By John Portch

“I don’t know how common it is per se – there are moments when I regret it!”

Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks, tells the Leaders Performance Institute that he is currently studying for a masters in Organizational Leadership at Arizona State University.

“There is never a perfect time to begin a new course, but it’s been cool because it’s put me outside my comfort zone,” he says. “It’s very much more business and organizational leadership-driven, but the work and research I’ve been able to do as part of it, has enabled me to see and learn what people are doing in these other settings and where I think there is a lot of potential transfer or application to sports settings.”

One such example is the practice of job crafting. “In essence, job crafting allows staff to customize some of their tasks and responsibilities in ways that might be more meaningful and aligned with their personal values,” Brandon continues. “I find this practice fascinating because it creates opportunities for staff to develop range in their roles and positively impact the organization in ways beyond their traditional job description.”

The Diamondbacks’ Mental Skills Department has experienced job crafting first-hand. “Although our main responsibility is providing mental performance training for our players, we’ve been able to slowly expand our reach to other facets of the organization, including injury rehab, coach development, scouting, and business operations.”

The question of employee wellness is another that is influencing Brandon’s work in the clubhouse. He says: “Building a robust, systematic, and preventative approach to employee wellness requires that leaders address policies, practices, and perspectives in their organizational culture.

“Perspective begins with organizational values and addressing if, and how, employee wellbeing is prioritized in the culture. This requires that leaders and staff be intentional and progressive with their language surrounding mental health.”

He says it is important that coaches and leaders recognize that their personal wellbeing can influence those around them. “Research has even shown that coaches with elevated stress levels can negatively affect the mental health of their athletes. At the end of the day, coaches and leaders need to model how to appropriately invest in one’s mental health and wellbeing. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ doesn’t work. Athletes and fellow staff will look to their leaders for guidance in these areas so it’s not something that coaches can afford to ignore.

“Ultimately, leaders play a pivotal role in showing those they serve that self-care isn’t selfish. In reality, supporting wellbeing and resilience for your employees is really a competitive advantage, especially with the ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity found in work environments, which often lead to stress. Leaders should aim to install comprehensive prevention strategies within their organizations rather than rely on reactive support as issues arise.

Brandon explains that it is important that coaches and leaders establish a safe and supportive environment for athletes and staff to discuss mental health – a key step to normalizing it. “Enhancing policies might include ensuring that staff have trusted and affordable mental health and wellbeing resources available to them, and their families, or opportunities for temporary flexibility as it relates to scheduling and the location of their work.” he says.

“Practices could include initiatives that strengthen peer-to-peer support, such as mentorship programs or community groups; promoting personal development, with continuing education and training as prime examples; and encouraging physical and mental wellness through initiatives such as meditation classes.

“Additionally, research suggests that athletes, particularly at the elite level, perceive coaches as less effective when stressed.”

Beyond leaders, Brandon argues that mental wellness needs to be ingrained into the fabric of an organisation’s culture and not treated simply as a program. “It can’t just include initiatives where employees participate in exercise challenges, yoga or mindfulness classes or company-run social events – expecting staff to participate in activities and wellbeing initiatives outside of their normal workday is an inadequate approach to promoting mental wellness.

“I am interested in how you can promote those wellness questions within the margins. All of those activities I describe do influence a person’s wellbeing, but a significant portion of people’s daily stressors are a product of their actual work environment and the demands placed on them. In addition to these activities, organizations would be wise to identify the on-the-job stressors that staff experience and design resources, or support, accordingly.

“It’s been interesting to think about things from a more organizational and system-wide perspective. It’s not just the idea of how things apply with one particular team but across a collective organization. Most organizations want to develop resilience. We want to develop resilience too, not only within individuals but within sub-teams and the organization as a whole. Leaders are architects of organizational culture and, thus, play a critical role in cultivating resilience and wellbeing for those serving the organization.

“Learning about the role leaders can play in this process has been interesting and offers a valuable opportunity for organizations to invest in their people.”

Download the latest Performance Special Report, Staying Agile: Managing Disruption and Optimising Preparation During the Pandemic – detailing the work of the English Institute of Sport with its teams and athletes.

Download Report

An article brought to you by our Partners

By John Portch

When it comes to learning there is still a notable discrepancy between sport and the corporate world, where executive coaching has become the norm.

More than half of FSTE 100 CEOs are believed to use an executive coach. “The senior leaders of those organisations recognise the need to find time to step away, reflect and be coached,” says Dave Slemen, the Founder of Elite Performance Partners [EPP], a search, selection and advisory firm working across elite sport and specialising in performance.

“The number of CEOs, head coaches or performance directors in sport using coaches is not that high – we did our own research. It’s interesting that it’s a cultural shift that needs to be made within sport. I wonder how important it is in terms of that organisational purpose and culture that has an impact on learning.”

Slemen opens the floor to Scott Drawer, the Director of Sport at Millfield School in Somerset, and Simone Lewis, who currently works as a Technical Leadership Expert with Fifa.

The panel came together for this EPP Webinar, titled Creating Effective Learning Organisations, to discuss why organisations that prioritise learning are gaining a critical competitive edge.

Leaders Performance Institute members logged in from across the globe to hear the trio discuss the creation of learning cultures, tips to ensure your staff are continually engaged in self-development, and useful models of feedback to ensure that learning is captured and applied.

You need to make learning happen

Often sports organisations talk about learning but there needs to be a concerted effort to ensure your coaches and staff are continuously engaged. “It’s no different to training an athlete,” says Drawer, whose background includes time spent working for UK Sport, England Rugby and the Team Sky Innovation Hub.

“You’re fundamentally trying to change your memory state. There’s some underlying physiology and neuroscience that drives that. You’re trying to drive information and behaviours from short-term memory to long-term memory; and there’s some tools and techniques to do that based on really good pedagogy.

“The way I describe it: the best coaches we have are often the best teachers; and the best teachers can be the best coaches. We often forget some of this foundational knowledge that exists in pedagogy and andragogy.”

Drawer’s time away from sport has helped him to coalesce his thoughts. “If you’re really serious about this, you have to be deliberate and focused about it and create time to let it happen,” he continues. “You have to really think about how you’re going to structure those opportunities.”

The role of leaders in creating a culture of learning

“It’s very hard to have a learning culture if it’s not enforced by senior leaders,” says Lewis, who is an advocate of role modelling. “You can learn as an individual without [necessarily] being in a learning culture.” It is complex, although Drawer outlines some tips for teams looking to develop a culture of learning. “You have to feel safe and supported as an individual where you’re not going to be ridiculed for asking questions or questioning the norm. At lot of that starts with the leadership in any organisation,” he says.

“‘Psychological safety’ is used in lots of contexts, but you have to feel it. Equally, an individual has to feel vulnerable enough to want to expose themselves. All of that is around that principle of safety. Once you have that, it’s then around the support that you put around them. If I’m going to ask a question, I’m given freedom to explore it.”

Lewis has also found that leaders often need help when structuring difficult conversations. “Giving and receiving feedback is hard,” she says. “Using things like ‘greens and reds’ and neutral language, always starting with the positives, and then following up with the things that can be improved upon. ‘You and me agree’ is another one. ‘You go first, what do you think?’ then I offer my opinion and we discuss it rather than me as your boss diving in with feedback. BAR is another one: behaviour, affect, request. Using the ‘affect’ and ‘it makes me feel’ can be really powerful for giving and receiving feedback to bring about learning and change.”

Inevitably, as Slemen points out, some people will be resistant to change, either openly or secretly and he asks Drawer how he might overcome such reluctance. “I need to understand why they’re resistant,” says Drawer. “There could be some fundamental psycho-behavioural reasons why that’s the case because of their previous learning experiences.

“My experience is that the brilliant people, the brilliant leaders I’ve worked with in a number of domains, they make you feel safe to go and explore.”

Learning is not a case of cause-and-effect, so time and support are both requisites. “That means better resources, that means putting time aside, that means having a leadership that recognise your next competitive advantage is going to be in that space.”

Help people to self-reflect

Lewis explains that the key to supporting individuals in their learning is to raise their self-awareness and helping them to self-reflect. She says: “It’s about helping them reflect on what they know, how they learn.” There are a number of tools freely available and Lewis suggests the ‘so what? /now what?’ model as an example. “‘Everything’s gone on, so what have I learnt? And then the key question is what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do differently? What am I going to implement?’” she continues. “If you’ve had a whole season let alone a whole game it’s about distilling the key learning and what I’m going to take forward. Build a habit and a system of capturing that and sharing it, if that’s relevant, whether that’s sticky notes, voice mails or old-fashioned note-taking – find a way that works for you.”

Learning experiences need to be designed and tested. Says Drawer: “If I knew intervention X would definitely give me Y, I would be doing it all the time and that’s not the real world. You need to try lots of things and see how individuals respond.”

Teaching curiosity

Studies around andragogy – adult learning – demonstrate that adults need to see immediate value when learning. “You’ve got to find ways of making that happen,” says Drawer. “If you feel supported in doing that, that will just evolve over time. If you encourage the opportunity for people to question because they genuinely want to understand, and then create the space, we can test an idea and explore it.”

Lewis suggests that mentoring, including support for those who have never worked with mentors before, is important. As is peer to peer learning and communities of practice. “We’re social animals, we learn together, but in terms of adding a bit of structure around a project, say, with a group of people in your organisation, [it helps to use] action learning principles or just giving a little guidance around how to define the problem better, how to be creative in brainstorming solutions for how to move forward with a project.” That way people learn, solve a problem, and become better leaders in the process.

Maintaining a long-term learning lens

Performance is always the inevitable focus, so how can teams and individuals retain a lens on learning when the pressure to obtain results begins to tell? “I’d never polarise one or the other,” says Drawer, who puts himself in the position of a coach. “Of course, you’ve got to win, but there are still opportunities to learn, there are still coaching moments and it’s therefore probably the time and effort you spend on that versus the reality of trying to get an outcome. Whatever you do, even if you’re focusing on one thing, there’s still opportunities to do that. You just have to acknowledge that’s the reality of that environment that you’re then in.”

He believes that leaders need to be pragmatic when trying to exploit learning opportunities when everything is what he terms “full gas”. “There are ways that we can capture and sort this unstructured data so that you don’t miss the moments of long-term opportunity,” he says. “Every time you’re having a conversation, all that unstructured data, body behaviour, language – all of that is quality information that you can learn from. By the time you get to the end of the season, when you’re doing a full debrief, you can pull on it and extract themes; and that might help you move.”

Staff learning can also be periodised, just as training might be for athletes. Drawer discusses psychology theory about how leaders can structure learning opportunities, but preaches patience. “It can take you a year to understand the rhythms and culture of the organisation / ecosystem you’re going into,” he says. “Anyone coming in will need that and be able to recognise when those opportunities are and when you’re most likely to be in a position where your brain is free, you’re not cognitively loaded, and you’re ready to do those things.”

A video brought to you by our Partners

Written summary here.

Dr Scott Drawer, the Director of Sport, at Millfield School in Somerset, argues that humans are born to learn.

“It’s evolutionary – if you look at how everything started and how we survived – learning is what enabled you to progress and move on. We’re now in a hyper-connected world and there’s more information available than there has ever been,” he says.

“But sometimes the day job is a blocker to that and we need to recognise that to progress and move on, and evolve, it’s a fundamental part of survival.”

Drawer is joined by Simone Lewis, who currently works as a Technical Leadership Expert with Fifa, and Dave Slemen, the Founder of Elite Performance Partners [EPP] to discuss why learning organisations are gaining a critical competitive edge as part of EPP’s Creating Effective Learning Organisations Webinar.

Leaders Performance Institute members logged in from across the globe to hear the trio discuss the creation of learning cultures, tips to ensure your staff are continually engaged in self-development, and useful models of feedback to ensure that learning is captured and applied.

By John Portch

In June 2021, Harlequins became English rugby’s most unlikely champions when they defeated Exeter 40-38 in the Gallagher Premiership final.

Six months earlier, the team were languishing sixth in the Premiership table and were without a lead coaching figure following the departure of Paul Gustard as Head of Rugby.

A series of swift and profound decisions transformed Quins’ campaign. Firstly, Gustard was not directly replaced. Instead, the reins were taken by Director of Rugby Billy Millard, with support from coaches Jerry Flannery, Nick Evans and Adam Jones.

Off the field, the club sought the counsel of performance coach Owen Eastwood, who has worked with organisations including Gareth Southgate’s England men’s team, the British Olympic team, NATO and the South African men’s cricket team, in an effort to revive their fortunes.

“Everybody was looking at them and saying ‘there’s no energy – are they not fit?’ Eastwood tells the 2021 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium. “The team was struggling, they weren’t playing well, and they were getting a hard time for that.”

Eastwood’s role was vital. “We were lost in our DNA and Owen Eastwood started spending time with the club,” says Millard, speaking on a different day at Twickenham, where Quins lifted the Premiership trophy. “We excavated the history of Harlequins.”

By June, both the men’s and women’s teams had taken their leagues by storm, playing fast and frenetic rugby on their way to being crowned champions. Both were aided in part by the cultural reset that laid the foundations of both triumphs.

Back to Quins’ roots

As the Leaders Performance Institute speaks to Millard, it is clear that part of him still cannot believe the turnaround that took place. “You don’t have seasons like that,” he says.

His mind goes back to Harlequins’ last Premiership triumph in 2012. “We played a certain style, we behaved a certain way. Quins have always been entertainers – that’s why we’re ‘the jesters’ – and we just had to tap back into that, which we did. Our owners [Duncan Saville and Charles Jillings] set a vision, we stripped it right back, and that vision was aligned right through the playing squad.”

Sitting beside Millard is Danny Care, Quins’ scrum-half who was a key part of that earlier success. He says that he and his teammates had ‘fun’ as the club raised its game. “I think the main thing we did is that we said we were going to do it our way, we’re going to do it the Quins way, we’re going to go back to our roots, back to what we feel is the way we like to play rugby, do it with a smile on our face,” he says. “And we went and did it.”

“In 21 years of professional sport I’ve never seen it so strong,” adds Millard. “If we lost a game, which we did on the run to winning it, there was no panic, as long as we were doing what we said we’d do and play a certain way, everyone stayed true to that.”

Back in January, Eastwood had spotted the lack of energy. He would conduct 52 interviews with players and staff as he sought to make his recommendations. He says: “Just through some changes in the environment, different philosophies, all of a sudden, this team had this unbelievable amount of energy, and they were the same conditioned group and they were the same people. Something shifted that created this unbelievable energy – and that was the environment, the culture.”

TRUE values

As Eastwood, who joined the Quins board in August, began his research into the club founded in 1866 – the fourth-oldest rugby club in the world – he quickly unearthed characteristics that lent themselves to a neat and powerful acronym: TRUE, which stands for ‘tempo, relationships, unconventional, enjoyment.’

“Owen said this acronym had been around forever,” says Millard. “’Tempo’ – Harlequins play with tempo. ‘Relationships’ – everyone says relationships are important, but we live and breathe that. Our relationships are the foundation of what we do.

“We’re ‘unconventional’. As [prop] Joe Marler says, that means we can do whatever we want. Pretty close. And enjoyment, so T-R-U-E. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s Quins for nearly 160 years.

“[Eastwood] spoke to us about all these amazing stories about relationships and unconventional and enjoyment; and we all tapped into that.”

Care takes up the theme. “I think it’s the main reason we were successful come the end of last season,” he says. “To revisit what the club is all about, I think, for players, sometimes you’re in a hard situation as a player. You feel that you can’t really speak out and say what the coach doesn’t want to hear. But when we did have this reset, I think it was a great opportunity for players, coaches, staff to sit in a room and each of them describe what we needed. I’ve never known an environment where we’ve felt more empowered because we were asked questions.”

Belonging cues

As Care says, the Harlequins players were asked for their input to help shape training and preparation in the absence of a head coaching figure. Tabai Matson would be installed as Head Coach during the subsequent off-season but, there and then, the players led the way and, most importantly, felt heard by Millard and his support staff.

He says: “The coaches fully gave us that trust and listened to us. Then, as a player, you then feel empowered and trusted to go out on the weekend.”

As befitting Quins’ ‘unconventional’ label, changes were made behind the scenes, including the abolition of the ‘captain’s run’ [the traditional final captain-led training session on the eve of a match] and Quins consistently found a level of performance befitting their talent.

Eastwood believes that a fundamental factor was the ‘belonging cues’ the players increasingly received from the coaching staff. It stems from his research into the relationship between energy and hormonal states.

“Fundamentally, from a hormonal point of view, when we go an compete, we will be stressed,” he says. “The two biggest energisers in our hormones are adrenaline and cortisol. It’s not hard to find them when we’re competing, but if we’re only fuelled by them then a) is it sustainable? And b) that type of fuel will have consequences. People in those states can have tunnel vision, they can find it hard to talk. More widely, people who are marinating in cortisol and adrenaline can get into a self-preservation mode and find it hard to connect with other people. People who are fuelled by cortisol and adrenaline can find it hard to be vulnerable; if they don’t understand something they may not put their hand up and say it.

“So what we want to do is create this balance, from a hormonal point of view, when we are in a competitive environment. The cortisol and adrenaline will be there, we don’t need to ramp it up, actually we need to calm it a bit. And what hormones like oxytocin, around our connection with other people; dopamine, which is that motivator pushing us forwards towards the goal; serotonin, which has a regulatory effect on our mood. What we really need to do is, in our environment, promote those hormones. I think there’s a simple way of understanding it and it’s all related to energy.”

Therefore, belonging cues, as Eastwood argues, can have a positive impact on a person’s energy and hormonal balance. “When people receive belonging cues, it’s a massive energiser. So many experiences I’ve had of going into teams where people, they trust me and they’ll talk to me and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know if I belong here, I feel a little bit like an imposter, I don’t know if the coach respects me. I feel like every single thing I’m doing, even training, off the field, I’m being judged and people make decisions all the time about whether I should stick around here.’

“When that happens, again, people start marinating in cortisol, stress hormones and adrenaline. They go within themselves. If they don’t understand something or if they’ve got a weakness in their game that they want to develop, they’re not going to put their hands up and say that because they feel unbelievably vulnerable. We also know that our short-term memories are affected when we’re in that state as well.

“When we feel a sense of belonging, that we actually belong here, that people respect us, we’re in a completely different hormonal state. Our dopamine, oxytocin levels are raised, we’re able to focus on our job and our teammates, if we don’t understand something we feel comfortable in saying that.”

“It was definitely different to what I’ve been used to,” says Care. “I’ve never felt more trusted, empowered, respected, but also then there was a massive responsibility on us as senior players to lead it and the younger players to follow.”

Millard says that the approach is here to stay and, when it comes to recruitment, there is “a method to the madness,” adding, “you’ve got Danny and the leaders telling stories and Owen Eastwood saying ’70 years ago, this is what Quins used to do’ and these young kids are like ‘we’re bigger than this, the spotlight’s on us now but there’s so much that came before us and, in 20 years, we’re still going to be playing this way.’”

This article originally appeared in our Special Report Enhancing Your Environment: Nurturing positive high performance set-ups. It also features insights from English Premier League Brentford FC, Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays and Google.

Download Report

By John Portch

Brentford Head Coach Thomas Frank has been a breath of fresh air in the English Premier League, but some of his experiences are wearily familiar.

“It can be very lonely at the top,” he tells an audience at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium in November.

“My biggest thing is that I really like my family, friends and social life, and you can’t combine the two. I guess you can, but there’s no balance. So I’m constantly saying to myself to do this for maybe five more years. I’m actually on top of everything so, of course, I like to enjoy the Premier League and I’d like to stay here and all that, but it’s tough. I love it, but it’s tough.”

Frank, if his animated touchline demeanour is anything to go by, lives for the matches at the weekend and dies by the results, so to speak. Session moderator Michael Caulfield, who works with Frank and Brentford as a psychologist, asks how he copes with the work-life balance.

“It’s really simple, actually,” begins Frank in response. “My wife, she has absolutely no interest in football. So that’s good. I have two fantastic daughters, one 19, one 15, not interested in football – especially my 19-year-old daughter – she never knows if we’re playing.” Frank clearly values the division between work and his personal life, although he also tells the audience he has a son who takes a keen interest in football.

The Dane has been the Head Coach of Brentford since 2018, when he was promoted from his role as Assistant Head Coach. Three years later his team were promoted to the Premier League, although it might have been sooner had they not lost the 2020 Championship play-off Final to Fulham. The Bees made it in the end having successfully navigated the playoffs at the second time of asking last May.

As he takes to the stage, Frank has been a Premier League Head Coach for a little over three months and was still coming to terms with the increased scrutiny. “The media circus is totally insane,” he tells the audience. “I’m so happy I’m not on social media – I don’t know if any of you are – I will say get rid of it. It’s not worth it.”

Controlling the hurricane

Brentford made a positive start to life in the top tier. Their opening day defeat of Arsenal at their new Community Stadium was quickly followed by a creditable home draw with Liverpool and the Bees looked at home in the Premier League. Before the clocks had gone back observers were citing their success as vindication of their data-informed approach to performance under the owner Matthew Benham.

Frank had been identified by the club as a coach able to give life to their values when he was appointed Dean Smith’s assistant in 2016. He was as far removed as could be from the managerial merry-go-round that characterises English football and it’s questionable whether he would have been given a chance in the Premier League had he not been promoted with Brentford. Frank had worked with Denmark’s men’s underage teams in his homeland before taking the Head Coach’s role at Danish Superliga side Brøndby, where his tenure lasted three years.

The enthusiasm around Brentford has been tempered in some quarters by the club’s mid-season travails – not that Frank was ever carried away by the external narrative – and the west Londoners retain an excellent chance of staying up at the end of their first top-flight season since 1947. “We never say ‘stay up’, by the way – we try to achieve instead of avoid.”

Frank, who infamously lost eight of his first 10 matches in charge before building one of the best sides in the Championship, has developed a healthy self-awareness, which is just as well given the emotions he feels during matches. After 20 minutes of the 2021 play-off final, Brentford were cruising and the Premier League was within touching distance.

“I was thinking ‘have we done it? Have we done it? No! Just stay cool’,” he said, “and there’s just a hurricane inside you; and it’s for 70 minutes and it’s crazy emotions you’re feeling.”

Caulfield, who enjoys a weekly walk with Frank at Brentford’s Jersey Road training ground, asks how he controls that hurricane. “It’s very difficult. I use a lot of energy to stay calm. I’m quite an open, passionate person, but try to be very level with it. When I’m really shouting or anything I can lose my temper, of course, can I do that but very rarely. I’m aware of it and thinking about it every day.

“I think we – Michael and I – find coming in and among the staff and the players really good. We have a catch-up, walk around the training ground for half an hour. [I ask] How’s the staff? How’s the players? All the information I don’t get. Of course, confidential; so if it’s really confidential stuff I don’t get it. I talk about myself as well. I think that’s extremely important. Trying to work on your weaknesses and try to improve your strengths.”

Confident but humble

Frank, a former amateur player, turned to coaching at the age of 20. He says: “I never had a dream when I started coaching when I was 20 years old, 28 years ago, that I wanted to be a Premier League manager. Step by step, I was lucky and privileged to get all of these opportunities. I studied so much: how to be a good coach on the pitch, how to be really good at analysing games, and how to be specific in what I wanted to do.”

Frank recounts a tale from his time as Head Coach of the Denmark men’s under-17s team, a role he held between 2008 and 2012. “Back then, I analysed the game myself – I had no analyst. I got up, 5:30 in the morning, rewatched the game. It took me three and a half hours because I cut it down so that I could present the analysis to the team.”

Each player was presented with 10 clips and he spent 10 to 15 minutes evaluating those clips with each of them. “That gave them something to improve but also the way I wanted to play. So it was of course their individual development but also in their role. I wanted them to succeed. I don’t have the same time now but I have the same mindset.”

Privileged or not, there was nothing inevitable about his ascent to the Premier League but both he and Brentford made it happen. “In all kinds of sport, money is a big part of it. We speak a lot in football that money is 70 per cent and then the last 30 per cent is knowledge, culture, those margins. I think we do these 30 per cent and maybe let’s say 35 per cent unbelievably well.

“We have a fantastic group of staff where we have this unique togetherness and a really good group of players that we built over time and we’re really strong on culture. Togetherness, hard work, attitude and performance; and that’s what I try to drill into the players every single day. Two things I’ve stolen – I can say that out loud, no problem – I love the All Blacks book, Legacy, and that phrase ‘no dickheads’ – a fantastic one-liner.”

Caulfield says that he uses that a lot and Frank agrees. “You know, we only want good people and I think it’s extremely important. People need to be themselves and express themselves, but they need to think for the team and the club.”

Frank is also fond of phrase he first heard from Stuart Worden, the Principal of the BRIT School, a renowned performing arts college in South London. “His one-liner is ‘the right attitude is when you are confident but humble.’ You need to be confident, you need to trust yourself. I need to trust myself, the players need to trust themselves, but if you’re not humble for the work you need to do every single day, we can never achieve anything.”

He expresses deep affection for his players. He does not let sentiment get in the way of his decision-making but feels he can be better at having those difficult conversations, whether it is telling a player they are not playing tomorrow or that their future lies elsewhere.

“The most difficult thing is to keep everyone happy in the squad. It’s impossible and it’s breaking my heart when I can’t play some of the players who aren’t playing. But I trust my gut feeling and, you know, what I believe in, so I go with all the players. But it’s really tough to see some of them giving their all and they’re just not good enough. Maybe it’s only in my opinion, or maybe they are not good enough. You never know before they maybe move club, or I move, and see how their development is. I think that’s really tough. I haven’t found a way, I try to get around them, I try to speak to them, but that’s one of the things I’d like to do better, because it’s so important.”

It is a journey rather than a destination and Frank still “massively” enjoys developing as a coach. “I know when I was 30 I thought I knew everything, but even now I know nothing and I’m constantly trying to develop.”

His claim to know nothing is self-effacing but he is still trying to find the optimal level of control that enables his staff to grow and permits Frank himself to recharge his batteries. “If you don’t delegate then your staff never grow and you can never take a step back, I think that’s extremely important. But I just love to be hands on.” He then permits himself to future-gaze. “Maybe in 10 years I’ll back off a little bit,” he says, already doubling the five years he suggested earlier in the conversation.

As Caulfield draws the session to a close Frank shares a lesson he learned while listening to some fellow coaches at the Leaders P8 Summit the previous day. “We have a player who’s rarely playing but I think he’s so good for the culture. He’s such a culture builder, because he trains like a beast every single day. Now I think I’ll say that to him in front of everyone, when we meet in the coming days.”

By John Portch

• A carefully calibrated facility can attract the best talent in a crowded market

• Consider your athletes’ major staffing touchpoints and use them to your advantage

• Future-proof your building – be wary of designing a space for a specific use

The starting point is people and culture

So says San Antonio Spurs Head Coach Gregg Popovich. ‘Coach Pop’ caught wind of the organisation’s wish to create a new practice facility and approached Phil Cullen, the team’s Director of Basketball Operations & Innovation on the gym floor. “He goes: ‘I’ve got two things for you: protect the culture and protect the people’,” Cullen later told an audience at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. The Spurs have since broken ground on their new facility. “When we talk about design, we talk about influences on design, the human-centredness. It was an approach he really took from day one.”

If you’re building a new facility, be sure your architect listens

Cullen explains that San Antonio had an issue with sports-focused architects whom they consulted. “They try to give you the best rendition of what they’ve just completed,” he said. “They’ll kind of tell you what you want rather than really listening to what you need.” The solution was to partner with an architect that had experience of other sectors. “All of us now are becoming small tech companies; the technology’s integrated in everything we do. Why aren’t we looking at technology companies and how they work to see how it can impact how we’ll work in the future?” The Spurs were left considering aspects and thinking points they may not have otherwise considered.

Who are your athletes’ major touchpoints?

Human-centred design promotes the casual collisions that promote collaboration and creativity. “A lot of times it’s focused on the coaching element, which is extremely important, and player amenities, but how do you facilitate those casual collisions?” said Cullen. “The people that would be in your facility the most and have the most touchpoints are probably not who you think they are. For us, it was our equipment guy. Very often you’ll go back and the players are hanging out with the equipment guy. Why? Because they can just hang out. It’ll be the athletic trainer, it’ll be the guy who’s taping his ankles and helping the guy rehab.” This has been uppermost in the Spurs’ thinking, who have even installed TVs close to the ceiling of their current facility to help take players eyes away from their phones.

Cullen added: “How can we make sure we have the best possible experience so that we’re actually giving them opportunities in their career development; giving them all the resources they want to advance? So that when we go into the marketplace to recruit these guys to have elite talent in our building, we’re not only attracting elite basketball players and elite coaches, but also the staff around them. That’s where collaboration is key. For us, the human-centred design piece is really trying to break down those interactions and it starts when the players pull up into the facility; what’s that experience when they enter in, get out, walk into the parking lot? Who are they walking past when they go to the locker room?”

Future-proof your facility – leave some space free

It can be tempting to throw the kitchen sink at a new facility but the Spurs and Cullen are wary of doing so or being locked into one type of technology. “We’re trying to be intentional about not designing a space for one specific use because it can very quickly become a closet if it can’t be used for more than one thing,” he said. “By far the No 1 thing people tell us is make sure you have enough space. You may not have all the nice designs and be able to finish it all out, be able to brand it, be able to story-tell the way you want, but make sure you get the space because you want to future-proof and you can’t move around in it.”

By John Portch

Chad Morrow, a command psychologist with the US Airforce, succinctly identifies the elephant in the room when it comes to multidisciplinary work.

“When you hire people who are usually at the top of their game and they’ve then got to slow down to work together,” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “I think everyone says they want to do that but if they’ve never done it, I’m not sure they want to do that.”

He goes on to explain that healthcare professionals in the military can recoil when they understand that being embedded can come with limited support. In truth it is not always so different in elite sport.

In our discussion on the creation of holistic teams, we also touch upon:

• Why we need to teach practitioners to talk about ROI [13:00];
• A typical job analysis in the military [16:30];
• How data emanating from your shop floor can be a crucial leadership assessment tool [23:00];
• The pitfalls to avoid in setting up transition processes for service personnel [29:30].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

On International Women’s Day, we reflect on the pivotal roles played by women across high performance sport.

By John Portch

From the front offices to the locker rooms via the psychologist’s couch, we bring you ten performance lessons from the Leaders Performance Institute vaults that continue to resonate today.

1. Athletes need to feel a sense of belonging

The WNBA is renowned for its advocacy of social justice issues and one of the its leading lights, the Seattle Storm, have been at the vanguard under CEO and President Alisha Valavanis. Backed by one of sports few all-female leadership groups in Force 10 Hoops LLC, the Storm has won three championships and made every effort to ensure the players find an inclusive, cohesive locker room where everyone is committed to representing the Storm’s vest.

“It starts with establishing personal relationships and building relationships on trust and connection so that players can share with us what their hopes are off the court,” said Valavanis, speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute in 2020. “There’s a real intentional effort to learn all about all of the individuals in our organisation and we certainly have conversations with players on how we can support them and make sure that everyone is clear what it means to be part of this organisation.”

2. Engage your athletes in their development

When athletes feel secure then you can empower them in both their personal development and the collective. “I’m a big believer in getting players to collaborate, present back, research, share with the group, present to the coaching group and vice versa,” said Jess Thirlby, the Head Coach of the England netball team on the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2020. “It’s a good way for me to check understanding from the group and it helps inform how to set direction and invest my energy when I hear the playing group back and they’ve demonstrated really sound understanding of themselves and the opposition and, not only that, but coming up with ways in which we’re going to pit strengths against their weaknesses.”

3. Make space in your schedule for independent development

Thirlby’s emphasis on empowerment is matched by Lucy Skilbeck, the Director of Actor Training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA]. “One of the things we’re looking at is how we can develop a more facilitative relationship with the student and how we make more space within the timetable for the student’s independent development,” she told a Leaders Performance Institute Webinar in 2021. “We’re also looking at how can we foster in them a greater sense of independence and understanding of themselves as artists and actors; as people who can make and create work as well as deliver other people’s work. Pedagogically, how do we work with them to facilitate the growth of their individuality rather than a monocultural process?”

4. Take a step back

Paula Dunn is the Head Coach of the Paralympic Programme at British Athletics. Ahead of the delayed Tokyo Games, where her team claimed 24 medals, she spoke of the perils of micromanaging. “I thought I had to be in charge, I had to be tough, I had to work the longest hours, I had to have all the answers,” she said. “It’s never good to have a decision made by one person, so I’ve tried to work with my team, understanding what their motivations are, and just being honest when I just don’t know something or if I’ve had issues.”

5. Is the athlete’s real competition the challenge of fulfilling their potential?

Anne Keothavong, the Captain of the Great Britain Fed Cup tennis team, is engaged in the development of the nation’s players and knows that no corners can be cut. As she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018, the challenges can differ from player to player. She said: “Every player represents a different case, depending on where they’re ranked and how old they are, how long they’ve been playing professionally, and what targets they need to hit. I’m not involved on a day to day basis but when I see them in a training or competition environment I’m looking out for whether they’re improving, consistently working on those goals, and the other things they want to focus on to help make them a better tennis player.”

6. Track athletic development through relevant tests

The best data can be linked to specific tests and Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners, walked viewers through a hypothetical process with a pitcher at our February Webinar. “When they come in, we’re going to test range of motion, we’re going to test movement capacity; how are they going to move in a general sense and a baseball-specific sense,” she says. “We’re going to look at the different components of strength, speed, power, we’re going to look at body composition. All these different things that we know contribute to and help support what they do on the field. Then what we’re going to do is look at the on-field data and link that back and go ‘OK, maybe there’s issues with their shoulder separation on the mound.’ We’re going to look through everything and go ‘OK, is it coming from a range of motion issue? Is it coming from just a movement capacity issue?’ Or if it’s not those things maybe it’s just a coaching issue that we have to work on and come up with specific drills.”

7. Data: spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back

“For data capture and analysis, we have a mantra at the EIS: ‘we should spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back’,” said Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the English Institute of Sport. “That’s something that’s been rooted in us since the inception of our Performance Analysis team.” She and her team supported Great Britain’s athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Games and, as she told the Leaders Performance Institute in the aftermath, they prioritise harnessing the latest tech and relationships with the end users. “The software available now is immense,” she added. “There’s so much to choose from, which can be a challenge but we honed in on data visualisation and our ability to translate data into usable insights.”

8. Do not attempt to separate emotion from performance

Sports Psychologist Mia Stellberg feels attempting to shut down emotions is counterproductive for athletes. “The more they can understand emotions, they can explain and understand what they are feeling or how that feeling came to occur is the first step,” she told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2021. “We can never control anything that we are not aware of. So you need to be aware of your emotions, sometimes this is the most tricky part of my work, to talk about emotions to young guys at age 20 who just want to rule the world, play and win the title! Then the second step is understanding how that feeling occurs or what needs to happen before it pops up, so if we want to prevent negative feelings we have to understand what happens before it comes so that we can learn how to control, how to prevent.”

9. Embrace risk, expand comfort zones

Mental performance coach Véronique Richard, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil as well as a variety of sports organisations, attempts to cultivate ‘risk-friendly’ environments. “Risk needs to be part of your environment,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018. Richard strives to foster the conditions for enhanced skill development in the athletes and performance artists with whom she works. In short, she introduces an element of chaos. “By working through that mess, people actually increase their repertoires of thoughts and actions, which contributes to creativity,” she said. “First, I ask the athlete: ‘what are you avoiding not because you’re not skilled enough but because it makes you uncomfortable?’ There’s all sorts of things we don’t do because of discomfort; it can be technical, tactical psychological, emotional, personal, ego and then, as a leader, your role is to find the right stimuli to bring the person to explore discomfort and bring people to work in this zone of discomfort; and if you manage that successfully you actually expand their zone of comfort.”

10. Do your athletes know where to turn for help?

In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport established its Career & Education Practitioner referral network, as Matti Clements, the acting CEO, explained in her former role as Deputy Director of Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement. “That is practitioners who can provide high level expertise on vocational pathways. It’s referral-in and we’ll cover the costs of all podium-plus-level athletes and coaches,” she told an audience at Leaders Meet: Wellbeing. The AIS also provides help for the athlete wellbeing & engagement managers with the provision of a personal development programme. “This is so that we can ensure a level of risk management and skillset across those people. What we’ve done is invite the whole system, including professional sports, into that education and we’re creating community practice hubs so that they can actually have some peer support; it’s led by us, but there’s peer support there.”

• Allow people to be their authentic selves

• Conversations raise empathy levels

• Invite your people to take an active role

What is the biggest obstacle to employees feeling valued and understood?

SC: Psychological safety and fear. People are afraid of getting it wrong or saying the wrong things or they just don’t know how to have the conversation with people. I always say if you’re not trying then you’re not going to make a mistake. If you try, you’re going to make mistakes – it’s just part of who we are as humans. It’s about your intent and your recovery as well. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to get it wrong, everyone is, and it’s about normalising that as well.

There can be dominant cliques or cultures in any organisation, but how can a team or organisation work to not only celebrate but see the value in cultural differences, different modes of thought or ways of thinking?

SC: It’s really about trying to break those cliques or to have one big clique so that everyone feels a part of the team. Everyone can have an activity whether it’s bonding over food or whether it’s celebrating cultural events. That in turn raises people’s awareness and helps them to become culturally competent. You’re giving them the tools to talk about it in a really friendly, informal way as well.

What is the role of leaders in supporting and promoting diversity of thought and culture?

SC: It stops and starts with leaders – that’s a part of leadership. If you think about inclusive leadership, essentially, people just want to be seen and heard for who they are. When people say to me ‘this might seem like a silly question’. No, there are no silly questions. ‘It’s fine, just say it, because I really want to know what you think and how you feel as well’. As leaders, the only way to be inclusive is to role model that inclusivity. It’s not what you say it’s what you do as well. People can work out really quickly that this person says one thing and they mean another; or it’s a tick-box exercise. It’s really about authenticity in this space and admitting to people that you’re going to make mistakes and this is where you are in your EDI journey and this is where you want to be and what support do you need and what support do you expect from people to give you that as a leader as well. It’s definitely a two-way conversation.

What can people in the cultural majority do at an organisation to support?

SC: Talk. It’s talking about it and sharing your experiences, it’s raising empathy levels and giving people the space to open up and talk and about it. Once you’ve opened up and talked about it, it’s ‘OK, what are you going to do about it?’ Because once you start asking the questions of people you need to have some sort of plan in place. And the plan doesn’t have to all be you, you can ask people ‘what do you think we need to do as an organisation? This is the vision of where I want us to be, how are we going to get there collectively?’

At what point will we not be talking about diversity, equity and inclusion?

SC: That’s the magic question, isn’t it – I’d love to be out of a job! That’s my goal in life and I have no answer to that one. The thing is it’s human behaviours and humans evolve and there’s no one mould fits all, it’s different tactics for different people. It’s about little steps every day that create and have a massive impact. Hopefully I’ll have no role – that would be the dream.

An article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“As I’ve followed the thread of this conversation it’s making me realise or it’s helping me to understand that being a learning leader – or being a leader that learns – feels really important,” says Dusty Miller, the Head of People & Culture at British Fencing.

“And the sense of leading or inspiring others to do things they don’t necessarily think they can do.”

Miller is speaking at our latest Keiser Webinar, which was titled ‘Developing the Person and the Practitioner’. He is joined by Duncan Simpson, the Director of Personal Development at IMG Academy and moderator Dehra Harris, who serves as Assistant Director of High Performance Operations at the Toronto Blue Jays.

The trio explored people development on a personal and professional level; what is done well, and what could be done better.

Scaffold your development as you scale

You are perhaps never at a better time to restructure than when you have reached a low ebb. Miller explains that British Fencing currently has just one podium athlete but that he, in his role as Head of People & Culture, is working with the wider team to build elite foundations ahead of the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane. He says: “[We want to] create an environment where people learn from whatever lens they’re viewing the programme through – be it a coach, be it an umpire, be it a parent or stakeholder in the journey – we’re building those world class foundations to grow and scaffolding the learning as we go through without having too much expectation placed on the individual athletes.”

The IMG Academy, which is based in Bradenton, Florida, serves 1,300 student-athletes across eight different sports, and employs over 800 staff. It is more advanced than British Fencing in its efforts to scale and support development but, as Simpson explains, there is a constant process of breaking down the silos that form between subject matter experts. For him, the key lies in its structure where the four facets of student-athlete life – school, campus life, sports and athletic & personal development – are given an almost equal footing. “How organisations are structured actually plays a massive role in the processes and how we see collaboration.”

The power of informal learning opportunities

Structures are important but culture also has a role to play and this informs the thinking around the Toronto Blue Jays’ new training facility, as Harris explains. “If we only meet separately then it doesn’t work,” she says of the staff based at the 65-acre Player Development Complex, which opened in Dunedin, Florida, in February 2021. “Having times where we’re socially together across disciplines helped and not just jumping into meeting structure but having five minutes of shooting the breeze where everybody’s just talking as humans. We recognised that we needed to shift from this relentless productivity of Zoom.”

Performance staff and coaches are also brought together through what Harris calls ‘intentional collisions’, a process that is also popular at Google. She says: “Strength & conditioning sitting down with hitting, we’re going through a bunch of players, we’re looking through an S&C lens and a hitting lens and we’re talking about a specific hitting goal. That’s a place where we’re anchoring a goal but maybe bringing people who aren’t always in the same room together.”

Do with not to the learner

“I need to have a ‘see, feel, hear’ sense of what’s going on so that I can, with the rest of the team, support [the athlete’s] learning in a way commensurate and at a tempo which is good for them,” says Miller. “Hearing, and feeling, and sensing what’s going on with the learner and how we build the learning around them in their context is really important.”

He sums it up with a pithy aphorism: “do with not to the learner.”

At IMG Academy, Simpson tells the virtual audience that learning is divided into three buckets: what the individual prefers to improve in, what they’re required to improve in, and where they are actually improving. He says: “It’s getting an understanding of those three elements. The actual development part is ‘maybe I can have a little impact there’, but it’s also getting them to understand that, ‘yes, you want to develop in this area and that’s fantastic but we can have multiple areas that we’re passionate about but your role may have evolved and changed, or the demands have changed, and you’re required to improve in this area.’”

The open conversation around those three elements, which can be scaled from the individual to the wider team, are the starting point for goal setting each year.

Comfortable being uncomfortable (and curious)

Miller wants people at British Fencing to be comfortable being uncomfortable and, for the audience, draws on his experience serving aboard a nuclear submarine in the Royal Navy. “When people join a submarine they’re walking into a learning environment, which is a high performance learning environment,” he says of an experience he and his shipmates called the ‘fourth dimension’.

“The importance of that is regardless of where you are hierarchically, when you walk into a submarine for the first time you are a learner and the philosophy and the culture inside that submarine is that we need you to be the best version of yourself as soon as possible because you might walk past an incident and you need to know how to deal with it because you’re the first person there. You can’t rely on a subject matter expert to come and bale you out, as it were. That sense of learning, that sense of curiosity, is inculcated in every fabric of every human interaction inside a nuclear submarine.

“Everybody takes responsibility for their individual learning but also their collective learning.”

It is an attitude he has taken into his post-military career with England Rugby, the English Institute of Sport and now British Fencing. “If we can help people to flex their curiosity muscle and encourage people to ask really insightful questions and be curious and want to develop themselves, where we get to is a sense where ‘it’s OK to ask a good question. It’s fine. It’s OK to not have the answer.’ But what we’re encouraging is the ability to be hungry for that learning.”

Making learners feel safe

Harris, who previously worked with medical students, recalls a time when she experienced a safety shift when delivering feedback. “A friend helped me to think about the difference between calling someone out and calling someone in,” she says. “When you call someone out there are relationship stakes. I might fire you, I might do something at you; there’s going to be something happen versus if I’m calling you in, it can be very direct but I’ve removed the relationship stakes by saying at the beginning of the conversation: ‘I appreciate that you’re here, I see all the hard work.’ This is potentially a difficult conversation but there are no stakes. This is us being honest about what is happening. I have to give difficult feedback but I want you to be very clear that we’re working on whatever I say.”

In addressing the question of belonging and psychological safety, Simpson cites American entrepreneur Charlie Munger. “He always talks about how much he underestimates the power of incentives,” he says. “When I sit down with individuals, I may have this picture of how great it is to work here, and we’re all pushing in the same direction, but I also need to understand the individual’s incentives. Why do they come to work, what are they here to do, what are they motivated by?”

Time is another factor, says Miller, who stresses the importance of trust and rapport. “Also with the learner, it’s giving them attainable goals in the short-term so that they feel success for themselves. Harris concurs, adding: “Succeeding is cooler than only failing.”

Tracking growth and development

The panel agree that evaluating learning can be difficult and Miller uses the Kirkpatrick Model, which is widely used for evaluating training and learning programmes, to explain why he feels he has fallen short at times.

“Organisations that plan big learning and development programmes often stop at the reactionary phase, the foundation phase i.e. ‘how did it feel? What was the learning like?’” he says. “The next level to that is how you are transferring that knowledge into your context. Then Kirkpatrick will suggest, actually, it’s a bit deeper than that because it’s how are you applying it? This takes time. Where we want to get to is how has it behaviourally made a difference to the organisation?

“When I think about learning programmes now, I think about how I’m going to evaluate it in the first six to eight weeks after the experience; what does the transfer of knowledge into the context look like? I plan that, six weeks out to three months. Three months out is how they’re applying it in their context and then, finally, in a year’s time, if we review and reflect on that learning experience for those individuals, what does that look like and how does it change the human behaviours inside the organisation?”