By John Portch

“The whole idea of self-development, leadership and learning is such a passion of mine,” Jon Bartlett tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

Within a few minutes, the Elite Basketball Performance & Program Operations Advisor at the NBA explains just how interconnected people development, people management and process development is.

When each is done poorly, there tends to be common themes, such as a lack of investment in people, a lack of clarity, misalignment, and fear of challenging the status quo. These return time and again throughout our conversation and Bartlett cites the distinction between ‘discussion’ and ‘dialogue’ in making his case.

“In sport, we often skip the idea of engaging in dialogue – that is being open to and listening with intent to everyone’s viewpoint, willing to understand their perspectives, place value in their backgrounds and their experience – and instead we go straight to the discussion/debate narrative. Without recognising it, the situation quickly becomes a ‘me versus you’ with the actual problem not being addressed or solved.

In the first instalment of our two-part interview, we explore the steps teams can take to promote better people development, people management and process development.

Jon, what is the first step leaders can take towards creating shared understanding, language, meaning, vision and clarity within their teams?

JB: The obvious one, and it’s easier said than done, is making it visible. Does everyone know what the plan and strategy is? Is it evident within the environment you’re working in on a daily basis? Is there alignment between the owners, the board, the GM, coach, performance director and then all the different verticals underneath? Are there routine checkpoints along the way to determine progress or is it just an annual check-in to see how it’s going against the plan? Are there actual processes and opportunities to review the plan as it’s happening and emerging? Is the work of those who are non-athlete facing and those who are athlete facing aligned to the wider goals? Are the actions and words consistent? It’s easy to put words up on a wall, but are the actual actions and behaviours aligned with those?

How can goals and values be effectively communicated to staff members?

JB: It’s about taking people on a journey. In an ideal world they’re somewhat part of the conversation, or involved some way in developing the goals and values. This way you likely get to the point easily and quickly around how those values are embodied. For big staff groups though where this isn’t always possible there are opportunities through behavioural frameworks. If you’ve got a certain set of values and behaviours in which we’re going to operate, what are the actions that embody those values? And how can you live those on a daily basis? I think in having that shared language and that shared understanding, the co-creation and sharing of that responsibility, you’re then reaching all the different verticals. There are many ways to achieve this but, ultimately, I think the more people involved in the process the more buy-in and engagement there is early on.

What about the role of those below the leaders?

JB: To achieve alignment, the heads of department are critical in sharing the values, the language, and the processes. One thing I’ve thought about hard is giving flexibility to staff on how they do their work and how it contributes to the bigger picture. Empower and allow them to carry out how they do their job on a daily basis, but then collectively identify how that work contributes to the bigger picture. Now you’re meeting them in the middle. That is key to that alignment. If it’s just being told constantly, ‘this is what you need to do, this is how you need to do it’. I don’t want to work like that. Flip it around: the work you want to do and how you’re doing it; how is that contributing to the bigger picture? What  piece of the puzzle are you in contributing to the overall strategy? It’s both top-down and bottom-up.

How can organisations track both progress and the development of behaviours?

JB: You always want to be able to track if something is going in the right direction through constant touchpoints on where it’s at, what’s the progress, where’s it getting to, but it’s also a case of tracking what isn’t working as well, what needs to be dropped. So, I like the idea of asking how do we spend our time? And what are we spending our time on? Then you’re almost thinking what’s the problems we’re trying to deal with? Are we asking the right questions? Are we trying to solve the right problems? If you haven’t got the initial plan, vision and strategy, then what are you actually tracking? I think that’s key: you’ve got to have the first part first in order to then track your progress along that lifecycle.

What are some of the signs of poor process management?

JB: This is really talking now to how things are done, the methods in which we account for planning, ideation, creation, implementation, review and evaluation. I think, done poorly, there’s gaps at every stage. Done well, there might be one or two ‘getting there’ stages, which might need tweaking. Done great, there are processes and frameworks contributing to every step of that process, it’s a well-oiled machine and it effectively contributes to decision making. For example, if there’s no review or evaluation of a process, then there’s very little learning happening. And no learning means the same thing is being done over and over; when you want different results and you do the same thing it’s basically insanity. In sport, if you do the same thing over and over, recruit the same, go through the same cycle and expect different results, nothing changes. One of the themes that I think interchangeably gets regarded as poor staff incompetence is just poor process management. Sometimes, it just needs better oversight and better management of the process and then often this can lead to better action plans and development for staff.

Change often comes during losing streaks, periods of staff turnover and other turmoil. How can teams begin to find opportunities in those moments?

JB: You’ve got to ask: what’s the problem? What’s the question we’ve got to ask ourselves? Change is inevitable in sport, it’s a constant. That’s why I think context becomes so important. To get a group of people to work together towards a common goal you have to ask: was there even a common goal established at the start? If there wasn’t, then that’s the problem, not necessarily the people underneath, because they didn’t necessarily know what they were doing. The opportunity is there to ask the right questions and if you don’t know what the questions are then get people in to help ask those questions and find out what the problem is. Subsequent to that, all staff have the opportunity to be a part of something. What do you want your role to be in this and how are you going to contribute to it in terms of turning it around and changing it? Some people will be ‘I’m out of here, I’m done’. Some people don’t have the choice. But in a way, you’ve got to come back to: what is the problem? Poor results isn’t the problem, that’s the outcome. You’ve got to find out what’s leading to those poor results. Context is key and that’s the opportunity.

What is the right way to win over stubborn people within a team?

JB: We are talking here in the context of change, I guess, and with that how you go about convincing someone with a certain mindset and philosophy of practice tweaking how they do things, so they’re aligned to how an organisation or department wants to operate. The first thing is learning about what their perspectives are, what their background and experience is and what their modus operandi is. Gaining understanding of this means building a relationship and respecting that background. Equally it provides the opportunity of asking: ‘how can their background, practice, methodology, philosophy contribute to us trying to answer this problem?’ You want to get to a place where you get them to come up with a solution of how they contribute to the actual problem as opposed to saying, ‘this is where we’re going and this is where we need you to operate.’ Again, it comes down to that ‘dialogue versus discussion’ concept. They might not agree with the vision, strategy and pathway, which might mean a separation of ways, but if they are engaged then for me it’s about identifying with that individual how they align and operate the agreed vision and philosophy of the department.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Sarah Evans

Recommended listening/reading

Keiser Podcast: How Leaders Can Overcome Resistance to Change

How to Create Energy in Athletes Performing Under Great Scrutiny

Framing the topic

This was session two of our new Performance Support Series, which focused on exploring the topic of ‘Making Wellbeing A Core Component Of Your Organisational Culture’, led by Dr Meg Popovic. In the last session, Meg explored culture, wellbeing and learning through an organisational / systems lens. In this session we delved into the ‘Team of Teams’ phase of Meg’s framework and the thinking of relational intelligence through subcultural understanding. There is one more session to follow, and across all of the sessions, we will look to explore three questions: how do you see? What do you see? How do you use what you see to make it better?

What is a ‘subculture’?

• Commonalities individuals share with one another – guidelines of social behaviour, overarching values that guide and reflect behaviour, known symbols (to the people within) and modes of operation that convey meaning to persons in shared system
• A smaller, more manageable unit of that culture as a whole, and differs from parent culture by embracing certain attributes. Thus, there are clear differences and specific commonalities between subcultural norms, values in the broader culture.
• Individuals of a subculture are socialised to adopt cultural definitions and perspectives, and to assert cultural identity and sense of community. They validate identity from each other and present themselves to the external society.
• Within a subculture there are varying degrees of commitment to the core of subcultural identity.
• Individuals who express high level of commitment are known as the ‘ideal type’.
• Subcultural criteria creates feeling of belonging and shared commonality. It also defines boundaries between insiders and those on the periphery.

How does this work in high performance sport?

If you want to design a new role, and have it contribute to something you’re already doing, how do you know what is possible and how do you know it will work? Ask yourself, what is the outcome I / you / we want to seek?

Success in this is when the leader hits the mark on the programme or process of the subculture. Failure, or when it falls flat, is when you’ve missed something or missed the mark within the subculture.

Meg Popovic: ‘Today we become team of team ethnographers tasked with investigating staff subcultures using this framework’:

1. How do you see?
2. What do you see?
3. How do you use what you see to make it better?

What is Relationship Systems Intelligence?

• The ability to interpret oneself as an expression of the system.
• What happens is not only personal but it also belongs to the system.

The ‘third entity’: Imagine each staff system is a living organism, a collection of parts.

• It has a life of itself, an identity that people feed into.
• The essence that emerges as an expression of the relationship or system – the voice of the system
• What is created as a function of interactions (experiences, events, behaviours etc.) in a relationship or system – the space between and among people.
• The ‘more’ in the more than the sum of the parts.

Group exercise

Step 1: Pick TWO staff departments.

Step 2: Subcultural analysis. Explore subcultures of two sub groups, think about the following for each sub group.

1. SKILLS: 1-2 capacities to be great at tasks in role
2. QUALIFICATIONS: Professional and education to obtain roles in department.
3. TIME: Busiest? Most free? Most stressful?
4. LONGEVITY: Length of time working for Club?
5. COLLECTIVE HISTORY: Describe the department 10 years ago?
6. PASSION: What are they most passionate about?
7. CREATIVE: If you could give this department a song, what would it be?

The shadow

The framework that is dragged behind, that which is in the background, seen or unseen, acknowledged or not acknowledged, but there is gold in there too.

Part of the growth process is shining light on the dark parts, and not being ashamed of those dark parts or making them wrong, but instead bringing them in and integrating them. This can happen on an individual level or on a group level.

Step 3: Deeper subcultural work – ask the following questions for the same two sub groups.

1. KNOWLEDGE: What is the wisdom this group holds for the club?
2. STATUS: How is success gauged within this group? What makes someone an outsider in this group?
3. SHADOW: What are a few qualities within this staff group’s collective shadow?
4. CONFLICT: What is the DREAM BEHIND THE COMPLAINT within the broader club environment?

Task before next session: Next Level Leadership – The Wellbeing 1%

Do one small thing for each department (or someone in the department) that honours who they are. Recall the dream behind the complaint, and think about what would connect with them. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, just something small, but we all know we operate in a world where the 1 per cent matters. Bring back to our group later this month to celebrate with each other.

By John Portch

As Kairos CEO Andrew Trimble explains, athletes often risk missing out on vital information for the most prosaic of reasons.

“There could be something in a group chat that was buried under half a dozen different birthday messages,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

That missing information could be the details of a pitch the team is training on, the details of a medical appointment or a sponsor engagement.

Trimble, a former rugby player with 229 caps for Ulster and 70 caps for Ireland, explains that teams across all sports struggle with communication channels. “There are teams with 10-15 WhatsApp groups or – just as bad – they have one group for every single topic and there are numerous threads being discussed; and no one can understand everything,” he continues.

It sounds confusing. “Then there’s numerous screen grabs of whiteboards, which are obviously non-live. In some instances, an athlete has to walk into the medical room, pick up a marker and book an appointment that way, which is very strange in this day and age.”

Trimble, who retired from playing in 2018, heads up the Belfast-based Kairos, who have created a unified digital planning platform that enables better communication within sports organisations, from operations and management to coaching and performance. The platform was designed to be not only sport agnostic, but has tools to support every level from first team down through academies.

Kairos – a Greek term meaning ‘the decisive moment’ – enables teams, through their app and desktop-based platform, to solve problems by eradicating the distractions caused by multi-channel approaches. Trimble and Kairos Chief Operating Officer Gareth Quinn, who developed the first iteration of their platform in the mid-2010s, soon realised there was no suitable tool on the market. “We received strong validation that this is a problem that’s really worth solving,” says Trimble, who explains that Kairos is compatible with third party calendars such as Outlook and Google. “With our platform, it’s all very clear, there’s no clutter, all the athletes know where they need to be and there’s greater levels of accountability.”

Their platform is currently used by teams in the English Premier League, United Rugby Championship, Premiership Rugby and a series of teams across North America and South East Asia. Trimble points out that these teams may not just be suffering from a problem of unclear communication. “From a staff member’s perspective, it could be getting assurance that if you send something important to an athlete that it’s going to be delivered, received and understood and engaged with correctly,” he says.

“If it’s one place, then it doesn’t take up any cognitive load for the athlete. They can spend 100 per cent of their time thinking about performance. If that’s compromised in any way, if they have to scroll through their screen grabs or pictures of a PDF, and they have to scroll through their email for something else and look through their WhatsApp group to find a thread, then all of that is a distraction and all of that impacts on performance. Equally, if multiple departments are speaking different languages then you’re asking an athlete to be a goalkeeper with ten different goals to defend.

Trimble delves further into the issues that can exist within a single team. “Even within one department you can have three or four different behaviours,” he says. “Take a medical department. One medic may create a block of availability that allows athletes to book appointments, another medic may book that same slot of availability but then allocate slots to athletes, there may then be another medic who bypasses all availability and pushes bespoke events or appointments to players.

Kairos helps to solve such problems. “Athletes and staff get the assurance that everything is on the platform and they can see it. It’s all live. Any department that wants to communicate with the athlete will use the one platform. Ultimately, they’ve got one goal to defend and, if anything changes, they can see notifications, reminders or updates on their notification channel; it’s very clear and very easy for them to know where they have to be, what they have to do, what the requirements are, and then how to get the best out of themselves.”

The platform can also be adapted to the prevailing culture at a team. “There’s ownership on one end and management on the other, and every team lies somewhere on that spectrum, but it’s important that we can support everybody, whatever that team culture is or environment or what the expectation of the players is; either to tell them where to be or what to do, or to allow them to manage all that themselves. We’ve got tools to capture both behaviours.

“There’s a number of different ways that you can use our software and it’s important that we can work with a team and find a way that works best for them and gets them the best results and, ultimately, gets their athletes performing the best.”

On that note, Trimble says that Kairos is continually reiterating its platform. “Every conversation for us is about discovery, finding where the club is at, and deciding what their unique issues are and, nine times out of ten, we will have encountered something similar before and there will be a mechanism in place to be able to provide a solution in the software,” he says. “We can take them through that, but often there can be something unique and there’s learnings in that for us too. That could even just be a coach with a new way of thinking about the game, a new way of communicating, or a new operational procedure. We have to capture that development.”

This attitude points the way forward for the next 12 months. “The next phase we’re going to be working on is the integration with third parties, be that GPS providers, sleep data, or nutrition and diet.”

The feedback from Kairos’ ever-growing client base has been positive too. “They say it is unthinkable that they’d be able to go back to the way it was before,” says Trimble. “Professional athletes require a platform that treats them like they’re a valued professional and communicate in a way that gives them back time and takes away distractions.”

Recommended reading

Understanding Team Effectiveness at Google: Tips & Tools

Cynefin Framework

A Leaders Framework for Decision-Making

How Design Thinking Can Influence Decision-Making

What Google Can Teach Your Team About Problem-Solving

Framing the topic

Google’s Global Head of Creative Capability Kirk Vallis once said at one of our events that ‘creativity and problem solving is still one of the most underrated skills for leaders and the reality of creativity is that it is just about creating more options. And with more options you can make better decisions’.

You’d probably agree if you operate in high performance sport, with the complexity and agility required, that problem-solving is a pretty critical skill. For this virtual roundtable we wanted to chat about problem-solving and, more importantly, how we are thinking about it and approaching it.

Discussion points

1. When looking at the theme of problem-solving, where is your current thinking and what are some of the things you and your teams are trying to do to positively influence it?

• We are looking at how we get our practitioners to understand and grow in the problem-solving space through reflecting on how you deal with problems. As leaders, how do we facilitate someone understanding how they problem-solve, and how to extend that ability further?
• It’s important to understand the environments you are in and trying to put in place systems so that people can learn from their practical experiences. Our philosophy means we place an emphasis on the idea that the biggest learnings you are going to take are from your day-to-day experience, so reflecting on those is important.
• Understand what the problem really is and define it. Sometimes it can be difficult to identify what the actual issue is. Use quality questioning to define and tackle the problem. To dovetail this, have an environment where you can creatively brainstorm and have a safe space to experiment with ideas. Don’t jump to the end until you have been through the process.
• We have been utilising roundtables outside of specific disciplines – one of the big things with problem-solving in a discipline or particular department is that it can create a conflict with another discipline. The approach has to be collective.
• We’re also looking at the relationship between how we recruit and solve problems. There is a focus on recruiting and developing from within but we also want the balance of bringing in fresh perspectives to challenge current processes.
• We are working on bringing a coaching approach to our problem-solving across the organisation. A large number of staff have gone through some performance coach training so rather than solving problems for people we’re trying to coach people to solve the problems for themselves. This approach is more sustainable and people become better at resolving issues themselves – we’re finding people are starting to perform better in their roles as well with those ‘grow type’ questions.
• With good questioning focused on ‘growth’ it allows the individual to think more clearly and resolve it for themselves – they solve it the way they want to solve something rather than someone else solving it and imposing their way of doing it. We want to get ourselves in a position where people are coming to us with ideas and not problems.
• We talk about ‘grow conversations’ as formal coaching but there is also informal as well – you don’t have to sit down with someone in a one-to-one and talk at length about a problem. Consider the impact of ‘big chats (formal) and little chats (informal)’. When we see the ‘little chats’ going on, that’s when we know it’s becoming part of the culture.
• We are really looking for our people and staff to be empowered to guide conversations.
• It’s important to have a strategy to solving problems and there is a balance of the short-term in having quick wins around the problem, and then the longer-term approach.
• Ask yourself, do you have a safe space across your environment for people to bring and solve problems?
• We are taking a look into The Cynefin Framework – this is a framework to help understand problems and whether it might be is a clear problem with a solution, a complicated one that can have a complicated answer, or is it a complex problem? The framework considers ‘probing’, making sense of the space and then responding.
• Problems can mutate – if you are working within a team, everybody brings with them their own journey and information, and the influence within the group can change the outcomes.

2. What next? Where are the opportunities and ongoing challenges we are facing?

• There remains a huge opportunity around collaboration, particularly in situations where a problem maybe held by one person but affect other people. We need to continue to exploring ways to bring people together in the environment to share that problem and help to open the eyes of everyone. Often we don’t see the same issues with multiple disciplines.
• A consistent coaching approach is something that can add huge value. We use a very simple term called RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) approach to communication to ensure everyone is considering who they need to speak to regarding any issue.
• We can often underestimate what people would like to know and what they want to know about what you’re dealing with – often we hold problems in our own space because we potentially feel like others aren’t interested, but this tends to limit the options for solving a problem when you close off the collaboration.
• Another big opportunity we see if seeking out solutions from other areas of the organisation or business – people who might be dealing with different types of problems in different contexts and they could provide a different lens. What can we learn from a sales team in how they sell premium tickets or hospitality if we are struggling to sell places for coaching courses and accreditation as an example? We can often get groupthink around what we see and think.
• Try and take the emotion out of this process – if there is too much emotion, there is almost no way of resolving the problem.
• An improvement for us going forward is how we best distil inputs from the collaboration and ideas that are generated around problem-solving – how do we effectively evaluate the issues and really progress the extended ideas moving forward.
• Establish if the problem a global problem or is it unique to one particular individual or area? This drives you in a direction of how you solve the problem, whether it requires collaboration or just individual support. Probe around where the actual problem is and dig a bit further into that, so when the collaboration element comes in you can pick the relevant parts to move forward. When you come through the problem-solving process with the decision, have you then investigated those enough to decide and confirm what are the challenges? We’ve talked about the problem mutating. Coming up with a solution is good but have you fully attached yourself to the journey that it is the right one for all – is there clarity around how the solution will be embedded?
• An idea we’ve toyed with is the ‘day in the life of a discipline’. Provide an idea of what others go through in their working day so there is a more holistic understanding of how interactions and communications can work more efficiently around decision-making and problem-solving.
• Diversity in this process remains a huge opportunity to get a more rounded understanding of the problem through a multitude of lenses. It broadens the way your perspective when looking at a problem or issue.

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

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A Leaders Performance Podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

“Sometimes you can listen to advice and it might be wrong for you, so you’ve got to figure out what is good and what is bad for you – who’s your angel and who’s your devil,” says Asha Philip.

By John Portch

The British sprinter – a two-time Olympic 4x100m bronze medallist – is speaking to the Leaders Performance Podcast as part of the Keiser Athlete Optimisation series.

Asha won bronze with her teammates in Tokyo and talks about some of the steps that enabled her to go again after winning a medal in Rio in 2016.

Also on the conversational agenda are:

• The mental strength that defines elite sprinters [10:00];
• Asha’s need to be comfortable being uncomfortable [14:30];
• The importance of self-reflection and positive affirmations [15:30];
• Why she is increasingly taking care of her mental health [22:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Further listening:

Leaders Performance Podcast – Leadership & Culture Special

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