all of that stuff but, in the end, it’s behaviours – behaviours of championship culture. That’s the one you want to be able to say: ‘we have championship behaviours’ not ‘championship slogans or mantras, we have championship behaviours’. And when you do that you have a chance to win and change people’s lives.”

All that said, are there phrases he thinks resonate? “I think the unorthodox phrases are the most valuable,” says Easterby. “I think of Coach Belichick’s ‘do your job’ or I think of some of the things that happened during the course of doing business and also what potentially comes out of your mouth, not just a premeditated ‘put the team first’ or ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’. Those things can get cheesy.

“What happens when you’ve got some things going wrong, some things going right, and you’re trying to apply some good vision and some good energy and you’ve got to go to something? For me, that was ‘it all matters’ because when you’re trying to create buy-in, a lot of times you’re standing in front of people and saying ‘guys, this is really important’ and then the next day you’re in front of them and you’re going ‘this is really important’ and then you realise ‘hey, I’ve said that nine times’. So the best thing to say is that ‘it all matters’ because now you’ve covered the gauntlet of when things are good, things are bad, when things seem small, things seem big; you’ve always said ‘it all matters’ so that was my go-to phrase because I didn’t want any body to have the premonition that something was a lot more important. The ops role is just as important as the star wide receiver and if you have equal pressure on everybody’s job then everyone will look to perform accordingly for the love of the team and the love of each other.

“But I do think the best buzzwords and the statements that are uniting come from the pressure where the leaders had to say certain things and that gave everyone a spark to rally around.”

By Sarah Evans

Recommended Reading

What Are your Trade-Offs in the Quest for Success?

Our Athletes Are Not Always in Tune with their Bodies, But Help Is at Hand

Performance Perspectives: Balancing the Emotional and Rational in Performance Support

Framing the topic

This was the third and final session of our first Performance Support Series of the year, which focused on ‘The Performance Paradox’. Across these sessions, which are led by our Performance Advisor and performance specialist Dr Meg Popovic, the aim is to explore the trade-offs, and considerations in the quest to win for staff, athletes, and their wider organisation. This series is centred around Transformational Learning Theory; how we learn to transform ourselves and our teams we co-create. This final session focused on the voices in athlete-led leadership.

Recap

The Oxford Languages definition of ‘paradox’: ‘a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true; a statement, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities’.

“A flower won’t open if I yell at it and say ‘bloom!’” – Marion Woodman

Assumptions

1. Our athletes are growing into their (young) adult selves.
2. Athletes become great via being highly coachable. Part of coachability is being able to be told what to do, how and when.
3. We as organisational leaders have yet to fully embrace athletes’ voices, thoughts and insights into our design, processes, multidisciplinary teams.
4. We have a responsibility as adults and roles with power in and over athletes’ lives to help them be their best versions of themselves; this includes creating a container for them to find their voices in their athletic journeys and lives.
5. The co-active way is possible for athlete-led leadership in high performance sport.

Holding space: athlete-led leadership

If we imagine more space for athletes to find and integrate their voices into the system (club/team/organisation that surrounds the athlete):

1. What would it look like?
2. What would it feel like?
3. What would have to change?

Our own voice process – “All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Pedagogy, coaching = reflective practice, self knowing.

Meg asked our members to reflect on their own voice process, and make notes on the following questions:

• What is the age of athletes you work with? If it’s a large range, pick either one team or level of the athletes you relate to least. This is the age you need to remember yourself at. Try to relate these questions to you at this time of your life.
• Details – where did you live? What school did you go to? What sports did you play? Did you have a part-time job? Did you travel at all by that time in your life?
• Influencers – who were you living with? Who had the greatest impact on your life decisions and choices at this time?
• Life learning – what was something that this younger version of yourself had to go through or learn from? What happened in your life that made you learn an important lesson?
• What were your greatest worries? How did you handle it? Who did you talk to?
• What was your peer group like?
• What were your relationships like with people in their 30s/40s at this time?
• How did you think about and/or handle money and wealth at this time?

It’s important to understand our younger athletes, think about what life was like for you at that time, and how to help them in order to get the best out of themselves as people and performers.

Agency vs structure

When looking at the social relationships between individuals and larger groups and social institutions that have influence on those individuals, consider the following:

Structure – macro: the recurrent patterned arrangements / social structures which influence or limit the individual choices and opportunities available. The Club / Organisation and its departments.

Agency – micro: the capacity of the individuals to have the power and resources to fulfil their potential, express themselves and act upon their own will. The athletes.

The structure and the agency are always in a co-active dance together, let’s see where they blend and where they don’t.

Low agency, low structure = drift

• Athletes are vulnerable.
• Little resistance and athletes disengaged and disconnected.
• Boundaries and expectations are unclear.
• Staff are out of touch with the athlete’s needs, wants, feelings and experiences.

High agency, low structure = laissez-faire

• Under-regulated, no clear boundaries.
• Expectations are not clear or articulated for the athletes.
• Athletes speak and often drive decisions, but results in wishy washy standards and inconsistency.

Low agency, high structure = regulation

• Compliant athletes.
• Shallow resistance.
• Shallow engagement in broader decisions made for them.
• Dominant authority by staff over athletes.

High agency, high structure = alignment

• Integrity and awareness in athletes and staff.
• Strong engagement between athletes and staff.
• Co-active player development; athlete voices invited into the decision making and ideation that impact their careers.

Think about the departments of your organisation, if you were to evaluate the relationship between the club, the department and the athletes and the dialogue between them: where would you plot them on a graph with the quadrants above?

Strength-based best practices

Thinking about the departments within your club or organisation, if they’re really good at engaging players’ voices:

• Why so?
• What are they doing?
• How are they doing it?
• What’s the impact?

By John Portch

Where does the balance sit between the vision of an incoming leader and the needs of the people whom they lead?

“There’s factors in every culture that pre-exists the leader’s vision – that’s the thing that most people don’t want to admit,” says Jack Easterby.

The performance specialist, who most recently served as the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans, is referring to the limitations that face a leader. “Sometimes that’s weather, sometimes that’s facilities and sometimes that’s the finances of the club,” he continues.

“If you set your vision based on ideal circumstances and you don’t consider major footprint factors, issues that have held things back in the past, then your vision will never find traction. The balance is: are you receiving from your people the risk factors or the inhibitors of the past and why they haven’t gotten to where they want to be? Are you receiving those and reincorporating them in your new vision? If you don’t do that then even the best vision is doomed to fail.”

This is the second part of the Leaders Performance Institute’s recent interview with Easterby. The first instalment focused on the questions a leader must ask their people. This one hones in on conflict management.

‘People are more attached to motives than ideas’

Easterby argues that a leader must move away from focusing on the origin of an idea to the process of implementation in as little time as possible. “You really don’t want to be stuck to one person’s idea ever. It may be a good idea that someone comes to you with, but you want to be able to create consensus,” he says.

“Everybody is going to have ideas, some are better than others, some will be more original than others like you can take it and put it in place and roll; some things you’ve got to change in a bunch in order for it to work.”

What approach does he take when two people come to him with conflicting ideas? “My first reaction is to ask myself: ‘can we jump into the “why” of both of those versus affirming one or the other?’ because if I can get to the why of those; ‘why do you think we should do B?’ And ‘why do you think we should do A?’ Then what I may be able to do is come up with idea C that incorporates the ‘why’ from both of them and we may actually be doing a different idea in the end.

“People are more attached to motives than they are to ideas. For example, if someone says ‘I want to do expense reports differently because I believe that it costs me too much time to do it this way’, the motive for me is to save time. They don’t really care if they have a debit card or they’re paying online or whatever; they’re really just saying ‘this costs me a lot of time’. You don’t just want to say that idea A is better than idea B, you want to get the motive from idea A, the motive from idea B, and then you want to say ‘how do we consider all of the motives behind these ideas before we implement it?’ ‘They might be saying idea A but they’re not saying that, what they mean is this’. You can then build consensus with idea C.

“You want to know the ‘why’ behind the idea because there’s a lot of time people make great suggestions and you listen to it and think the why behind it is right and pure, ‘let’s go with it’. There’s other times that people make suggestions and these people are tired and frustrated right now, they’re upset with their co-workers, they’ve got some things going on personally. I’ve got to make sure I filter that and ask more questions about the motive to see if that’s really where we should be going with this initiative or not.”

Always have a backup

What about those times when systems simply fail? “The number one thing when moving on from systems failure – this is something I wish I would have done better in Houston – is to recognise that system failure can’t be deflating for the entire team,” says Easterby, reflecting on the time he spent at the Texans between 2019 and 2022.

“No matter what the system is that’s not working, you need to be able to insulate yourself from operating poorly because that system didn’t work. So if something is going wrong in athletic training, if something is going wrong in operations, if something is going wrong with salary cap administration, all of those things have to be done in a way that if something goes wrong there’s another system that you can run temporarily or a backup philosophy that you can operate so that everybody is not looking and going ‘oh my goodness, we’ve failed’ because you can’t let the confidence of the entire group be attached to one system.

“I would say that one of the greatest things I experienced in New England, which was really cool, is that Coach Belichick often had multiple systems in play but the same initiative. So if it were an athletic training situation, he had a couple of different trainers who could do the same job just in case we needed to replace one or something happened. If it was a situation when we were travelling, he had multiple contingencies so that there wasn’t just one thing that threw us off and everyone felt deflated and the confidence of the team was lost because we didn’t execute.

“You never want any particular system to carry the entire confidence of the group. You want to have a lot of layers in there because a lot of things can go wrong in athletics and you’re naturally going to be on your heels some. So if you can create systems, lily pads that you need in case you need to jump from one to the other, that’s the way to do it.

“If the system does fail, the leader has got to be willing to say ‘hey, I didn’t do this right, I missed this, this factor I didn’t consider’; whatever it is, just confess that, because it’s going to open the gate. If you get into blame it’s going to disenfranchise people and they may turn their backs on you, you’re not going to have a chance to build the system back right.

“I like the idea of putting a few people in a committee and potentially starting a meeting structure to talk about why that system failed immediately. ‘Hey, these three people, you guys were really a part of that system. Let’s come to my office, let’s share, let’s get on the white board, let’s talk about why this didn’t work, because your “whys” are going to go right into your new system.’

“You’re going to be learning a lot about why something potentially didn’t work and that’s going to give you the keys to the new system when you’re building it. I like committees or actions that can give you some good feedback; ‘this is potentially where the tension point was and why we didn’t do a good job’ and then you begin to edit. Then I like sharing the results of those meetings publicly within the team. ‘This didn’t work, this is what we found, and here’s how we’ve been addressing those needs, and we’ll meet and implement this new system when it’s ready’.”

By Sarah Evans

We often hear about the importance of problem solving within high performing environments, but what is the process of identifying, reviewing and then effecting this problem solving? We looked into the ways in which our members were going about this process within their own environments within a recent Topic Led Virtual Roundtable.

Here are four key themes that we pulled out of our conversation around how to effectively define and solve performance problems.

1. The power of questioning

• It is important to have an inquisitive mind when it comes to problem solving. Our members stressed how important it is to be able to ask ‘why was this data collected?’ ‘What was the context?’ The more we ask questions and tease out more depth before jumping in to solving problems the more effective you will be. As leaders, they explained it is important to continuously challenge the coaches when they come with a solution, break it down and ask what else could you do?
• There is huge value in having multiple, and varied sources. Asking others, ‘we’ve already tried this’ and thinking, ‘what lessons can we learn from it’.
• One of our members highlighted the need to clarify one thing right from the beginning: ‘what is the question we’re going after, is it actually the right question and presented in the right way so people are aligned?’ Therefore as leaders, influencing the narrative is also important, especially when considering the language and then the approach to how you go about this.
• Often the first question is not always right, but you have to start somewhere. Sometimes the original question is needed to prompt discussion and collaboration to get to the better answer. However, often we wait for the perfect question, but actually within that time the problem has changed or evolved.

2. Reframing

•  As mentioned above, huge importance is placed on asking lots of questions to provide context to define the problem to fully understand it. However, it is then imperative to try to reframe the problem to get other perspectives and see it from a different angle to help you come to different solutions in order to solve the problem. Working as multidisciplinary team, pulling in the athlete’s perspective are just two ways to go about gathering different perspectives.
• Do we do enough of getting past the surface level? Part of the problem is where inexperienced coaches within a multidisciplinary team don’t delve into enough detail in terms of framing the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ before they come to the table. But on the other hand, very experienced coaches often feel like they need the answers before they come to the table. Do we allow them to be vulnerable and help frame the problem, to allow them to have more input from others, before sitting down with the whole group?
• It is important to highlight before the meeting, what the purpose of the meeting is. Is it to define the problem or come up with a solution? Setting this out from the outset allows everyone to be aligned and come mentally prepared to the meeting.

3. Diversity of thought and experience

• Spending time in non-traditional environments is a great way to improve problem solving. One member explained about how, every month they intentionally spend time in environment that is left field, and not in sport. Sport organisations are large with cultures and subcultures, and in order to navigate these and keep things moving, you have to look outside the norm.
• Understanding yourself, your blank spots, and then widening this to your team and wider organisation is hugely valuable. If you understand what your blank spots are you can seek out people or environments which complement your weaknesses and make for more well-rounded problem solving. Often the problem lies within the people in the room and their preferred way of thinking, so being able to take a step back, be humble and honest with yourself and the group about the collective shortcomings.
• Engaging with multiple stakeholders is imperative, you need to incorporate the insight from people with different experiences. Don’t just seek out those who are the most engaged, seek out the insights from those that might sit on the periphery or who are not as bought-in.
• Diversity of thought in the coach development team has been a key factor in one member organisation’s team success. This team was very much intentionally put together incorporating their different skills and backgrounds to complement each other. This helps them to constantly reframe the questions and get different inputs.
• The community of practice approach. Social learning is a big part of one of our member’s problem-solving process. Understanding the problem, providing the context and allowing people from different backgrounds to frame it from their perspectives.

4. Symptom vs problem

• There are different kinds of performance problems, those that are reactive and symptom-like which need solutions right away, and those which are fundamental problems. Often teams look to solve the symptoms but miss addressing the fundamentals.
• It is crucial to understand the fundamentals on where the team could have tackled that earlier to understand for next time. Then, form taskforces to ask questions. You have to trust the taskforce, to have the understanding of the structure. If people have a narrow-minded way of seeing structure, it is not fruitful, so building trust and having overview are two key things to have in the taskforce.
• Often teams are brought a lot of problems, but it is most important to think of a way to facilitate an environment in order to fix them. You have to find a way in which you can delve deeper into specific problems whilst maintaining a multidisciplinary approach. One example is where rather than meeting as a multidisciplinary team in order to be collaborative and open, one of our members explained that having the group of physios meet more regularly, really getting into the weeds of the problem and learning from one another, allowed them to problem-solve more easily. They then could set a meeting structure with a process that is conducive to them bringing all their problems to the table and using the network to help solve the problem, then reporting back to the wider team to take it further.

Recommended reading

The Cynefin Framework – Using the Most Appropriate Problem-Solving Process

Design Thinking Defined (IDEO)

Five Tips From IDEO for All Leaders in Sport

Pig Wrestling: Clean Your Thinking to Create the Change you Need (Goodreads)

Procrastinate on Purpose

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Amazon.co.uk)

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Amazon.co.uk)

By John Portch

How does a leader in sport make sure they are choosing the right ownership group?

“That’s a very tough question to answer because you don’t always know everything about what everyone’s doing,” says Jack Easterby, the Former Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans.

“It becomes important to look at wide windows of decision-making patterns. Most of these owners have other businesses. You can study some of their investment strategies or their potential investments in those businesses.”

Easterby, who also worked with Bill Belichick, the General Manager and Head Coach at the New England Patriots, believes a prospective leader can learn from studying how the owners structured their C-suite and delegated responsibilities.

He does, however, issue a caveat. “It’s not good to do that based on the media because the media doesn’t always tell the story of what owners are really about,” he continues, “but it is incumbent upon the leader to pick the right place because that alignment is key, from jump street”.

In the first part of this interview with the Leaders Performance Institute, Easterby explores the art of the inquisitor, the questions he thinks should be asked by the leader, and the questions he wished he’d asked in the past.

Jack, what is the risk to the leader in failing to ask the right questions?

JE: People are going to give you information, and when you have whatever reporting structure you have set up, people are going to come to you and say: ‘hey, this needs to be done, this needs to be dealt with’; and they’re going to do that based on their tension points. ‘We need a better bathroom for everyone to use’ or ‘we need a better cafeteria’. You don’t just want the inputs you get to be based on their problems. You want the inputs to be based on what’s going to make the program better. Sometimes, if you don’t ask good questions, and you don’t persist in the deep questions that you feel are better for everybody, what happens is that you get a lot of issues – but the issues that you hear about are not the real issues. So you may solve a lot of problems but you’re not actually getting better. As a leader, I think the question is not ‘do you solve problems?’ – every leader has to solve problems – it’s ‘which problems are you solving?’

What are the important questions?

JE: The ones that make the biggest impact on the clubs that I’ve been part of are the ones that solve the big questions; and in order to solve the big questions you’ve got to ask the big questions. ‘How do we function as an overall group? How are you held accountable for your job? How does each individual person feel cared for in their professional and personal existence? How do we create a better version of ourselves year by year? What are the inputs of information and how we receive data from the outside world? And how do we store data on the inside world and how do we communicate with each other?’ Things like that – when you ask those questions you’re going to get systems, past experiences, a lot of stuff that people throw at you. You can go through it and be able to say ‘here’s what we do from here to go to next place as a group’. But if you don’t ask really good questions you’re just going to get a newspaper of today’s problems sent to your desk. That’s good, but that’s not always the long term best information that you want to go through.

What are some of the questions you wish you’d asked in previous roles?

JE: How do we build or how do we digest the multi-phase implementation of a program? Meaning that I think we all want to win, we all want to be great, but that’s a question I would have asked in Houston, maybe even in New England. How does the leadership team or the executive team digest a multi-phase program and how do we make sure that we’re all going to stay on track no matter how many phases it takes? Because when you diagnose a problem and you go from A to B to C to D to E and you’re trying to elevate slowly to get to a place of prominence, you know that’s going to take some time and phases. It’s going to take some iterations. You might be at phase two and everyone is like ‘we’ve got to get this done’ and so you’re not really at phase two because everybody is ready to abort the mission. I think that’s something I would have asked going in. ‘How does everybody in here receive the multi-phase vision and how do we keep everybody on track to a multi-phase vision so that we’re not evaluating the ham when it’s only been cooking for 15 minutes?’ You can’t pull it out, you have to leave it in there and let it cook because then you can really push out different challenges along the way and say ‘hey, remember we’re at phase two of six’ versus ‘this is the next thing’ and I probably didn’t do a great job of that. I was just trying to sell that next thing as we all got excited about growing. You’re trying to sell that next version of yourself versus ‘hey, this is version two of our nine-step process to get us to where we can be the best version of who we can be here within the club’.

Perhaps it is not always obvious at the time.

JE: That’s exactly right. Hindsight is 20-20. It’s like the stock market, which tells us every day where we are at the moment. You have forecasting but you also have that daily metric on where you are; up down or whatever. When you’re leading, you need to be able to do both of those. You need to be able to forecast and then come back to today and say ‘this is where we are within that forecast’. If you’re buying a bond or something that’s going to mature over time, you need to be able to know, ‘OK, I’m going to remind you. It’s not going to mature today, it’s going to take a second’. And if you do that, your checkpoints are going to be a little easier because you’re not looking for the best possible result within a short period of time.