Main Image: Paul Gilham / Getty Images

By Peter Hodgkinson

If Sir Lewis Hamilton took a risk when joining us at Mercedes in 2013, then his first proper day of testing at Jerez in southern Spain would have done little to assuage any lingering doubts.

Lewis’ rear brakes failed on his 16^th lap and he careered into a wall at turn six, which is known as ‘Dry Sack’ corner. He emerged from the wreckage unhurt but his car’s front wing assembly, front uprights and the floor were all damaged in the accident and we had no spares at the circuit. To compound matters we also needed to supply a fix for that rear brake failure.

As the Head of Build for Mercedes F1, I was one of the first to receive the bad news from the Race Team in my office back at our HQ in Brackley, Northamptonshire. Not long after I put down the phone, Aldo Costa, our Engineering Director, came to find out the status of available spares.

The crash had only just happened so I did not have all the answers. I told Aldo I would get back to him shortly. I said much the same to Rob Thomas, our COO, when he stopped by. It was not long before a stream of people came to my office looking for answers and a plan. It was a big moment and I could feel the pressure building. I told some to stand by and others to go and gather information.

Then I told everyone I was going to lunch.

I could see the shock on their faces. How can you eat at a time like this?

For my part, I needed to get out of my office. I normally ate lunch at my desk so my trip to the canteen was out of character. People could see that. I sat on my own and ate for 20 minutes but at the same time my mind was going flat out.

When I got back to my office I knew what we needed to do.

Mercedes teammates Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton in 2013. Photo: Clive Mason / Getty Images

I called everyone to gather around for a short meeting (no one else had moved). We figured out what we knew and what required answers then came up with a basic plan and assigned responsibilities. The Composite Build team looked after the floor and the front wing along with Compbond and the design team. Sub Assembly had to look after the front uprights that were still in the Machine Shop.

I went looking for what we didn’t know because we couldn’t afford any surprises. The Race Team in Jerez needed sufficient time to rebuild the car. I needed to know both the latest the private jet could depart from the airport in nearby Oxford and if a car floor would even fit through the door of the plane. We also booked extra vans to take parts to Jerez and assigned extra people to support repairs at the circuit.

Once we had timings, we were able to understand what we could achieve in the time available. I’d like to think everyone had clearly defined roles and knew their responsibilities. There were so many details to sort out and any one of those could have prevented the car from running the next day.

Instead of meetings – there simply wasn’t time – I walked a thousand miles around the factory gathering and communicating information, asking and answering questions. That communication was dynamic. It was mostly verbal but reinforced with an email when time permitted. I kept Rob and Aldo informed of progress. The late Barry James, who was our Composite Manufacturing Manager, and Darren Burton, our Ops Director, worked with their departments to ensure we got all the support required.

The car ran the next day. It was a true team effort. The damaged parts were returned from Jerez for inspection, repair and service and a fix was sent out for the rear brake issue. It was an amazing recovery from a difficult situation, but that is Formula 1.

So, what did I learn? These moments are important, as the way you react to them is what you will be measured by as a person and a leader. If you think back on your careers, you will have good and bad moments. Some will be short, others will be longer. It will not stay tough forever, it will get better, but nor will it stay under control. Something will happen.

It is important to think about your behaviours in good and bad moments.

Firstly, Lewis’ crash hit five pressure drivers:

1. High stakes: it was Lewis Hamilton’s first drive in a Mercedes and he crashes
2. Uncertainty: what spares were we missing and what else could prevent us from running?
3. Small margins: what if we inadvertently miss a part and the car cannot run tomorrow?
4. Fast change: the car was running and then it wasn’t. That’s a fast change.
5. Judgement: as Head of Build, I felt I would be judged on how I lead my team in this moment; how did I react as an individual and how did my team behave? This would be a reflection of me and my leadership in the part we played to get the car running again.

So, why I did I go to lunch?

I want to explain my rationale with reference to Dr Ceri Evans’ Red-Blue model, as set out in his 2020 book Perform Under Pressure. I cannot recommend it highly enough for a fuller, clinically-informed account of the principles of performance under pressure and how one can gain emotional control at the times when you need it most.

Ceri proposes a three-step model:

1. Step Back: recognise your current mental state and feelings
2. Step Up: reframe and move into a logical mental state
3. Step In: engage with clarity and confidence. Take v Wait

Here, I’ll explain how I approached each in turn after Lewis hit that wall.

The Step Back

I needed to go to lunch. I was under pressure and could feel it. I had to get out of my office and away from the noise. I realised that this was a flight response. I also realised I was under both internal and external pressure. My heartrate was up and you are trying to think of numerous things at the same time. Going to lunch allowed me to move from Step Back to Step Up. It gave me a moment to move away from the emotional response and start to come up with a mental plan of what we were going to do next.

The Step Up

You need to understand what is going on and start coming up with a plan for what you need to do and the desired outcome you seek.

In Step up mode, I was moving from Red mind to Blue mind. This requires a further explanation with a little help from Ceri, who describes two interacting mental systems:

• Red Brain: this operates in the present and is driven by emotion and feelings. It is associated with fight, fright or freeze responses.
• Blue Brain: this is driven by logic, analysis and control, which helps with clarity, planning and decision making.

Neither state is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There must be a balance, as too much Red can make you impulsive, emotional and reactive, while too much Blue can leave you detached and hesitant.

In Step Up mode, I was moving from Red to Blue, from emotions and feelings to logic and planning. I allowed my Blue to dampen the Red. I now had an idea of a plan and what we needed to do and I remember very clearly feeling energised and ready to rock ’n’ roll.

The Step In

You have a plan to start tackling the issue, using the clarity of the Blue combined with the energy of the Red system. Trust you skillset, you are the best in the world at what you do.

We talked through the basic plan and off we went to face the challenges in front of us. During the course of that day, well into the evening, I remember going back to Step Back mode as something went wrong but this was quickly followed by Step Up (planning) and Step In (doing). Red/Blue, Decide and Do.

That day I was in a purple patch, balancing the Red and Blue.

How this impacted my behaviour

I knew that how I behaved and the language I used would impact the people working on this challenge. The pressure was on and one wrong word could trigger a shift back to a Red brain response, which we simply could not afford.

I also felt trusted by Aldo and Rob, who knew I would play my part to help resolve the issues along with the rest of the team. They didn’t interfere with what we were doing and allowed us to get on with the job. We made sure to regularly check-in with them both, providing updates and seeking their thoughts on something in those moments when we were stuck. It was classic Intent-Based Leadership in action.

This was one of many situations we faced weekly at MGP and no F1 team is any different.

You will be judged on how you respond and react to these moments. It is not about placing blame, it is about movement and making extraordinary things happen using the right mindset and behaviours.

Finally, there will always be lessons from these moments, so make the most of them. They are a great opportunity to improve as individuals, teams and organisations.

Lewis Hamilton, with Lotus driver Kimi Räikkönen and Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg on his tail at the 2013 Australian Grand Prix. Photo: Ker Robertson / Getty Images

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 37^th America’s Cup.

If you would like to speak to Peter, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

The 2025 French Open men’s champion Carlos Alcaraz is one of a select few to have won a Grand Slam final from match point down.

“I think the real champions are made in situations when you deal with that pressure,” said Alcaraz at Rolland-Garros in Paris last month. “That’s why I saw my best tennis in crucial moments, and that’s why I saw my best tennis in those difficult situations.”

Performance under pressure was a theme that run through the month of June here at the Leaders Performance Institute, starting with the wise words of Red Bull’s big wave surfer Ian Walsh.

His approach is geared around managing his fear. “Those nerves and everything you fear are natural, and you can use that to elevate your performance,” he said in this article. “It commands every ounce of your being and your focus to deal with what’s coming at you and how you want to navigate it to try and finish on your feet.”

Elsewhere, we returned to the question of alignment, named the common causes of inadaptability, and asked the Brisbane Lions to talk about their approaches to female athlete health.

What if there’s clarity in your communication as a team, but still you suffer from misalignment?

Edd Vahid, the Premier League’s Head of Academy Football Operations, answered this in a recent interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

He explained there could be a few factors at play, all of which point to the importance of feedback:

Staff development needs. If a staff member commits an error of execution, it is an opportunity to deliver developmental feedback. Vahid says: “Does everyone understand what we’re going after? If they do and they step outside of that, then feedback is warranted.”

Psychological safety. “It’s a buzz term,” says Vahid of the commonly used phrase, “but it’s crucial for people to feel they are in a feedback culture.” The leader must show that the intent of feedback is to help the individual to progress. “You’re taking time to give them feedback because you care,” he adds. “You’re then seeking to work with the individual to create that development.”

The leader’s behaviour. Leaders must also demonstrate their willingness to listen to feedback. “They need to provide ‘speak up’ signals,” says Vahid with reference to the work of psychologist Megan Reitz. “The leader needs the skill to understand the position they’re in and the power they carry in that dynamic.”

The four inhibitors that prevent adaptability in a complex world

Those four inhibitors are discussed in great detail here, but one that will discuss below is when leaders themselves become the bottleneck due to their authoritative approach.

“Authoritative leadership has been proven time and time again to be effective in very short bursts,” said Tim Cox of Management Futures at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, “but it isn’t much good for adaptability.” The reasons are simple enough. “It’s really difficult for one person to be able to think through, be creative, respond to the environment around them when things are changing at a high pace.”

Leaders, Cox said, should:

• Set the ambition or intent but remember: “the empowered leadership style is always more effective.” It fosters motivation, creativity, and collaborative problem-solving.

• Consider the four Fs of effective, empowered leadership. “Any good model needs a four something or a three something,” said Cox, “and here are the constituent parts, which you will recognise.”

Focus: The leader must deliver clear, strategic alignment where everyone understands the direction and purpose of their work.

Feedback: Regular feedback and debriefing are essential for learning and continuous improvement, especially in dynamic settings.

Freedom: Give people autonomy and allow them to explore, innovate, and respond to change.

Fusion: This is about building strong relationships and collaboration, both within and beyond your organisation with a view to harnessing collective intelligence

Leadership is stagnating

This idea of leadership stagnating was revealed in stark terms in our Trend Report earlier this year.

The Trend Report revealed that 57 per cent of practitioners believe that leadership within their organisation has stayed the same or got worse in recent years.

The primary factors appear to be the shift towards task orientation and the pressure to ‘win now’, which can act to stifle innovation and long-term thinking. Leaders, as a selection of Leaders Performance Institute members agreed during a June roundtable, have less bandwidth, less time for staff development and even less time for staff onboarding.

Ben Baroody of Abilene Christian University, who co-led the session with Edd Vahid, observed that even at organisations that prioritise leadership development, stagnation is still reported.  For Baroody, this is compounded by what he sees as the link between alignment and (high) quality leadership.

Vahid questioned whether leaders are giving themselves enough capacity to lead effectively and, as such, he is an advocate of distributed leadership models and leaders who invest in their own development as well as that of their people.

The virtual floor also highlighted the importance of skills including influencing, an ability to hold honest conversations, and active listening.

The Brisbane Lions have turned female athlete health into a performance question

The renewed focus on female athlete health is a direct result of the work of Matt Green, the Lions’ High Performance Manager for AFLW and his team.

As an organisation, the Lions focus on five key, interrelated areas:

1. Pelvic health. “This is of primary importance,” said Green. “We want to give women and girls information around what’s normal, what’s not, and what we can actually do about it.” Services include a women’s health specialist physio. These help bring conditions such as stress urinary incontinence to the fore “when a lot of female athletes may be dealing with these issues in silence”.
2. Breast health. Annual breast-screening and bra fittings (plus the provision of a bra) are now standard. “There’s some damning statistics that more than 50 per cent of female athletes wear an ill-fitting bra,” said Green, who alluded to the increased risk of breast injury when an athlete is not wearing suitable equipment.
3. Gynaecology. The Lions now have a gynaecologist embedded in their program and the club is “starting to get players thinking about family planning”. This helps normalise the conversation and provides a safe and supportive environment for all athletes thinking about family planning.

A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

When Bianca Rech shares a decision with FC Bayern’s players, she knows instantly how it has landed.

“You feel it,” says the Director of Bayern’s women’s programme. “You already know when you look at their faces. You’re like ‘I think she doesn’t like it’, ‘yeah, she likes it’ and ‘she needs a bit of proof’. It’s like sometimes I see myself sitting on the other side.”

The ‘other side’, as Bianca tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders’ John Portch, refers to her transition from a Germany international and Frauen-Bundesliga regular to a senior leader of the German champions, whom she represented on the pitch for four years.

“It’s so much harder now when you sit on that side now,” she adds, reflecting on how she used to feel as a player. “I see myself sitting on the other side, like, ‘oh, maybe I have to talk to them again’.”

In this third and final episode of our special series with Teamworks, Bianca touched upon several of the major themes that emerged from our recent Special Report High Performance Unpacked: interconnected performance teams.

She spoke of her role in helping to transform the Bayern culture on and off the pitch [37:00]; keeping the athlete at the centre of the performance jigsaw [14:30]; the importance of sports psychology [31:00]; and the thoughtful integration of technology [21:00].

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

Episode One: Simon Rice, the Philadelphia 76ers

Episode Two: Miranda Menaspà, the Australian Institute of Sport

By John Portch

Let’s start with a question: is the VUCA Framework still fit for purpose?

Many of you will be familiar with VUCA (which stands for ‘volatility’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘complexity’ and ‘ambiguity’) and employed it in your day to day work.

It looks like this:

VUCA was devised in military circles in the 1980s as a strategic response to external forces and is both analytical and structural. It remains a useful tool for planning and building resilience.

However, there is a growing consensus that VUCA alone does not capture the emotional and psychological toll as environments become increasingly complex.

In 2018, the author Jamais Cascio, a self-styled ‘futurist’, published his BANI Framework, which is his effort to introduce a more human-centred lens, that emphasises fragility, emotional responses, and the breakdown of linear logic.

Here is an outline:

And here is how it may look in your environment:

“Cascio sees BANI as parallelling VUCA, but he thinks VUCA is not real enough,” said Tim Cox of Management Futures, the host of a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “He’s not saying BANI replaces VUCA, but he feels that it’s much more up to date with what’s going on at the moment.”

It helped to set the scene for the second session of our three-part Virtual Roundtable series entitled ‘Leading in Complexity’.

Which trap is most common in your organisation?

In part one, we explored how adaptability can increase the chances of an effective response to complexity.

In part two, we turned our attention to four common factors that can inhibit your ability to be adaptable and asked the table to select their most common ‘trap’.

1. Being overwhelmed or hijacked by our emotions – cited by 11 per cent
2. Operating from out-of-date assumptions or an out-of-date map of the world – 47 per cent
3. When authoritative leadership causes a bottleneck – 21 per cent
4. Inflexibility – 21 per cent

Cox then spoke to each trap in turn.

1. Being overwhelmed or hijacked by our emotions

This trap was cited by the fewest attendees but, as Cox explained, “even in sport we are often hijacked by emotions and we fail to adapt because they override our thinking.”

One must “relax, observe, and make a call”. Cox has some tips on that front:

• Recognise and harness your emotional responses – don’t suppress them – to help maintain equilibrium under pressure.
• Practise deliberate breathing to help regulate arousal levels and maintain composure.
• Rehearse for high-pressure moments – this enables leaders to respond with intention rather than reacting impulsively.

2. Operating from out-of-date assumptions or an out of date map of the world

Nearly half of attendees cited this as the most prominent trap.

It is an enacting metaphor too. “The classic operating from an out-of-date map was the belief that the world was flat,” said Cox. “It limited people and it spread fear in people not to go beyond certain points.”

Without active sense-making, he explained, leaders risk falling into mental ruts that limit adaptability.

Cox recommended the following:

• Stay open to both the internal and external environment. Seek new insights from all sources and, as far as possible, foster the ‘collective brain’ in pursuit of collaborative reflection and shared understanding.
• Leaders should routinely challenge their assumptions, not just during crises or formal reviews. Unchecked assumptions can be a major blocker to progress and adaptability.
• Find ways to surface and explore new ways of thinking. Cox has witnessed Lego Serious Play, which is a facilitation method designed to provoke conversation.
• Employ the OODA Loop and STOP frameworks. The OODA Loop is explained in all its glory here. Cox shared a slide that illustrated STOP.

It is a practical method for fostering adaptability and creative problem-solving in complex environments:

3. When authoritative leadership causes a bottleneck

Our poll indicated that more than one in five attendees rank this as their team’s most prominent inhibitor.

“Authoritative leadership has been proven time and time again to be effective in very short bursts,” said Cox, “but it isn’t much good for adaptability.” The reasons are simple enough. “It’s really difficult for one person to be able to think through, be creative, respond to the environment around them when things are changing at a high pace.”

Leaders should:

• Set the ambition or intent but remember: “the empowered leadership style is always more effective.” It fosters motivation, creativity, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Consider the four Fs of effective, empowered leadership. “Any good model needs a four something or a three something,” said Cox, “and here are the constituent parts, which you will recognise.”

Focus: The leader must deliver clear, strategic alignment where everyone understands the direction and purpose of their work.

Feedback: Regular feedback and debriefing are essential for learning and continuous improvement, especially in dynamic settings.

Freedom: Give people autonomy and allow them to explore, innovate, and respond to change.

Fusion: This is about building strong relationships and collaboration, both within and beyond your organisation with a view to harnessing collective intelligence

4. Inflexibility

As with authoritative leadership, our poll indicated that more than one in five attendees rank this as their team’s most prominent inhibitor.

Cox had a selection of ideas that leaders might consider:

• Low-risk experimentation and incremental learning. “If you want to test something test it small. Only once you’ve proven it do you test with a bigger project.”
• Create safe zones where teams can experiment without fear of failure. “Where’s the sandbox that we can play in so that we can adapt? Then we’re not just sat there waiting for the world to change.”
• Environmental design and psychological safety both foster flexible thinking. “Place the brain in a space that’s more amenable to learning.”

Other inhibitors cited by Leaders Performance Institute members:

• Success can create complacency. When an organisation is winning or leading, there’s often less perceived need to change. This can reduce the urgency or willingness to challenge existing practices.
• Excessive caution and due diligence. Even when presented with novel opportunities, organisations may hesitate due to fear of doing something untested or unfamiliar.
• Over-reliance on process and certainty. This is especially problematic when emerging technologies require rapid experimentation and adaptation.
• Emotional bias and distorted perception. To build on Cox’s earlier point, leaders should be aware of their own cognitive and emotional filters when interpreting events or people. It takes intellectual humility to recognise that your perspective may be limited, biased or closed to certain viewpoints. Such self-awareness helps to prevent emotionally-driven or misinformed decisions.

Sign up for Part Three

In the third and final session on 3 July, we will explore building a collective playbook for leading in complexity:

Learning Series: Leading in Complexity (Part Three)

By Luke Whitworth

The coaches and practitioners who downloaded The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport were given the opportunity to share their thoughts at a recent Virtual Roundtable.

The session was led by two report contributors, namely Edd Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, and Ben Baroody, the Executive Director at the Center for Sports Leadership & Learning at Abilene Christian University.

Firstly, the duo asked the virtual room to select which of the five trends highlighted in the Trend Report resonated most with them. This is what the poll revealed:

1. Alignment is more integral to success than ever before – 42 per cent
2. Leadership is stagnating – 16 per cent
3. Resourcefulness continues to trump resource – 16 per cent
4. Psychology is increasingly game-changing – 16 per cent
5. Smart teams are leading the tech arms race – 11 per cent

We now had the basis for our discussion of the five.

Trend No 1: Alignment is more integral to success than ever before

The clear winner in our poll. Baroody suggested that while ‘alignment’ is a commonly-used term, its practical application is often vague; additionally, silos persist. There are several common factors that hinder alignment:

• A lack of clarity, including board-level understanding (and support).
• The growth of multidisciplinary teams and the complexity of performance mean there is often tension between organisational purpose and departmental goals. This can lead to unresolved interdepartmental tensions.
• The increasing commercialisation of sport as business and performance operations converge.
• The post-Covid transition to hybrid working continues and the comparative lack of in-person interaction means teams must be more deliberate in their efforts.

Baroody stressed the need for clarity in daily operations, especially in decision-making and strategic direction, if alignment is to be brought to bear. Vahid also praised practitioners who can simplify complexities and present ideas in a clear manner that promotes unity.

Trend No 2: Leadership is stagnating

The Trend Report revealed that 57 per cent of practitioners believe that leadership within their organisation has stayed the same or got worse in recent years.

The primary factors appear to be the shift towards task orientation and the pressure to ‘win now’, which can act to stifle innovation and long-term thinking. Leaders, as the floor pointed out, have less bandwidth, less time for staff development and even less time for staff onboarding.

Baroody observed that even at organisations that prioritise leadership development, stagnation is still reported.  For him, this is compounded by what he sees as the link between alignment and (high) quality leadership.

Vahid questioned whether leaders are giving themselves enough capacity to lead effectively and, as such, he is an advocate of distributed leadership models and leaders who invest in their own development as well as that of their people.

The virtual floor highlighted the importance of skills including influencing, an ability to hold honest conversations, and active listening.

Trend No 3: Resourcefulness continues to trump resource

Performance programmes are impacted in all directions whether it’s by ownership, internal politics or resource allocation.

As Vahid illustrated, your people remain your central competitive advantage. He argued that success is less about having greater resources than prioritising more effectively. Both he and Baroody emphasised a leaders ability to adapt, which comes from greater alignment around a clear purpose. With clarity comes a greater ability to prioritise.

Trend No 4: Psychology is increasingly game-changing

The Trend Report identified psychology as the most underserved area across the human performance disciplines in sport.

More than 40 per cent made that point despite a full 80 per cent stating their belief that psychology is ‘very important’ to the enhancement of human performance.

So if we know psychology is vitally important, why is the consensus that it isn’t working effectively across parts of the industry? There are several commonly cited reasons:

• Too often psychology is perceived as a tool only for when things go wrong.
• A lack of understanding in how psychology interacts with adjacent disciplines such as player care and wellbeing. This leads to inconsistencies for both the psychologist in their practice and stakeholder understanding.
• Mental skills, as an element of psychology, were described by one participant as a “side dish” rather than as a core component of their programme.

There are, however, steps that teams can take:

• Adopt a strengths-based, proactive approach that integrates psychological skills into daily routines for both athletes and staff.
• Better integration stemming from clearer role definitions and broader access to psychological services.
• Psychological services can be hard to measure. Find metrics that enable psychologists to demonstrate the efficacy of their work.

Trend No 5: Smart teams are leading the tech arms race

Vahid stated that while we remain “data rich” we are still “insight-poor”. In the Trend Report, only 43 per cent of practitioners reported having a clear decision-making process for adopting new technologies, which means the rapid pace of development is not always matched by effective integration.

Vahid, Baroody and the wider table offered a series of tips:

• First understand the performance questions you are trying to solve before engaging with tech; be more evidence-based and solution-focused.
• Not all tech is created equal and it is too easy to accumulate unused tools (which add to the inefficiency). Promote rigorous evaluation processes that take into account your organisational goals.
• More sports and teams are hiring chief technology officers or R&D leads to oversee their tech strategy and to guard against siloed adoption. It’s worked in other industries and sport should pay heed.

Other trends in your sport, discipline or environment that are not mentioned in the Trend Report:

• A lack of diversity in leadership. The hiring of the same people for the same roles. Perhaps this contributes to stagnating leadership. Recruitment methods must evolve to meet the changing landscape and more time must be spent identifying good leaders.
• Similarly, there is a lack of suitable mentors. Teams must invest more in their staff and mentorship schemes to ensure healthy levels of both challenge and support.
• A lack of resource and clarity around wellbeing and belonging. Both are crucial as work environments evolve.
• More openness to learning. People are increasingly looking beyond sport for inspiration.
• The increasing need to demonstrate ROI. It is important to find suitable mechanisms.

And if you haven’t read the Trend Report yet:

The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport

By John Portch

When Chris Fagan’s Brisbane Lions won the AFL in 2024 it completed their transformation under his stewardship.

Their premiership success was not a bolt from the blue – they had reached the Grand Final a year earlier – but it was a far cry from the 18^th place finish the Lions managed in 2017, which was Fagan’s first campaign at the helm.

He appeared at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London – just weeks after Brisbane narrowly lost the Grand Final to Collingwood.

There were no guarantees that they would make the decider again in 2024 but Fagan, who had his doubters in Australia, transmitted confidence from the Oval stage. “Last year [2022], we lost the preliminary final by 71 points. A lot of people said we wouldn’t recover from that,” he said. “This year, we made a Grand Final and lost it by four points. I said to the players, ‘we’re getting better, we’re getting closer. We’ve been the most successful team over the last few years. Be proud of that. The team we played in the Grand Final is older and more experienced, so that’ll be good for us.”

So it was to prove. But the focus here is those early years, when Fagan worked to turnaround a faltering team. It was only in year three, when the team jumped from 15^th to 2^nd in the AFL ladder, that his methods were vindicated by points and victories.

There were three factors that underpinned Fagan’s approach.

1. He sought partners in the process

In 2017, Fagan arrived with his vision for a high performance culture. In outline it bore some familiar features:

But in order to deliver this through a strategic plan, Fagan needed everyone onside. It wouldn’t be easy in what had become a “poor bugger, me” environment. “I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there,” he said.

Over the course of four weeks he solicited the views of every player and member of staff. “I wanted to send a message to everyone at the club that they would be listened to, that it wasn’t just me coming in and telling them what was going to happen,” he added. “I wanted to find out what they thought the club needed to do to become better because they needed to be partners with me in the process. I think they appreciated that because they hadn’t had a process for a long time. They’d just been told what to do.”

This brought him trust and credibility during those first two seasons when there was barely a flicker of improvement in scoreboard terms.

2. The team became ‘the happiest bunch of losers’

Fagan is a big believer in high challenge, high support for players in pursuit of their goals. The challenges were plain to see in 2017, and the first measure of support came from Fagan himself. “I see myself as the chief energy and psychological safety officer,” he said onstage. “I want to build an environment where the players and staff feel trusted and motivated, because that certainly wasn’t the case when I turned up.”

Even as the poor results endured, the team’s morale did not falter. “You’d have said we were the happiest bunch of losers during the early years,” says Damien Austin, the club’s High Performance Manager. “We celebrated everything because we were such a young team.” That included winning quarters of games, strength gains or running PBs in training. “We were always striving for progression,” he continues. “And if there wasn’t progression there’s a reason why, and I think like any young kids today, you’ve got to take them on a journey.”

It chimes with Fagan’s emphasis on growth mindsets and, as a former teacher himself, the importance of learning day in day out. As ever in a Fagan team it comes with a human face. His list has a WhatsApp group chat called ‘Moments of greatness’ where players celebrate examples of their teammates setting new standards.

3. Fagan worked to increase his team’s ‘leadership density’

AFL veteran Luke Hodge joined the Lions’ journey for Fagan’s first two years. The new coach’s first big recruitment decision was to bring in the man he regarded as “the greatest captain to ever play the game” from Hawthorn, the club from which Fagan himself had joined Brisbane.

“He was well and truly at the end of his career,” said Fagan of the four-time premiership player. “But I just wanted somebody to come in and role model great leadership to a young group of players.”

Additionally, Fagan worked with leadership consultant Simon Fletcher to devise a leadership development programme for senior and emerging leaders. “The first thing he did was establish a trademark, which was a reference point for leadership.”

To this day the Lions’ trademark is built around the concepts of ‘brotherhood’, ‘heart’ and ‘selflessness’:

But Fagan knows as well as anyone that these are just words on a wall without the behaviours that drive and sustain these ideas. “The players come up with those and we drive it,” said Fagan of the Lions coaching staff.

“After a game, the players have to send me a text the day after and one of the things they need to rate is their compliance to the trademark for that game.” Usually, the better the result and performance, the higher the rate of compliance. It can go the other way when the team loses. In any case, “we have a vision of it being done well and we also show a vision of when it’s not so good”. Additionally, the Lions hand out a ‘brother of the week’ award, where players are invited to vote via WhatsApp for the player who best demonstrated the trademark behaviours that week.

In summary…

Fagan understands that if your environment is highly demanding then it must also be highly supportive. He has clear ideas on what motivates people that go back to his days as a teacher:

He said: “To be motivated, you have to have a clear purpose, that feeling that you’re improving, which I think our guys hadn’t felt for a long, long time. There is a desire to be listened to and to be a participant in your own growth and development; and that connection with teammates, staff and community.

“I put that model up as areas we would spend a lot of time on over the next few years, trying to grow our culture and team into a better place.”

What to read next

Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By Luke Whitworth

David Beckham was one of the first athletes in sport to be described as a ‘cultural architect’.

The label was used by sports psychologist Willi Railo, who worked as a consultant in the early 2000s for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England men’s national team Manager at the time.

“He has grown to become a cultural architect,” said Railo of then England captain Beckham in a BBC documentary titled The England Patient, which was broadcast ahead of the 2002 Fifa World Cup.

“[Beckham] has today a very great influence on the attitudes of the other players and he is thinking along the same lines as Sven-Göran Eriksson. So he’s a very good tool for Sven.”

According to Railo, cultural architects are “people that are able to change the mind-set of other people. They’re able to break barriers, they have visions, they are self-confident and they are able to transfer their own self-confidence to a group of people”.

Present day cultural architects include figures such as the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi, Australia men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins, and Chelsea Women captain Millie Bright. The list is endless when you dig down.

Your cultural architects can be coaches or staff members too. They can be anyone who pays enormous attention to culture. Critically, while they are not always the most senior leader, they do have to have the ear of those leading.

The idea that cultural architects can emanate from anywhere gave real impetus to a recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute explored various interventions and the value of adopting a strengths-based approach to building culture.

Current cultural goals

What established goals do you have in your organisations that relate to your wider organisational culture?

One of the trends we’re noticing when it comes to cultural leadership is a focus on one specific aspect of culture at a time. The participants in the session identified a series of culture-strengthening goals that, if achieved, would deliver a competitive advantage:

• Collaboration across functions
• Continuous improvement
• Innovation and creativity
• Belonging, identity and wellbeing
• Psychological safety
• Use of data to inform decisions

When you align behind a goal, progress can be swift.

The six levers needed to lead a cultural change

In the session, we revisited six key levers for leading cultural change.

1. Make the key principles ‘sticky’

A message needs to be heard at least six times for a person to take it in and, if the principles are ‘sticky’, they naturally become easier to remember. Consider your straplines or strategy: do they meet that level of ‘stickiness’? A good example from the Olympic world is the question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ Another is the All Blacks’ ‘leave the jersey in a better place’.

2. Role models

This is the classic example of ‘words on the wall’ versus living the values. If the leaders and cultural leaders really model those behaviours, it’s what people will experience and lead by. Research in the field of inclusive leadership shows that leaders can influence the people, the athletes, the organisation around them by up to 70 per cent with their behaviours.

3. Culture conversations

A team must constantly review their organisation and culture and reflect on their current status. Ask yourself: where are our gaps? Where are our strengths? How can we improve? You can use a system rating scale from 1-4 to guide some of these insights. These system rating scales create an opportunity for those culture conversations to emerge and they provide an insight into the health of the culture at a specific moment in time.

4. Develop skills and processes to support intent

Take psychological safety: it is important to enable people to speak up. If you provide such opportunities it supports the intent to make positive change.

5. Feedback

Feedback is critical, yet people do not always deliver skilful feedback. Too often it can feel personal, it provokes defensiveness and is ultimately counterproductive. It is better to create a feedback loop and a culture of ‘skilled candour’ (a twist on Kim Scott’s ‘radical candour’) so that people are able to deliver feedback in a skilful manner.

6. Get the right people on the bus

When engaging in culture change, do you have the right people in your environment? It may come to a time when you have to make a decision about who needs to be on the bus – and who doesn’t.

The power of AI (appreciative inquiry)

Appreciative inquiry is a social constructivist-informed model that seeks to engage people in self-determined change. The model, which was devised in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is inherently positive. It focuses on discovering and amplifying the best of what already exists (individually and collectively) within a system or organisation. It stands in contrast to most change models, which tend to identify problems and seek to fix them.

What are some of the benefits of appreciative inquiry?

The model:

• Leverages existing strengths, requiring less change and new learning.
• Creates positive energy, building confidence and pride.
• Taps the experience of those on the frontline and fosters ownership for performance.

How we do it:

• Identify and share examples where you have been at your best and forensically unpick those.
• Identify behaviours that stand out and challenge people to be specific.
• Maintain disciplined focus on positive examples.

Here are some reflective questions you can use within your environments when considering what aspects of your culture you want to develop:

• Think of at least one example of where you have seen this behaviour at its best in your culture. A subsequent coaching question could then be: ‘what stands out from these examples?’ The key is to be specific.
• Think of an individual who exemplifies this behaviour in your culture. Here’s an additional coaching question: what specifically do they do? Summarise key behaviours and standards from your discussion within a ‘we are at our best when we…’ framework.

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By the Leaders Performance Institute team

Collingwood captain Darcy Moore once compared preparing to play Australian rules football to spinning plates.

“There are parts of your game going well at a particular time and other parts of your game that are not going well,” he told Fox’s Face to Face in 2023.

“You’re trying to improve these things without sacrificing the things you’re doing well.”

He and Collingwood span those plates with alacrity during the 2023 season, his first as captain: they won the AFL Grand Final. Today, they remain one of the league’s finest teams; and Moore has been praised for his leadership abilities both on and off the field. It was to great acclaim that we welcomed him to the stage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at The Glasshouse in Melbourne.

“Good player leadership is organic and comes from natural respect based on competency, status and character in alignment to the team’s values,” he told an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members.

In addition to Moore, across two insight-laden days, we hosted a range of speakers from organisations including Melbourne FC, Leinster Rugby, the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Royal Australian Air Force. The overarching theme was the approaches one can adopt to give performers the best chance of success.

There were six approaches that stood out.

1. Prioritise the athlete-coach relationship

The athlete-coach relationship is pivotal, whether it’s a long-tenured coach setting up a new leader for success or, conversely, a senior athlete taking steps to put a new coach at ease.

Craig McRae, the Senior Coach at Collingwood, demonstrated the former with his public endorsement following Darcy Moore’s appointment as captain in 2023. “Be yourself, forge your own journey, and take a swerve at what that needs to be,” he told Moore. “Lead from the front and lead your way.”

Across town a year later, Rebekah Stott, a hugely experienced New Zealand international defender with more than 100 A-League appearances under her belt, went out of her way as captain of Melbourne City FC to ensure incoming Manager, Michael Matricciani, felt at home.

“From day one when I signed for the club, from the first conversations I’ve had, she’s only welcomed me with open arms,” said Matricciani. “She’s been a great support and she’s an excellent leader off the pitch.”

Neither Moore nor Stott, who spoke onstage together, believe they’re the finished article. Both spoke of their need to work on confronting teammates and having difficult conversations. In that regard, it helps when the on-field leader feels both comfortable and supported.

“It is every player in the team’s job to lead in their own way, however they can do that.”

Rebekah Stott, Melbourne City FC

“What makes a good coach? The coach knowing their players, having good relationships and understanding what they need – this sets you up for success. They also let talented people around them do their jobs. This is particularly important when the pressure comes and you need to remember that everyone is there for a reason.”

Darcy Moore, Collingwood FC

2. Build trust at pace and communicate with care

Moore and Stott’s concern with confronting people in emotionally charged environments is a daily feature of life at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, where Brian Le serves as Director of Palliative Care at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. “Preparation is really important,” he said. “I formulate what needs to be spoken about and what my agenda is. But once with the patient, I adjust to what I’m hearing and the clues I’ve picked up in relation to their context.”

Timing is critical too. “Not addressing the situation has its own cost,” said Le, adding that delays are regrettable when the patient likely knows that an emotionally-wrought conversation is coming anyway.

“When I started to apply what I had learnt, as I’ve matured in my career, I’ve realised it’s not about me but the person I’m looking after. My job is to apply what I know to help the person, listen more and let them lead more – it’s more effective than leading with knowledge and expertise.”

Brian Le, Royal Melbourne Hospital

3. Balance disruption and stability

Data-informed decision-making is preferable, but where does the balance sit between objective and subjective sources? Additionally, what of the balance between disruption and stability? The topic was tackled by Kate Hore, the captain of AFLW team Melbourne FC, who spoke alongside Marcus Wagner, the club’s Chief Innovation Officer & General Manager of Football Operations. The Demons have been using Teamworks Performance as they look to strike that balance.

“You can get a flag from your monitoring that helps a discussion, but the impact really comes from your relationship with the athletes,” said Wagner. “Baseline information helps, but understanding the person is most important.”

When you understand the person, you can ask the right questions (either in-person or via questionnaires) and, if something needs to change based on something that happened in training, staff can swiftly make adaptations (supported by data).

As for the balance between disruption and stability. “It’s fine balance,” added Wagner. “You need to ensure you don’t lose your identity by going too far either way. How we measure is by looking at overall performance internally and externally, how we communicate, and the quality of our data.”

“I really like the idea of having a dropdown [list] of someone you may want to speak to as a follow on from completing [the team’s wellness questionnaires]. [As a player] you may value speaking to a different person each time depending on how you are feeling.”

Kate Hore, Melbourne FC

4. Give a platform to ‘terrible ideas’

Approximately 95 per cent of Nobel Prize-winning scientists emanate from the same cluster of labs or have enjoyed the proximal influence of past winners. Why? It is their higher minimum standards or greater openness to new (and often bad) ideas?

David Burt, the Director of Entrepreneurship at the University of New South Wales, delivered a presentation in which he lauded the value of exploring ‘terrible ideas’. His rationale was sound: it reduces the negative emotions that can cloud creativity and reduces the impact of power dynamics in a team environment.

He recommends an ‘accountability loop’:

• Build
• Measure
• Learn

“Terrible ideas allow you to develop new skills and meet different people in the process. There is a surprising amount of value in implementing a little bit of resource in them to drive another layer of growth.”

David Burt, University of New South Wales

5. Sustained excellence does not happen by accident

What must we do to sustain excellence? That was at the centre of Dave Walker’s appearance at the summit. The former naval pilot, who works for the Royal Australian Air Force, spoke of PBED:

• Plan
• Brief
• Execute
• Debrief

PBED, he explained, is a continuous improvement process to table improved error recognition, error reduction or correction, which enables the creation of efficiencies that lead to improved performance. It is an essential tool in an environment where students must learn quickly.

“It’s the quality of interaction in each event that ultimately turns a team of experts into an expert team,” said Walker. “We often find that members do not know how to work or operate as a team – just following a framework does not make a team.”

“We must give people the ‘how’ – it is not enough to say ‘this is what you have to do’ – people will learn at a higher rate when you give them the ‘how’.”

David Walker, Royal Australian Air Force

6. Proximal role modelling for the next generation

Leinster Rugby, one of Europe’s most prominent teams, has a squad that is 86 per cent homegrown – what is the secret to finding and nurturing supreme talent in your region? As Simon Broughton, the Academy Manager at Leinster, explained, the team benefits from a group that has played and developed together in the youth ranks. They have travelled, won and lost as a collective. “So many experiences that strengthens their connection,” said Broughton.

The club has adopted a variety of approaches, including proximal role modelling, which sees younger players spend 80 per cent of their time integrated with older players. Proximal role modelling is “integrated organically into different aspects of their training week, from walking the pitches, to session design, and into analysis rooms.”

Leinster have also latched onto the ‘goldilocks principle’ as 33 per cent of their players are neurodivergent. “This has led to changes in how messages are delivered,” Broughton added. “There are slides, but also video and walkthroughs, and time for reconnecting and breaking mental circuits.”

“We use proximal role modelling so that less experienced players have social interactions with more experienced players. [This is] to create an environment where learning and development can take place without a coach or a member of staff.”

Simon Broughton, Leinster Rugby

By John Portch

Some say young athletes are not as single-minded and dedicated to their craft as earlier generations.

That is not necessarily true, but young athletes today do tend to have more autonomy and wider horizons.

If they decide they do not want to be on this pathway or that programme, others will welcome them with open arms. Even if an athlete does commit to your programme: are you providing the wellbeing, learning and social support they increasingly demand?

This generational shift – and the challenges it poses coaches and staff – set the terms for a virtual roundtable titled ‘What Are our Athletes Telling us?’ where we invited members of the Leaders Performance Institute from across the globe to answer four questions:

• What are we learning from conversations with athletes?
• Are there trends in the type of support they need?
• What topics interest young athletes?
• How are we adapting our environments to meet their needs?

Their responses pointed to four trends in the athlete-coach-team dynamic.

1. Athletes are increasingly expressing their desire for belonging and connection

Teams should consider the psychosocial elements of an athlete’s development. Emerging athletes wish for meaningful experiences and want a sense of belonging and connection. “It’s about where are they enjoying themselves the most and where they see the opportunities,” said one participant, who spoke of Australia’s women’s rugby sevens.

The programme takes teams of emerging athletes on tour to far flung places. Therein lies the opportunity for community-based activities where players will meet locals, in circumstances often far removed from their own and, in contributing to social and environmental causes, continue to develop a more rounded perspective of their own lives and development.

This builds on the fine work being done in Australia to develop the “whole athlete”, as one participant with knowledge of the environment explained. The Australian system, they said, has prioritised mental health support for Olympic and Paralympic athletes at the behest of the athletes themselves.

2. Athletes crave individual – and team – development

The desire of younger athletes for belonging and connection comes with a paradoxical demand for more personalised training and attention. This has implications for the time coaches spend on team dynamics in an era where the power has shifted to the athlete. “Staff and coaches are more vulnerable,” said one participant, who pondered where the balance needs to sit. “Give the athletes a voice and a choice, give them ownership, have the consultation, but there is a line too.”

Another participant with experience of coaching in European football, highlighted that individual work will mean different things to different people and can be dependent on team selection. They argued that there is room for better management of expectations and, more broadly, a consensus for coaches and athletes alike on what constitutes ‘individual’ training.

3. Athletes want a formal voice in decision-making

Athletes want to have a say in decisions that affect them. A participant working at the Premier League spoke of their members’ club captains being increasingly forthright in their views on league-sponsored initiatives.

They said there need to be clear systems and processes for engaging athletes and ensuring their feedback is considered, with the caveat that any outcomes may be unclear or unformed, depending on the complexity of the issue.

To this latter point, another participant spoke of the athlete advisory committee with whom they work. “We’re trying to provide agency and elevate that athlete voice, which in a lot of ways is really valuable and adds a lot of benefit,” they said. “But there’s risk associated with that. You are letting the ‘good’ in with the ‘bad’ to an extent depending on what topic it relates to, particularly in terms of managing expectations.”

4. Athletes want to explore opportunities beyond the sporting arena

One participant noted that athlete care roles have developed from being “concierge-style to far more hands-on”. That might include helping young overseas athletes settle in a new country with their close family or it might mean supporting leadership development, media skills training, or helping athletes to explore other professional opportunities beyond their sporting careers.

The Australian sports system, for example, is getting better at providing educational and career opportunities of the kind that enable athletes to be more “job-ready”.

However, it is not just those athletes in (typically) lower-income Olympic and Paralympic sports seeking wider professional development: LinkedIn has seen an exponential increase in major league athletes using its platform. As one participant noted, this interest in business and entrepreneurship is not a surprise given the levels of disposable income available to some athletes. It invites the question: how might teams and leagues support players in these endeavours?

By John Portch

Kansas City Chiefs Head Coach Andy Reid may be the best in the business, but he is not a one-man coaching ticket.

Reid’s celebrated right-hand men, including Offensive Coordinator Matt Nagy and Defensive Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, are in demand for newly vacant head coaching roles elsewhere now that the NFL regular season has concluded.

Time will tell whether Nagy or Spagnuolo can assemble winning rosters of the kind that delivered the Chiefs back-to-back Super Bowls (with a third still on the cards), but they will have a better chance of ticking all the right boxes if they can surround themselves with the right people.

On that note, the question of team dynamics sits at the heart of The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar. The trio has spent decades observing the worlds of academia, business, and government as they look to better understand the workings of high-performing teams.

“We wrote this book because we were fascinated with the question: what is it that makes a group of people more than the sum of their parts?” said Camilleri when addressing the audience at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“In our world, the unit of identification is most often the individual – if you think about how we hire, how we promote,” she continued. “Very rarely is the focus the team.”

Camilleri and her co-authors redress that balance in The Social Brain and here we explore how leaders can amplify the collective in the pursuit of better decision making.

‘The rocket fuel for performance impact and innovation’

The Social Brain applies theories of evolutionary biology to groups of high performers.

“We’ve been interested in what doesn’t change,” said Camilleri of this lens of enquiry. “When humans are part of small groups they can take advantage of their collective intelligence as well as a sense of safety, reciprocity and shared obligation.”

Camilleri, Rockey and Dunbar devised their ‘Thrive Model’, which sets out six foundational conditions for high-performing teams that consider social health (in addition to physical and mental health) as a prerequisite of wellbeing.

Onstage, Rockey defined these conditions as “the rocket fuel for performance impact and innovation.”

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

What do the numbers in the circle mean?

As Rockey explained, it is important for leaders to know where to focus their energy most effectively.

“All of us have the same amount of time in a day and we use it differently, but what doesn’t change for each individual in this room is how many relationships that we can have at any given time,” she said. Our brains are only so big, “so we can’t have endless relationships”.

She used Dunbar’s number, which was devised by her co-author in the 1990s, to illustrate her point:

Dunbar’s number has long been influential across several fields, from government and administration to business and academia.

Five, 15 or 150 people? Performance improves when you match team density, size, and space to the task at hand

For decisions made at speed, you’ll count on five people.

Five is the number of intimate relationships a person can have. Rockey said: “These are the relationships that protect us, make us thrive, and ensure that we go through life in a joyful way. They protect us from ill-health and from some of the psychological challenges that we might have from feeling insecure.” They, of course, occur in intimate spaces.

For more complex decisions, you’ll count on 15 people (including your original five).

The ‘pain’ comes when you look to insert new thinking into complex decision making in a group space. “We spend about 60 per cent of our social time with just 15 people,” said Rockey. “With the 15 in the workplace, they would have built long-term relationships and loyalty to you over time – that’s how we work as humans – so breaking up those people to bring in new thinking is painful.”

According to Dunbar, the upper limit on the number of social relationships we can enjoy is 150

Dunbar suggests that people can have no more than 150 social relationships at any one time. “It’s a very stable number across all societies and cultures,” said Rockey.

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

Camilleri and Rockey wrapped up their presentation by offering nine ‘social hacks’ for building relationships swiftly:

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

Rockey then homed in on five…

Synchrony: “Sport has done this brilliantly. The perception of pain is reduced when we’re doing something together. When you’re running with a partner it feels less painful.”

Laughing together: “A fantastic way of finding a group”.

Engaging with strangers: “When we have conversations with people we don’t know, it has a positive effect on us – I encourage you to meet people that you don’t know today.”

Giving and receiving kindness: “A New York-based study saw that when young people were able to engage with strangers and be helpful to them, they saw an uptick in their mental health.”

Eating together: “There’s something very magical about breaking bread together. You have about 30 minutes when you’re having food together in which you have a sense of wellbeing and positive vibes towards your dining partners. So if you want to do something difficult, eat with your group first and then go to the difficult meeting.”

The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar is available now from Penguin.