As the performance specialist highlights, the solutions lie in structures before people.
With these words Dr Robin Thorpe, who has worked across multiple elite high-performance environments, kicked off his recent virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members. The theme of the day was how teams and organisations can overcome silos born of structural issues with fresh skills and a new mindset.
“We tend to think of the human factors first,” Thorpe tells the Leaders Performance Institute off the back of his presentation, “but once you start to analyse the situation more deeply and begin to reflect, there are likely to be structural factors within an organisation.”
“Across my roles,” he continues, “the most effective environments weren’t necessarily those with the most expertise, but those where systems were deliberately designed to integrate that expertise.”
In rare high-performance environments where excellence is paired with humility, collaboration emerges naturally, as individuals are both confident in their expertise and open to the perspectives of others. This reflects principles from social psychology where low ego threat and high psychological safety enable collective intelligence to outperform individual capability.
So a leader in sport may encounter defensive or withdrawing behaviours, but their roots are often linked to underlying structural factors.
Below, aided by Thorpe’s reflections from a career spanning nearly two decades in both European and North American sport, we run through three of the most common structural factors behind the formation of silos and some of the steps that organisations can take before they become damaging.
Outcome:
In the late 2000s, as Thorpe explains, there was an acceleration across the world of sport in the emergence of different performance departments, from sports science and physiotherapy to medical and psychology. In numerous settings, “it led to dichotomy-type frameworks, such as ‘performance and training’, ‘medical and rehab’ or ‘injured and non-injured’. These were structural in nature and encouraged departments to each add their own KPIs, language and processes.” It ultimately led to misaligned and fragmented outcomes, which were often in competition.
Insight:
Specialisation improves expertise but also increases the need for deliberate integration. Therefore, it is important to be clear on the shared outcomes/priorities. How do you ‘nest’ short‑term priorities within longer‑term objectives ? Thorpe says: “We have to be clear on our objective and purpose. What are we here to do? For example, are we here to improve athlete education around certain topics? Is there a more psychological outcome? Is there a technical skill priority? And it doesn’t mean that these priorities are isolated, it just means that maybe a certain member of the team takes more of a lead in ensuring that everything fits together and the greater team work toward a shared outcome.” When done well, this doesn’t just improve collaboration, it directly enhances decision-making quality and performance outcomes.
In practice, this requires leaders to actively design how disciplines connect, rather than assuming collaboration will occur naturally.
This can lead to a much more nuanced (but outcome-focused) approach. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example: if a high-performance team is looking to stimulate quad hypertrophy in an athlete, it will certainly involve the S&C specialist and dietitian, but if the athlete is experiencing challenges with their eating behaviours, there will be opportunity for the psychologist or a mental performance/health specialist to integrate, considering the success of the outcome is heavily influenced by increasing certain nutrient intake. Shared outcomes enable that interdisciplinary conversation. “It can influence outcomes in ways not immediately apparent when viewing the performance challenge in isolation.”
Review your setbacks. “It’s really important to regularly review situations where outcomes weren’t aligned or why an outcome wasn’t achieved or there might have been a communication issue.” The first port of call should not be the human at the foundational layer.
Repeat your purpose. It sounds simple but it is critical to be “very deliberate and very repetitive in a positive, coaching way in reminding staff how to architect collaboration. Consistently discussing purpose, priorities and outcomes for athlete results, whether informally or sometimes more formally in team meetings, can be effective”.
Provide open spaces. “I think we should start to really think about facility architecture and ensuring that we’re creating and positively manipulating traffic footfall and healthy collisions within a space to help reduce silo-forming.” Thorpe admits the best-designed building won’t solve every performance issue, “but it can play a role in minimising some of the downstream effects”
Outcome:
Expertise is present but true influence depends on the hierarchy.
Thorpe recalls an experience from earlier in his career. “It was a highly coach-led, centralised structure,” he says. “We could put in place strong systems and processes, but ultimately, they needed to align with the direction and philosophy of the key stakeholder. This is not unique to that environment. In these settings, ensuring that all perspectives are heard and integrated can be challenging, and individuals or departments may naturally gravitate towards protecting their areas of expertise.”
Insight:
Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions. Teams should consider establishing…
Clear decision-making rights. Thorpe suggests that a high-performance team creates a mechanism that integrates interdisciplinary input before it reaches the coach or key stakeholders. He speaks of the “decision-making engine” that operates beneath leadership level.
He says: “Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”
When this is happening 24/7, “More information feeds into this decision-making engine,” he continues, using the example of a health and performance leader reporting on an athlete. “It allows them to communicate clearly, concisely and with confidence to key stakeholders.” These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.
The role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.
Outcome:
Departments optimise locally rather than collectively.
This often creates more problems. “Increasing volumes of data, when not clearly aligned to purpose, can unintentionally contribute to siloed thinking.” says Thorpe, adding that it can lead to opinion-selected data points that increases the risk of emotions trumping objectivity.
The highest-performing environments align incentives in a way that balances risk, performance, and availability, rather than allowing one metric to dominate.
It reminds him of Charles Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. The renowned English economist may not have had sports science in mind when he uttered those words, but they resonated with the virtual roundtable when Thorpe shared them.
When incentives are misaligned, collaboration becomes negotiation. The solution lies in…
Shared KPIs. This is linked to the shared outcomes discussed above. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example of a medical team delivering on player availability. He says: “If the team availability percentage is the North Star then it risks bringing about a more conservative approach to solely keeping players available.”
It raises both a moral quandary and a performance issue. “Performance departments tend to want to push players and to maximise human performance. In doing so, you acknowledge that there may be some potential collateral damage and injuries along the way. Medical teams often use player availability as a key indicator of success, while performance teams focus on driving adaptation and physical development, highlighting the importance of aligning these perspectives around shared outcomes specific to the collective objectives of the team or players.”
Intentional system design. It comes back to the ‘decision-making engine’ and clear decision-making rights. “It creates a shared language using correct, up-to-date, appropriate objectivity. Using appropriate data collection measures often reduces the influence of opinions and subjective inputs.”
Ultimately, organisations that address these structural barriers see improvements not just in collaboration, but in decision speed, clarity, and performance outcomes.
As high-performance environments continue to evolve, the challenge is not removing silos, but designing systems that integrate expertise to consistently deliver performance.
To wrap up proceedings, Thorpe posed four questions that practitioners can ask themselves:
What to read next
Breaking Silos: Why the Answer Lies in Creating a Sense of Shared Ownership in Performance
In March, the themes of talent development, performance environments, team strategy and the dissolution of silos were all top of the agenda.
The City defender-midfielder’s brace capped a perfect birthday weekend (he turned 21 on the eve of the final) and secured his club the first silverware of the English season, with a domestic treble still to play for.
Post-match, O’Reilly was asked if City’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal was a significant blow to the team with whom they continue to vie for the Premier League and FA Cup.
“100 percent. It is a blow for them and we need to build on it and get some momentum from this win now,” he said having received his first (but almost certainly not last) winner’s medal in City colours.
“As soon as the international break is over we need to kick on and fight hard. We have a game in hand in the Premier League, we have to play them at our place, we are still in the FA Cup. Liverpool is a tough tie [in the FA Cup quarter-finals] and we know that so we need to do everything we can to keep going.”
O’Reilly’s rise since breaking into the Manchester City team in 2024 represents another triumph for the club’s exceptional academy. His bullishness displays the drive and determination required to thrive in the elite game.
It calls to mind a late-March virtual roundtable hosted by Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler, who has worked on talent pathways in both English football and cricket.
When discussing the tensions that exist on talent pathways (Brunnschweiler highlighted five), he spoke of the need to develop well-rounded individuals and those with the ruthlessness required to succeed.
“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways,” he said, “and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”
It was just one of a series of talking points during a month where performance environments, strategies and alignment were top of the agenda. Read on for a complete round-up.
Quote of the month:
The athlete is undoubtedly a stakeholder with agency in their own development, but as one practitioner working in the British sports system observed during a virtual roundtable focused on performance environments, the athlete’s ever-growing involvement raises some questions:
“We’ve definitely found that when you give that space to the athletes, they then can take it a little bit too far. Sometimes they complain about everything. ‘We want to fix this, we want to fix that’. It’s not super constructive… how do we create those boundaries and expectations on what that looks like; and how can we keep it productive to the goals of the environment and what we want to do?”
Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full report here.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
Insight of the month:
Former New Zealand All Blacks General Manager Darren Shand delivered a presentation where he explained how the team brought the concept of alignment to life in their weekly work.
He said:
“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.
“As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.
“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”
Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.
(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Good to know:
Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions.
That is according to Leaders Performance Adviser Dr Robin Thorpe, who led a virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the question of silos.
Thorpe argues that teams should consider establishing clear decision-making rights, as the role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.
“Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”
These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.
(Photo by Patrick Khachfe/Getty Images)
From the archives:
The Brisbane Lions have won back to back AFL premierships, but that wasn’t the environment Senior Coach Chris Fagan encountered in his first days on the job in 2017.
“I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there.”
He told the story of the team’s transformation on his watch at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full story here.
(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
What’s coming up for members
In February, high performance specialists from across the sporting landscape wrote and spoke about a range of topics including performance systems, coach wellbeing and organisational alignment.
The Chinese-American star, who had just won silver medals in the slopestyle and big air at the Milano Cortina Olympics, had been asked at a press conference if she saw those medals as “silvers earned” or “golds lost”.
She chastised the journalist for his “ridiculous perspective” but her wider comments were more telling.
“How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right?” she said.
“I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before. So, I think that is more than good enough, but thank you.”
It called to mind the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was similarly exasperated in a press conference when he was asked about the Bucks’ ‘failure’ upon their elimination from the 2023 NBA Playoffs.
“There’s no failure in sports,” he responded. “There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better.”
Gu, it must be said, won gold in the halfpipe just days later (making it three golds and three silvers in two Olympics) but she and Antetokounmpo (who won the NBA Cup with the Bucks in 2024) hinted at how unhelpful it is to frame high performance as anything less than first place or a gold medal.
Setbacks are inevitable, but as Gu and Antetokounmpo show, athletes, coaches and programmes can choose how they meet the moment. Those that prepare smartly, with the right focus and guidance, can give themselves improved chances of success.
These ideas came up time and again at the Leaders Performance Institute in February. Here is a flavour of what was said.
Insight of the month
The Winter Olympics are on the agenda across the Performance Hub, with high-performance specialist Richard Young telling us what happens when teams stray from their mission:
As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.
The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier. At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.
Read more here.
Quote of the month
This month its Peter Hodgkinson, who wrote of his time working as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team during the 37th America’s Cup.
Given the youth and inexperience of his build team, psychological safety and intent-based leadership were the order of the day. He wrote:
Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news.
INEOS Britannia in action at the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall
Good to know
Pressure doesn’t make you better, but it does reveal what is already here.
That is according to high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery, who led a virtual roundtable for members looking at how they can reduce their athletes and coaches’ allostatic load – that is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold.
The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).
Crucially, as Vickery explained, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”
Read more here.
Coach wellbeing
Though often neglected, members of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to share ideas on how they can better support their coaches.
In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.
This, their former manager explained, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.
Read more here.
Aussie rules
In early February we welcomed many of you to Brisbane for Leaders Meet: Australia, where organisations including the Brisbane Lions, Cricket Australia and World Rugby tackled the challenges of the day.
Chief amongst those was the ever-pressing need for alignment.
The Lions’ Senior Coach Chris Fagan favoured strong relationships with senior management; Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry espoused the value of psychological safety in cricket; and World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson, as an executive, emphasised trust built on clarity from the top.
We picked out five elements for your consideration.
Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez
One you might have missed
Ben Ashdown and Dr Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University pondered the behavioural elements of resilience in young players at football academies in this exclusive interview.
Their research has identified six resilience behaviours:
Their hope is to use these six to fashion a tool to help academy staff identify and develop resilience behaviours in their young athletes.
Read more here.
What’s coming up for members
In our latest Leadership Skills session, Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures reframes how organisations should understand, shape and protect their cultures.
Amaechi’s words are shared by Jeff Pagliano, a consultant with Management Futures, who in our latest Leadership Skill Series session, introduced members to tools that will enable them to help shape their team’s culture.
How do cultures develop?
Pagliano began his presentation with a definition:
Management Futures uses the analogy of tables at a wedding reception to explain how cultures develop.
“You’ve seen how at a wedding each table develops its own personality,” said Pagliano. “It’s interesting that even in those interactions where some people know each other or some people don’t, a culture begins to form around that table. You can have the rowdy table, the quiet table; some are eager to get up to dance and some are not.”
What we see, what we say, what we believe
Pagliano then shared his ‘cultural iceberg’ model, which has been inspired by Swiss-American psychologist Edgar Schein and his pioneering work on organisational culture:
What we see
“This is literally what we see. So behaviours, systems, and processes,” said Pagliano. This could be how people interact, how leaders comport themselves, what actions are common or repeated. It also includes the physical environment (e.g., office layout or the visibility of team members).
What we say
“These are our goals, values and aspirations.” In other words, the official narrative.
What we believe
“These are the underlying assumptions we have about the organisation.”
The risk of emerging ‘shadow’ values
Underlying assumptions can lead to the emergence of what Pagliano calls ‘shadow’ values – unspoken, unofficial rules.
“Employees are acutely aware of what is rewarded or encouraged in everyday activities,” he said.
Pagliano quoted the British government’s sports funding agency, UK Sport, in making his point.
Therefore, it is important to be able to ‘map’ your team’s cultural influences to better help you understand who shapes your culture and in what ways.
Mapping cultural influences
For this part of the session, Pagliano called upon Dr Edd Vahid’s Cultural Hypothesis, in which he spoke of the importance of ‘sponsors’, ‘architects’, and ‘guardians’ in shaping a culture through a combination of leadership and influence.
Pagliano added two further categories: ‘shareholders’ (“I would argue that everybody who works in an organisation is a shareholder”) and ‘countercultural influences’ (“countercultural influences are negative role models that can be operating at all levels”) and presented the following slide:
He then shared a hypothetical example of a cultural map that pulls on these five types. The result is a complex diagram:
“Your sponsor is at the top,” said Pagliano. “That can be the owner of an organisation, maybe a GM, maybe a coach, but it’s somebody who has the ability to decide whether resources are allocated for building culture.
“Then you have the architect: the one who thinks about ‘see’, ‘say’, and ‘believe’. This is the person who has the ability to influence processes and has decision-making power.
They may or may not be the leader of the organisation, but they certainly have the ear of the leader.
“Then below is where the web gets a little complicated. This is where you can see how certain policies, procedures and aspects of culture can intertwine and be influenced.”
Pagliano concluded this section with a summary:
He concluded his presentation with six cornerstones of cultural leadership.
“These are the six levers that any culture leader, whether it’s your sponsor or your architect, can pull to make sure that vision of culture is consistent across your organisation.”
He then gave a real-life example for five of the six.
Communicate key principles – Netflix
“Netflix’s key principle is ‘act in Netflix’s best interests.’ And so their culture of ‘Freedom & Responsibility’ can be captured in these five words,” said Pagliano. “Anytime there’s a decision being made, you can always ask your team, ‘are we acting in Netflix’s best interests?’”
Role modelling – Collingwood FC
Pagliano explained that Collingwood’s Senior Coach, Craig McRae, asks himself daily, “‘to what extent are my day‑to‑day actions equal to our ambition?’” The Melbourne-based club were AFL premiers in 2023.
Continuous reviews – Pixar
“They had this concept of appreciative inquiry,” said Pagliano of Pixar. “It’s all about setting examples of excellence to create a blueprint for future performance.” In testing Toy Story, for example, the relationship between Buzz and Woody wasn’t working. So they went back to the drawing board over the course of six days and created those characters that we know and love today. Further down the line, they would go back and ask, ‘what were we doing right during those six days when we pulled together?’”
Skills and processes – the UK Sports Institute
This example is specifically about their approach to developing their staff members’ “teaming skills”. “This can come down to something as simple as ‘speak up, listen up’ and then a shared responsibility for performance,” said Pagliano. The UKSI wanted to teach “teaming skills across the different groups so that when groups from different parts of the organisation interact with each other, they have a shared language.”
Feedback – Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières
“Their motto is ‘we are intolerant of, but empathetic, when people don’t initially meet our high standards’,” said Pagliano, who explained that employees are given “three strikes”. “Feedback as a continual part of the process is really important to maintaining their culture.”
Recruitment – get the right people on the bus
Pagliano does not give an example for recruitment. Instead, he poses a question: “When you’re looking to hire folks, who do you think is going to buy into your shared cultural values and who is going to be a guardian or an architect of that?”
If you have any further questions around how to understand, shape and protect their cultures, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]
What to read next
As Warwickshire’s Performance Director James Thomas explains, strategy is not about establishing certainty, it’s about people, collaboration and coherence.
Often the word elicits a raised eyebrow amidst busy training and competition schedules or it alludes to scarce downtime for coaches and practitioners.
It is also associated with corporate language, long documents and theoretical discussions that feel disconnected from the daily reality of training, selection and competition. In high-pressure environments, planning (reviewing and learning) can be seen as a luxury, something to revisit once results improve or uncertainty settles.
My experience has been the opposite. I’m passionate about helping raise awareness of the importance and performance impact of great strategic planning.
Strategy: a precursor to performance
After more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I have come to believe that performance strategy and planning are not distractions from performance, they are precursors to it. In environments often defined by pressure, volatility and constant change, strategy provides something invaluable: direction, connection and a level of continuity.
High-performance sport is inherently unstable. Calendars shift, athletes get injured, form fluctuates, staff move on, leaders change and external demands arrive without warning. In that context, the absence of a clear performance strategy does not create freedom. It creates noise. Decisions become reactive, alignment erodes, and short-term fixes quietly undermine decision-making rooted in the agreed long-term ambition.
The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less. They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.
Planned Olympic success
One of the clearest demonstrations of the value of performance strategy in my career came during my time as Performance Director at British Gymnastics in the build-up to, and during, the delayed Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.
This period was defined by disruption. The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how athletes trained, competed and lived. Lockdowns restricted facility access. Competition schedules collapsed and re-emerged unpredictably. Athlete preparation was fragmented, and long-term planning was constantly challenged.
At the same time, the organisation was navigating a significant cultural crisis. The Whyte Review had been co-commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England in 2020 following allegations of abuse and mistreatment within gymnastics in Britain. Trust had been damaged, scrutiny was intense and the responsibility to rebuild confidence, both internally and externally, sat alongside the imperative to perform on the world’s biggest stage, the Olympic Games.
In that environment, strategy became an anchor.
It provided stability when circumstances were anything but stable. Performance strategy gave athletes, coaches and staff a clear sense of direction at a time when certainty was scarce. It reminded us of our five principles of high performance, our data informed team strategies for qualifications and finals, and created a shared understanding of what mattered most, even as day-to-day plans shifted repeatedly. This anchor also supported me during really challenging times when key staff behaviours or direction of travel didn’t align to our beliefs and approach. It gave me confidence to hold the line and make the tough decisions that leaders are so often faced with.
Rather than attempting to predict an uncertain future, the strategy focused on the team, the people, the data and practitioner-informed principles that we talked about for over three years. It established how decisions would be made, what trade-offs we were prepared to accept and those ‘what if’ scenarios that can always catch you off guard. One of these being the Head Coach breaking their leg 48 hours before heading to Tokyo. We actually had a plan for this!
This allowed the system to adapt without losing its identity.
That experience was one of the most challenging of my career, but always hugely exciting and rewarding. Three planned, but hard-earned medals secured for Team GB reinforced a core belief: strategy is not about certainty. It is about people, collaboration and coherence.
Different sports, same principles for high performance
The same principle holds true in professional football, albeit at a different scale.
During my time as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, operating within the City Football Group, I saw first-hand how long-term strategic planning can drive sustained performance improvement across an entire ecosystem.
At Manchester City, consistent performance progression was not the product of isolated excellence or short-term cycles. It was anchored in a clear long-term plan that connected the Academy, Women’s and Men’s first teams through shared principles, aligned methodologies and a common performance language.
That plan did not seek to eliminate fluctuation. Ebb and flow were expected. Injuries, form, competition demands, squad evolution and commercial demands were all recognised as natural parts of elite sport. What mattered was that the long-term vision, the direction of travel remained consistent, even as tactics and personnel changed.
Crucially, this strategic clarity extended beyond a single team or season. It flowed across the wider City Football Group model, creating a level of coherence across clubs operating in different countries, cultures and competitive contexts. While local adaptation was encouraged, the underlying performance philosophy remained aligned.
The level of consistent on-pitch success at Manchester City over the last 5-7 years, in many ways, is unparalleled, from Academy player progression and sales to the Men’s first team treble in 2023. Long-term business and performance strategy has a lot to do with this, in my opinion.
Good performance strategy increases speed
Modern high-performance environments are defined by complexity. Multiple competitions, condensed calendars, overlapping priorities and increasingly specialised roles place constant strain on alignment. Planning in these environments is often misunderstood as control. In reality, it is the opposite.
When direction is clear, decisions decentralise. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.
The VMOST model
At this point, structures and frameworks matter.
One of the most effective ways I have seen performance strategy articulated in high-performance sport is through clear, simple models that translate long-term ambition into day-to-day action.
One such model is VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics).
VMOST was created by business strategist Rakesh Sondhi and first proposed in 1999 book Total Strategy. The framework provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there.
The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity.
In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation. In my last two roles as a performance director, my VMOST strategy was etched onto a big wall, one which staff members and athletes walked passed regularly. And when curious conversations or even debates took place, we often found ourselves standing around the visual, challenging whether a new idea could really help us achieve a strategy or the mission, or was it something that could derail us and divert energy, with no clear route to helping us win. This is definitely something I am taking into my new role in professional cricket.
When applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame.
A new era in professional cricket
In cricket, this strategic clarity is particularly valuable and I’m living this right now as Performance Director at Warwickshire and the Birmingham Phoenix.
Across a single season, players move between formats that demand entirely different physical, technical and psychological outputs. Red-ball cricket rewards patience, control and endurance. Short-form formats demand clarity, aggression and adaptability. Players are selected for specific skill sets, yet all must contribute to a collective performance.
Without a clear strategic framework, these transitions become chaotic. Workloads conflict, roles blur and development stalls. With strategy, complexity becomes more manageable. Individuals understand their role, how it evolves across formats, and how their contribution supports the team’s wider ambition.
At its best, performance strategy connects people.
High-performance sport is full of specialists. Coaches, analysts, medics, strength staff and operations teams all operate in defined roles, and rightly so. The risk is not a lack of expertise, but fragmentation. Excellent work happening in isolation without a clear line of sight to the bigger picture, is one of the biggest risks leaders can face.
A well-articulated strategy creates connection. It allows people to see how their work links through to the final mission and vision of the organisation. Daily decisions gain meaning. Trade-offs become easier to navigate. Autonomy increases because intent is understood.
When people understand why their work matters, they can make better decisions.
Strategy also provides continuity in environments where turnover is inevitable.
Athletes move on. Coaches change. Support staff rotate. In some organisations, meaningful personnel change happens every season. Culture alone cannot carry performance identity through that level of churn.
Strategy creates continuity of thought.
It anchors philosophy, ambition and non-negotiable principles beyond any individual. It allows new people to arrive and quickly understand how performance is built, what standards matter and what success really means in that environment.
In my experience, the strongest systems are those where people can come and go without the performance identity being lost. That does not happen by accident. It happens because strategy has been made explicit, shared and lived.
This requires leadership discipline.
Performance strategy only creates connection and continuity if leaders reference it consistently, use it to explain decisions and hold themselves accountable to it under pressure. When strategy is visible in how leaders talk, select, invest and prioritise, it stops being a document and becomes a shared language.
That language matters when pressure rises.
Under stress, people revert to what they understand. Strategy provides a common frame of reference. It reduces anxiety, accelerates alignment and allows honest conversations about performance without personalising every decision.
Planning also helps organisations say ‘no’.
In elite sport, opportunity is constant. New competitions, new technologies, new interventions and new ideas arrive relentlessly. Without strategy, everything feels urgent, and every new opportunity feels like one we can’t miss out on. With strategy, priorities are clear. Resources are allocated intentionally. Energy is focused where it matters most.
Importantly, you need to find ways to stay flexible, and not become rigid, bound to a strategy you developed years ago.
The best strategies are not scripts. They are frameworks. They define principles, priorities and trade-offs rather than fixed answers. They allow adaptation without drift.
Good performance strategy answers simple but powerful questions:
The human impact of planning is often underestimated.
Clear strategy can reduce uncertainty. It gives people confidence in decision-making. Applied well, it creates psychological safety by replacing ambiguity with intent. Athletes and staff perform better when they understand direction, expectations and how success is defined.
This is particularly important in high-performance environments where accountability is high and pressure is constant.
For leaders looking to build effective performance strategy, a few principles matter.
Competitive advantage
Across Olympic and professional sport, one belief has remained constant for me: strategy is a competitive advantage if organisations are willing to treat it as such and invest in the people who are delivering it.
In high-performance sport, change and uncertainty is guaranteed. Strategy does not eliminate it, but it determines whether change becomes a threat or can be used as an advantage.
When planning for performance connects people, aligns ambition, creates continuity and promotes curiosity, performance shifts from reactive winning to sustainable success.
James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.
More from James Thomas
During his time with the INEOS Britannia sailing team, Peter Hodgkinson built an environment that enabled his young staffers to learn and thrive under pressure. As he explains in this exclusive column, intent-based leadership and psychological safety were at the heart of his approach.
Main Image: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall
We achieved a number of national firsts: the first British team to win the Challenger Series, fending off some tough opponents; the first British team to contest the Match itself in 60 years; and the first British team to score points in the Match for 90 years.
There was no shame in eventually losing 7-2 to Team New Zealand, who claimed their third consecutive victory. We gave it a good go against the team our helmsman, Sir Ben Ainslie, described as “the best team ever”.
This is the story of how we put ourselves in contention.
Assembling a functioning team: the hard part
The INEOS Britannia Team was made up of two organisations: Athena Racing and Mercedes GP. It wasn’t always easy – it was a collision of two different workplace cultures – but the common goal bonded the two companies together and we got on with the job.
I learnt a lot about sailing and the maritime industry and while there are similarities to motorsport, where I have made a career for four decades, there are a number of big differences (that’s a topic best saved for another day).
One of the things I really enjoyed about working on the Cup was that we got to recruit a new Build Logistics Team. Basically the Build Logistics Team are parts chasers; in the Cup they looked after ‘goods in’, ‘stores’, stock checks, parts picking, moving parts through inspection, NDT (non-destructive testing), X ray etc. so it is a fluid and dynamic role with lots of pressure.
The team we recruited had very little or no experience in this type of role but we believed it was more important to have the right mindset, practical intelligence and energy than experience. In the Cup, we didn’t have all the structures, systems and processes in place that you have in an F1 team but we had enough to do the basics well, if we used what we had correctly.
I believe if you have relatively fewer parts then you need additional people to manage those parts as they become more critical. Therefore, we ended up with a team of seven people in Build Logistics, which seems a lot, but considering the workload, I think this was the correct number.
Almost all members of the team we assembled would be considered Gen Z, but I didn’t view them in such narrow terms. I didn’t put them in some kind of box with a label. To me they were a new team that we had to get moving as quickly as possible. This was the hard part.
‘Don’t lose any parts’… and ‘no surprises’
The team’s inexperience was difficult to manage at first but as they were all intelligent it didn’t take long to get them up and running. Don’t get me wrong: we had some very difficult moments and some very challenging conversations, but after a few months we started to see improvements and we were going in the right direction. The energy and passion this group displayed was not seen by the whole team as everyone was flat out, but I could see what they were achieving. I applied what I had learnt in my time in HR (I was Head of Employee Engagement at Mercedes F1 between 2019 and 2022) to this group using intent-based leadership and psychological safety.
I gave the Build Logistics team two simple rules: ‘don’t lose any parts’ and ‘no surprises’. Don’t lose parts almost goes without saying, but it was important to articulate as it gave them a mental priority for what they were responsible for. I wanted them to feel that every part was important because, if we lost something, then we could miss an important test or delay a development item hitting the water, therefore delaying the opportunity to learn.
We did lose some parts but also we did learn from this, and I like to think we didn’t blame the person, as the process (or lack of) allowed it to happen. In most cases during my career, the human being was acting as a sticking plaster due to the lack of a robust process or system.
I used ‘no surprises’ as a tool to try to build psychological safety. Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news. As a Build Logistics Team, we needed to know now if there was an issue, as we simply didn’t have time or resources to bury bad news. We needed to hear their voices and, for me, ‘no surprises’ gave them permission to speak.
We had a daily meeting at 11:00am to go over the plan, projects and new parts – similar to what we did in F1 – and it took a while to truly hear everyone’s voice. I would say to them: ‘I woke up at 2:30am and thought about this, when you woke up last night, what did you think about?’ Sometimes nobody had much to say when I asked this question but on many occasions there was a little nugget of information that came to light.
If you are looking to build psychological safety in your team, try using ‘no surprises’. It gives your team permission to speak and it will help your team grow and develop as they feel they have a voice and will be respected for their contributions.
The 2% vs the 98%
Now this might be a bit controversial: one nugget I gave to the young Build Logistics Team on the America’s Cup was “you are only remembered for the 2% you get wrong, not the 98% you get right”.
If you are really honest and park up all the psychology for a moment, this is probably a pretty true statement.
I am sure plenty of cleverer people than me will disagree with this sentiment, but this is how I see it. It is a bit below the line, but it did focus my mind on my own performance. I believe we remember negative moments or threats to help protect ourselves in the future if we see this type of situation happening again, and therefore it remains fresh in our memories.
Others will have some good memories of some of the things we did but they will remember in detail our mistakes and the moments where we did not behave reliably or with competence. In other words, they lost trust in us. As human beings we will make mistakes, this is how we learn, grow and develop.
Intent-based leadership
Leaders of new young teams need to provide a lot of control and support in the early stages of the team’s development while the team members improve their competence and get aligned to the clarity of the intent. As the team’s competence and clarity increases, the amount of leadership control decreases. This is built on the intent-based leadership theory devised by retired United States Navy captain David Marquet.
This is a snapshot:
As a leader you are never quite sure what the people around you really think of you or if you have made a difference due to the pace of the world we live in. That said, a former member of the Mercedes F1 Build Logistics Team (and now a successful leader and manager in his own right) recently sent me one of the nicest bits of feedback I have ever received:
Your leadership allowed many young people to grow and now forms a lot of their own leadership and general teamwork skills. The biggest thing I always felt that made you different was your ability to allow others to make mistakes whilst catching them before it was at the detriment of the team. Without that, none of us would have learnt to be independent.
I think the key point from this is: I was catching the mistakes before they hit the 2% category while allowing the team to learn and become independent and responsible.
How is your team learning? Or are you telling them what to do so they don’t make mistakes? You don’t want their mistakes to reflect poorly on you and get you into that 2% category.
I hope this has given you something to think about. I am sure this may go against the grain for some of you but I suppose we can’t all agree on everything.
Peter Hodgkinson is a leadership and performance specialist skilled in helping high-performers become better at what they do. As an accomplished manager and mechanic, Peter has enjoyed almost three decades of success in elite sporting environments. His work in motorsport, as part of winning teams at Le Mans and Daytona, culminated in seven Formula 1 driver’s world championships won at Brawn and Mercedes, where he led car-building operations. Peter was Mercedes’ Head of Build during Lewis Hamilton’s era-defining run of six world titles. After a spell serving as Mercedes’ Head of Employee Engagement, Peter returned to the Factory Floor as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team when Mercedes supported their quest for the 37th America’s Cup.
If you would like to speak to Peter, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.
