3 Jul 2024
ArticlesMoonshots, how leaders can work on themselves, and the pathway to better collaboration – just some of the topics that featured on the June agenda at the Institute.
It is always wonderful to see the great and the good of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to discuss the pressing performance challenges of the day.
Speaking of which, the happenings at Red Bull were far from the only opportunities on offer at the Institute in June, with roundtables and community calls packed with members sharing both challenges and best practices on a range of topics.
Many are covered in this month’s Debrief. As ever, do check out our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions, which are designed to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.
Right, let’s get into some reflections on June.
What we learned at the Sport Performance Summit in LA
We had a great couple of days with those of you who made the trip; and there was plenty of thought-provoking content for us to get our teeth stuck into (full account here). Below are a few snippets that particularly caught our attention:
Four tips for avoiding the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen that explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations. It resonated with Jen Allum, from X, the Moonshot Factory and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, who understand they could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Onstage, Allum shared their four top tips for avoiding this scenario:
Allum added that X, the Moonshot Factory “rewards project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty” in the work they do.
How to optimise your energy as a leader
As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.” Here are her thoughts on how leaders should show up each day:
The biomarkers of a healthy culture
Back to the myriad insights gleaned from our June Virtual Roundtables, starting off with the latest segment of our series of learning centred around culture and change. The sessions highlight findings from a recent research project by the Premier League’s Edd Vahid titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. The project examines the key components of cultures that have been able to sustain themselves.
Vahid posits astute leadership as a ‘super enabler’. Indeed, as Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’
What are some strategies we can consider?
Vahid’s also research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:
Four features of a great debrief
Effective debriefing skills was the top of conversation for our latest Leadership Skills Series session. If you are interested to join roundtable sessions centred around developing your own leadership, there are some great topics coming up around strategy and cohesion you can find on the Member’s Area.
To keep this section punchy, a section of our discussion focused on some top line considerations for what constitutes a great debrief. Are you doing these well in your environments?
The pathway to better collaboration and multidisciplinary working
Finally, we wanted to highlight some interesting insights and perspectives from our topic-led roundtable on functioning more effectively as multidisciplinary teams, which is often a very popular topic of interest across the Institute when speaking to many of you.
Do check out the complete summary. Below are a handful of ideas from members on the call that they feel are currently missing or need to be given more attention in the quest to do this well:
New Zealand Rugby’s Mike Anthony lays out why the All Blacks and Black Ferns are always ‘restless’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘itchy’.
The former first five-eighth (fly-half), who won back to back Rugby World Cups with New Zealand in 2011 and 2015, was one of a “legacy group” of former players invited in August 2023 to observe the team’s preparations and answer any questions the younger players might have ahead of their World Cup campaign.
“It’s a new bunch and you guys know pretty well that when you finish playing, you get invited back into the changing rooms or the team room and it’s quite awkward,” Carter told former England internationals James Haskell and Mike Tindall on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby podcast.
It was a changing room Carter had shared with a number of that All Blacks squad. “I don’t know if you guys feel it but going back into that environment, you kind of feel like a spare wheel.”
At no point was this the perception of the players, coaches or the All Blacks’ high performance team. In fact, two months later Carter, Keven Mealamu, Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, and Liam Messam were invited to return at the Rugby World Cup in France, which took place in October and November.
“Talking to our team’s leaders, they got the most from the legacy group because the players are the ones who are having to drive along with that in the environment and the playing group would look up to them,” said Mike Anthony, New Zealand’s Head of High Performance, at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.
Here were some of the most-esteemed guardians of the All Blacks culture coming back to reinforce the connection between all those who have worn the jersey.
Anthony continued: “That group had been through adversity. They’d lost World Cups and won World Cups. They knew what it took. The legacy piece for us is important.”
Legacy – a word long-associated with the All Blacks – is crucial in bringing to life the ambitions across the ‘teams in black’ i.e. the All Blacks, the Black Ferns (current women’s world champions) and both programmes’ sevens teams.
Their three core ambitions are:
These ambitions help to plot the path towards a performance culture described by Anthony as “unwavering at it’s core, it’s inspiring, it’s empowering, it’s inquisitive, and it’s responsive to change.”
The last point is critical. “How do you bring it to life day to day and how do you refresh it so that’s it’s relevant to your current group?” asked Anthony. “I’ve observed teams being successful and then they continue to run with what worked before as the group changes. It comes down to induction: how do you make sure your vision is relevant for your current group?”
Here, we unpack how the ambitions of the teams in black are brought to life through their behaviours and habits.
The building of a legacy: the All Blacks have won three World Cups; the Black Ferns have won six of the last seven Women’s World Cups. This enduring excellence burnishes their legacy year on year. “We talk of leaving the jersey in a better place,” said Anthony. “You’re the guardian for a short time, so when you leave it to the next person, you hope to add value.”
A team-first attitude: this is a challenge for New Zealand Rugby as a whole, with the growth of individual brands and the often more lucrative opportunities on offer abroad. Yet New Zealand’s best players invariably remain at home during their peak years to pull on the black jersey. The allure runs deep and it requires selflessness. “You’ve got to be selfless,” said Anthony. “You’re an All Black or Black Fern 24/7 and it’s in the little things you do when no one’s watching. You’ve all heard the analogy ‘sweep the sheds’ – it is genuinely something that our guys do. It’s not the job of somebody who’s paid to clean up after us and we take pride in how we do that.”
A player-driven environment: Anthony explains that buy-in is at “100 percent” amongst the players and that some players “never want to leave” New Zealand. This is in part because the team is intentional in its efforts to encourage players to speak up and contribute to the culture (“you have to create something pretty special to keep players here”) but it is also due to the increasingly creative ways that players are incentivised. “We give guys sabbaticals to go away because we know the money’s good; then we bring them back and that’s worked really well,” said Anthony.
Alignment: it is obvious that no two people are alike but that does not necessarily prevent them sharing a common vision. Said Anthony: “For me, ‘alignment’ is when people understand and are deeply connected to your vision.”
It is also a consequence of effective leadership, which he distilled into several traits while adding the caveat that you have to, above all else, play well. “I think we sometimes burden our leaders and they feel cluttered,” he said. “We want the spine of the team playing well first because, generally, they’re your best players. You have to get the balance right there.”
In New Zealand rugby, leaders embody…
Humility. As Anthony said, “you’ve got to be humble and vulnerable because that’ll encourage others to step into that space and contribute.”
Inclusivity. Anthony felt that although teams want everyone to have a voice, there is too little focus on schooling people in how to give and receive feedback. “If we want our players to challenge their peers, we’ve got to give them the tools”.
A growth mindset. There is always a performance gap; always a challenge. “It’s never about ‘we’ve arrived’,” said Anthony. “That gap creates that discomfort and itch that you want in a high performance environment.”
Ownership. Being an All Black or Black Fern is a 24/7 commitment. Anthony described Richie McCaw as the embodiment of that view. “It’s doing the unseen things,” he said. “It’s easy to sweat, but when you go home, what you’re eating, your sleep, how you present around your family – those are key.”
Finally… he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata
Anthony wrapped up his presentation with a whakataukī (Māori proverb):
He aha te mea nui? Māku e kii atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.
What is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.
“The price of entry is technical knowledge,” said Anthony, “but get the people right and hopefully you can build the right environment for a performance culture that supports the athletes.”
21 Jun 2024
ArticlesThe NSWL’s Bay FC and the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries are two expansion teams and both have women GMs. Here, we bring you the views Bay’s Lucy Rushton and the Golden State’s Ohemaa Nyanin.
In March, Bay FC began their inaugural NWSL campaign to great fanfare.
The club was co-founded by former US women’s national team stars Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Danielle Slayton and Leslie Osborne, who propelled the project from an ambitious idea to a grand reality.
They hired Lucy Rushton as General Manager. Rushton, who was the second woman to serve as GM in MLS when she joined DC United in 2021, spoke at this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica.
Rushton is no stranger to the Leaders stage having also spoken during her time at Atlanta United, whom she joined following excellent spells with Watford, Reading and the Football Association in her native England.
She sat next to another trail blazer, Ohemaa Nyanin, the newly appointed GM of WNBA expansion franchise the Golden State Valkyries, who will join the league in 2025.
Nyanin, a Ghanian-American, had been with the New York Liberty for five years, most recently as Assistant GM, jumped at the chance to bring further basketball prestige to this corner of southern California. She previously served as Assistant Director of the US women’s national team and helped Team USA to Olympic gold in 2016 and World Cup gold in 2018.
The duo delivered insights into how they are shaping the cultures of their nascent organisations; how they’re working or planning on working with their athletes; how they’ve chosen to lead; how they’re supporting their staff; as well as how they’re changing the sporting landscape.
Owners must establish the culture and values
The Bay culture was clear well before Rushton had even accepted her position: everything is about the people, from the staff to the players. The owners want everyone to be B-A-Y. That is:
Brave – the ownership want the franchise to be bold in the industry, pushing boundaries, breaking barriers by being innovative.
Accountable – the staff turn up everyday and are responsible for their actions and drive, and push themselves forward.
You – Bay FC also celebrate themselves as individuals and bring their true authentic selves to work every day.
The three concepts have helped shape the mindset each day and give the staff and players something tangible to hold onto. The organisation’s vision is to be a global sport franchise at the head of innovation and change.
How can these be measured? For Rushton, “it’s the feeling when you go to bed or wake up and how you feel about going to work the next day or that morning”. She believes the staff feel good and know they can influence what is happening; they know it’s a positive environment and everyone is striving for the same things.
Women’s sport should not simply replicate men’s sport
Rushton’s experience of men’s football taught her a valuable lesson. “Coming into a women’s franchise, it’s so important that we understand and appreciate the difference to men’s sport and don’t try and replicate it,” she said. The club has been intentional on that since day one and strives to be people-first, player-centric, and celebrates and promotes good female health.
With Bay midway through their first season, Rushton reflected on how the staff live the values every day. They all want to work hard, but care, kindness, and mutual support are just as critical for an expansion team. You need people who want to be there, who have the grit to go through the ups and downs, but support each other when you might not have the same resources as the teams that are 5 or 10 years old.
“How we approach training everyday and present ourselves to the players gives them energy,” she continued. “Which in turn the players buy into and end up energised and galvanised.” The key is how you present yourself and how you turn up and how you live by the standards that have been set, and the biggest factor is togetherness and collaboration of all departments.
Measure success through environment and collective wellbeing
Nyanin left a household name in the New York Liberty, but her goal is not to merely recreate that team in the Bay Area. Nor does she simply want to recreate the Golden State Warriors (Valkyries co-owner Joe Lacob is also the majority owner of the Warriors). Nyanin wants the Golden State Valkyries to stand alone.
She needs to find people that are interested in a vision of winning championships, in alignment with the ownership group. Success will ultimately be measured in trophies. They are the first WNBA expansion team since 2008, so Nyanin is considering what it looks like to build a successful organisation. She said: “We need to find individuals who are interested in being challenged every day, leaning into the team. Do you want to come to work everyday, and serve the athletes everyday in a way that provides for an innovative space, that provides for us to do what we know we can do, and how quickly can we get there?”
With this question in mind, Nyanin reflected on the qualities she seeks out as the Valkyries hire and write job descriptions. “Being an expansion team means you have to be entrepreneurial. By embracing the unknown can you be empathetic too,” she added.
Rushton asked Nyanin about measuring success from a cultural perspective rather than through championships. In response Nyanin said it is about the climate of the people that come in the door. “When we ask how you are doing they might say ‘I’m fine’ or ‘I’m good’, but if you say ‘how are you doing in the terms of a climate?’; so ‘sunny, or ‘cloudy’, or ‘rainy’ – it adds depth. A way of measuring success is how we can collectively come up with our non-results-based success criteria, how do we make it such so that everyone is sunny?”
For Nyanin, ‘sunny’ doesn’t mean super excited, or super extroverted – you can be introverted but still be sunny. Success is ultimately defined by how the Golden State Valkyries create their own definitions of safety in the workplace; it stems from executives to coordinators, to players, and even changing the way agents and external stakeholders engage with the organisation.
A culture born of diversity
We all know the saying about the best-laid plans, so Rushton and Nyanin spoke of the importance of allowing culture to shape itself. For Rushton, the critical moments are when things haven’t gone to plan. “How you react to things not going to plan is how you create culture. Actions taken in those moments show the players and staff what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she said.
Some decisions have been made that may have impacted performance outcomes but certainly reinforced their culture and values. They might have been a “nightmare” at times, but they’re critical. The backing of the ownership and the Head Coach, Albertin Montoya, helped give Rushton the confidence to go ahead. Showing the group that the leaders are aligned was powerful and gave them the confidence that it was the right thing to do and that the leaders had each others’ backs.
For Nyanin, it is important to give newly-hired executives their own blank slate to contribute to the masterpiece. She said: “If everyone has a different background, you have to listen to their ideas as they’re all coming from different spaces. So it’s still being architected from all different walks and types of cultural differences.”
This means that it’s important to Nyanin to have each executive bring their own unique experience. Through these different experiences and backgrounds the culture develops. This will bring challenges and added work, as you have forces leaders out of their comfort zones. It also means that you have to be willing to think differently.
“It’s like explaining basketball to children, who all ask ‘why?’ People from different backgrounds are going to ask why do we need to execute things this way, and will ask good questions, and bring contributions beyond asking ‘why?’”
In return, Nyanin believes that the athlete will benefit, especially the female athlete who comes with different complexities. “If your own staff can challenge you and ask you why before the athlete does, then you’re giving the athlete a space for them to feel safe to be elite at their sport.”
Athlete care is paramount
What about their appeal to female players? Bay spoke with the potential recruits about player-centricity of club and how they were going to elevate player care. From starting from a blank slate, they were able to accelerate mechanisms that can help with impacting the salary cap through player housing for example. The club emphasised treating them like the athlete they are in comparison to some of their poor experiences in other environments.
In Rushton’s experience, the priorities are very different to male athletes, where pay often dictates the direction of negotiations. With females, it’s about living standards and how the organisation will elongate their career. It’s important to give them confidence in the staff who would give them the best care, medical treatment, and infrastructure. Rushton is proud that, as far as she knows, the players have no complaints about the level of care and how the organisation treats them as female athletes.
On a day to day basis it boils down to two things in her mind. Firstly, helping them be in the best position they can be for the longest time possible and, secondly, to help them live a nice lifestyle outside of football.
This focus on player care resonated with Nyanin, who was pleasantly surprised at the rapid expansion of the NWSL given her own experience of the WNBA. Bringing it back to athlete experience is hugely important because, in WNBA, athlete experience tends to focus on ‘how you do get elite talent to come through?’ Nyanin explained that longevity in the sport is different, although is it changing, because the majority of the athletes play six months in the WNBA and then go and play overseas where the conditions are often worse, but they’re getting paid more money. “Understanding the motivations of the athlete prior to them coming to your organisation and engaging in your space is important,” she said.
Attracting elite practitioners from male sport
How might top level practitioners be attracted from historically better-funded male sports? Both Nyanin and Rushton believe that efforts must be based on the vision, culture and concepts the organisations trying to build.
For the Valkyries, as Nyanin explained, the vision is to “build the best, to be the most elite, to build a space where people feel they’re being heard and their ideas being executed in a way that results in excellence. Why wouldn’t you want to come? How can I create an environment for you to thrive, and how can we do that together?”
Rushton agreed. She said: “it shouldn’t be about the gender. It does matter though – many wouldn’t be right for women’s sport. I want to make you the best practitioner in what you do, and give you the platform to excel in your specialisation.”
New franchises means recruiting for those who are willing to challenge themselves and go outside the box with their thinking. It becomes about finding the people who are comfortable with the associated risk in order to better themselves. Rushton believes they have to “believe that they can go there and make a difference.” Rushton also observed that, “a lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female athlete team because it’s a totally different environment, with totally different feeling and vibe.”
For Rushton herself, when she moved from men’s to women’s football there were two main factors that drew her in:
How fans contribute to a team culture
There remains another crucial component of a team culture: the fans.
The final moments of the session were used to discuss how both Nyanin and Rushton, and their organisations, are forging connections with their fans. As Nyanin said, fans expect communications, but there are times when you can’t share with them. This is a dilemma considering that the fans are also investing in the franchise and so they deserve communication. It becomes about finding the balance around what to do when things aren’t going well. Working on being honest in their communications so that the fans understand that the leaders and everybody involved is working to solve any issues.
Similarly, Rushton and Bay have been deliberate in how they present the organisation to the fans. The Business Operations team at Bay go to the fans and ask them to bring the energy and passion; to be part of their story. They seek to empower the fans and have them be part of the journey. Bay have gone out to the community, had fans come and watch training, and prioritised outward action in the build-up to launch. People now want to be a part of their journey.
Rushton spoke of how Bay deliberately tell the stories of their players. This means that people become invested in the emotional side of who the player is, so if the team lose a game, the fans are more invested in the person than the result. The outcome is one of which she is proud and the Valkyries hope to emulate. “The fans have fallen in love with the team, despite the record.”
Results will surely follow but, here and now, both women are intent on proving that new women’s sports teams are not only viable but can thrive.
As Brisbane’s Damien Austin said, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback has proved a useful reference point for a Lions team that sees high performance as a 24/7 pursuit.
The players and staff stand in awe of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterbacks’ postseason exploits, but Google images of a topless Mahomes with a less-than-perfectly-chiselled figure provide conversation-starters on training, performance and nutrition.
“He’s considered the GOAT at the moment and he’s basically got a ‘dad bod’,” said Damien Austin, picking up on the term Mahomes has used to describe his own appearance. As a three-time Super Bowl MVP, Mahomes is clearly doing the right things, and Austin, who is Brisbane’s High Performance Manager, was simply illustrating how highly attuned his athletes are to the demands of their own high performance.
“We educate the players about acute-chronic workload,” he told an audience at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse. “They know about injury management, they know about their programmes and why we do what we do.”
Brisbane are one of the best teams in the AFL; and a premiership, their first since 2003, is a realistic target. It’s a far cry from the mess Austin inherited when he first walked through the door in November 2015. He came from the Sydney Swans with a remit to revamp Brisbane’s high performance setup, but it would prove to be easier said than done. “I came to the harsh reality that we were very different.”
Brisbane rock: not all it’s cracked up to be
In 2016, Chris Fagan was appointed Brisbane’s Senior Coach. He initially focused on the physical, technical, tactical and psychological elements that could give him the biggest bang for his buck.
The team also decided to fake it until they made it; “stealing” ideas from individuals and teams, including Usain Bolt, Eluid Kipchoge and the San Antonio Spurs. Austin said: “These people reminded the players what some teams did and we mirrored [their actions and philosophies] until we could develop our own.”
They even brought a large rock to Springfield Central so that the players could ‘pound the rock’ in the manner talked about at Gregg Popovich’s Spurs, where a rock takes pride of place at the entrance to their practice facility. It brings to life the Spurs’ belief that it is not the final strike that cracks the rock but the hundred blows that came before.
While it makes for a stirring scene in San Antonio, Brisbane’s rock did not hold up its end of the bargain. “Every now and then the players would have a crack at it but the rock wasn’t hard – it kept breaking – we had to get another rock!”
On the field, the team continued to lose most weekends. “We called ourselves ‘the happiest bunch of losers’.” While Fagan’s first two years were characterised by turbulence and continued turnover, the atmosphere gradually improved because the people that stayed (or joined) believed in the direction of travel.
The team had long since resolved that at least no one would outwork them. It was their founding philosophy. Players were pushed out of their comfort zones (Brisbane introduced 3K time trials when 1K or 2K were the league norm) but given all the necessary support to prepare. Additionally, no other team had to train in the oppressive heat of the Brisbane summer (routinely reaching 29˚C/84˚F) but the local climate was reframed as a performance advantage.
The team also began to measure everything they could. “I’ve never been in a programme where strength results or running results from the general running session were put up in team meetings so much,” said Austin.
Little victories were celebrated along the way. “If a rookie player benched 60 kilos for the first time it was a pretty big deal.” The players enjoyed their progress. “It could not be us just harping on and on [otherwise] those early losses could have taken their toll.” Instead, as results turned, it led to a firm bond between the players, many of whom are locals who happily spend their downtime together.
Eight years on from teaming up with Fagan, Austin defines high performance very differently. “In the early days we would say ‘let’s do the basics and get as many gains as we can to attract younger players and hopefully they perform later down the track’. Now we’re looking for the finer edge. How we can improve our weaknesses? If you were to play us, how would you as an opposition coach or stats department play against us? Years ago we would not have looked at that.”
Best foot forward
Under Fagan, Brisbane have become known for their growth mindset and fearless approach. The staff have worked continuously to remove the fear of failure, with sessions that demanded players kick off their weaker foot being a prime example. Such efforts underlined that this was a psychologically safe environment. “Those sessions weren’t pretty, but there was an acceptance that you’re going to fail; but don’t be fearful of it. Learn from it,” said Austin, who also explained that players now routinely run their own training sessions and both give and receive performance feedback. “Leadership is not about being the best. Leadership is about making everyone else better.”
Nevertheless, for all their progress, Brisbane’s major defeats have been frustrating. These include semi-final losses in 2019 and 2021 and preliminary final reverses in 2020 and 2022. They bounced back to make the Grand Final at the MCG in 2023 but their narrow defeat to Collingwood that afternoon still rankles and they are determined to make amends. They have put their belief in a 24/7 approach to high performance to bridge that four-point gap. “You need to live it, endure it, deliver it. You need to do everything off the field, look at how you manage it; be involved and make the best out of it.”
Patrick Mahomes would no doubt approve.
Some cultural leaders are front and centre, but many work from the wings to deliver the success their teams crave. Here are some steps you can take to ensure your team has its cultural leaders too.
Those leaders can be athletes, such as England captain Harry Kane, who will lead the Three Lions in their Euro 2024 campaign. Or Breanna Stewart, the New York native who returned home in 2022 and led the Liberty to the 2023 WNBA Finals; bagging the league’s MVP in the process.
Kane and Stewart are the embodiment of local heroes who have done well, particularly if you include Kane’s remarkable spell at Tottenham Hotspur.
Then there are coaches who represent an expression of the systems that enable their programmes to excel. On that front, one can point to Kane’s international manager, Gareth Southgate, who has overseen England’s most successful spell since the mid-1960s.
Cultural leaders, however, need not be so high profile. They operate at all levels of an organisation, independent of job title or seniority. Do you recognise the cultural leaders in your team? What steps can you be a better cultural leader?
Cultural leadership – the super enabler
The link between leadership and sustained success is the centrepiece of a research project run by Edd Vahid, the Head of Football Academy Operations at the Premier League.
In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.
Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.
The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.
The second, which took place in early June, homed in on cultural leadership, specifically how leaders might change or sustain a culture. The concept is, as Vahid described, a “super enabler” for your sense of purpose, belonging or even psychological safety.
Culture should be an accelerator and energiser
In the session, Vahid observed that organisations are increasingly deliberate and intentional about culture because they see it as a competitive advantage. It is not a one-time annual event – it’s a regular part of ongoing conversations.
This is lost on some organisations, as Jon R Katzenbach, Illona Steffen and Caroline Kronley wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2012:
‘All too often, leaders see cultural initiatives as a last resort. By the time they get around to culture, they’re convinced that a comprehensive overhaul of the culture is the only way to overcome the company’s resistance to major change. Culture thus becomes an excuse and a diversion rather than an accelerator and energiser’.
Four ways to get to grips with your culture
To understand culture you need keen observation and data collection. Vahid proposed several useful tools:
During the Korean War, John Boyd, an American military strategist and fighter pilot, devised the OODA Loop as a decision-making process designed to emphasise adaptation and agility in four stages:
Organisations can apply the OODA Loop to assess and respond effectively to cultural dynamics.
Vahid also pointed to other efforts to collect data around culture, such as UK Sport’s ‘cultural health check’ or retail giant Selfridges using data to better understand their most culturally-stressed communities.
Vahid also stressed the importance of critical incident reviews to help observe culture during specific moments such as exits, inductions, wins and losses.
Teams can also find their place on the Sigmoid Curve, a common model for tracking organisational growth and decline. At each stage, expectations can change, which affects what we see, hear and feel.
Five Steps Towards Cultural leadership
Vahid explored five steps that can help a team to develop cultural leaders.
5 Jun 2024
ArticlesThe May agenda was dominated by cultural enablers, the fundamentals of communication and the impact of mental skills work.
Those three, different as they are, share a reputation for sustained high performance and, as such, represent the profile we had in mind as we picked May to launch of our latest Performance Support Series.
That series – which has two sessions still to run at the time of writing – was just one of the opportunities on offer to Leaders Performance Institute members through their membership during the course of the month.
There was much more besides and The Debrief is designed to keep you on the pulse of contemporary thinking across the high performance space. Do check out some of our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.
Four interconnected cultural enablers
We have all asked ourselves this question at various times but Dr Edd Vahid and Management Futures decided to delve a little deeper.
In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.
Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.
The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four interconnected enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.
Vahid explored each enabler in turn.
Questions for you to consider in your organisations:
Questions for you to consider in your organisations:
Questions for you to consider in your organisations:
A question for you to consider in your organisations:
Achieving communication nirvana
Win, lose or draw, teams are constantly in transition and, as such, they need different things from their leaders at each stage in their development.
This can be tricky because you can’t shortcut the development of rapport, belonging and trust – all are critical to team development and effective transitions – and yet teams and leaders still face pressure to perform now.
That comes down to good communication, as discussed in a recent Leadership Skills Series session.
In fact, it is worth exploring five levels of communication as experienced in a team setting. It is useful to think of the following as a pyramid. Teams begin at No 1 and work towards No 5, with increasing exposure to risk, vulnerability and criticism at each level.
Five fundamentals when measuring the impact of your mental skills work
In the modern landscape of high performance sport, we often here the phrase ‘everything that is managed is measured’.
Such is the desire to show impact and return on investment, we are indeed measuring much of what can be measured.
Nevertheless, it can be difficult to measure the impact of areas such as coach development work or, as discussed in a recent Virtual Roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members, mental skills work.
While it is tempting to jump into the measuring process, it is important to first build some pre-requisites.
15 May 2024
ArticlesDr Edd Vahid kicked off his latest Performance Support Series with a discussion of the traits that define cultures at the top of their game.
We have all asked ourselves this question at various times but Dr Edd Vahid and Management Futures decided to delve a little deeper.
In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.
Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.
The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.
Vahid explored each enabler in turn.
Most sustained high performing cultures have an inspiring purpose. Vahid referred to clothing brand Patagonia, which says ‘we’re in the business to save our home planet’ and its every action is driven by that purpose. This example calls to mind the work of Alex Hill who, in his book Centennials, suggests that organisations that have sustained success over a long period of time have a stable core and a disruptive edge. According to Hill, it is important that your purpose doesn’t fluctuate too much or disappear because its has the power to help your organisation shape society and enable you to effectively engage future talent.
Another aspect of ‘purpose’ is the idea of individual and organisational alignment. Those organisations that are tending to culture regularly are taking the time to consider how their purpose resonates at an individual and organisational level.
Questions to consider:
In The Fearless Organization, psychologist Amy Edmondson suggested that ‘making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century’.
The findings of Vahid’s ‘Cultural Hypothesis’ suggest that cultural leadership plays a fundamental role in an individual’s experience of psychological safety. In the session, he referred to Netflix, which has adapted its in-house feedback mechanisms to ‘lead with context and not control’ (concepts that are highly aligned and loosely coupled).
Questions to consider:
Owen Eastwood, in his seminal book Belonging, wrote that ‘our senses are primed to constantly seek information about belonging from our environment. We are hardwired to quickly and intuitively understand whether or not we are in a safe place with people we can trust’.
Organisational anthropologist Timothy Clark also highlights a bridge between psychological safety and belonging in suggesting that the first level of psychological safety is the idea of inclusion safety – you belong to something.
New Zealand Rugby provide a case study in this area, as the theme of belonging is central to their philosophy. They recognise the diversity of their playing groups. They invest in their inductions, and there’s some literature that highlights the importance of your sense of belonging on entry and the critical process of effective inductions to ensure from the very outset that you feel like you belong in your environment. There is a regular and considered approach to belonging cues and rituals that reinforce the idea that people belong, and that could be as simple as ensuring that people’s voices are heard.
Ultimately, we want to get people to a point of challenge. The most optimal environments where there is a high degree of psychological safety is where individuals feel comfortable to challenge.
A question to consider:
An inspiring purpose is essential, a psychologically safe environment is crucial, and a sense of belonging exists as a fundamental human need. Coupled with exceptional leadership, these elements distinguish cultures that thrive.
Leadership is presented as a crucial and critical part of Vahid’s ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. It feels central in that it is seen as a super enabler, that when you’ve got strong and aligned cultural leadership it will be a precursor, certainly to psychological safety and belonging.
Questions to consider:
The four traits of the ‘Cultural Hypothesis’ ranked by members
Vahid invited attendees to rank their current satisfaction with these enablers. This offers a snapshot of the state of play across elite sport, particularly in North America, Europe and Australasia:
Other reflections on culture
The ‘Iceberg Effect’
The discourse prompted a further question on the nature of ‘culture’. Vahid cited the work of psychologist Edgar Schein on the ‘Iceberg Effect’. Schein’s model likens culture to an iceberg: what we see (artifacts) is just a fraction of what lies beneath (espoused beliefs and assumptions). This is how that may look in a sports organisation:
Culture: a ‘group phenomenon’
The ‘Iceberg Effect’ chimes with the work of business academic Boris Groysberg who in 2018 co-wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review with Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng. They defined culture as:
[1] ‘The Leaders Guide to Corporate Culture’, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2018
If you are interested in joining the second session of this Performance Support Series with Dr Edd Vahid on Thursday 6 June, sign up here.
13 May 2024
ArticlesThe Real Madrid Head Coach is the antidote to the systems-based, top-down coaching approach that is in vogue in some quarters.
The team’s Head Coach, Carlo Ancelotti, who recently signed a contract extension until 2026, has his own record to pursue: a victory over Borussia Dortmund in north-west London would see him claim his fifth Champions League title as a coach.
Last week Ancelotti also eclipsed Sir Alex Ferguson’s record when he coached a Champions League match for a record 203rd time. It comes after a weekend when he won a second La Liga title with Real.
The club paraded that trophy on an open-top bus through the streets of Madrid at the weekend, with Ancelotti living up to his ‘Don Carlo’ nickname by putting on his sunglasses and clenching a cigar between his teeth – a look he first rolled out during similar celebrations after winning the Champions League and La Liga double in 2022.
“I have a dream… to dance with Eduardo Camavinga,” he told the crowd on Sunday (12 May).
Ancelotti is the ultimate establishment figure, yet his relaxed, consensus-based approach to coaching is at odds with many of his contemporaries and marks him out as counter-cultural at the highest level.
What makes Ancelotti so successful? It’s certainly rooted in his zest for life; his love of people, good wine and fine food serve to break down barriers and forge connections. It speaks to his longevity too.
Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores four of his finest traits.
It is hard to imagine too many of the world’s best football coaches bringing players in at the planning stage. While the final decision lies with Ancelotti, he will often ask the players for their opinion on the match strategy. He knows they will have a better understanding and feel a sense of accountability and buy-in if they’ve been involved in the decision-making process.
“Our biggest strength is that he finds a way to let a lot of the boys play with freedom, that we’re so kind of off the cuff.” Real’s Jude Bellingham told TNT last month. “As a man as well, he fills you with calmness and confidence.” Real have not always been a club noted for their calmness, nor has Madrid as a sporting market, but progress has been serene during his latest tenure.
“There are two types of managers: those that do nothing and those that do a lot of damage,” he said last week. “The game belongs to the players.”
This is a term we’ve used before to describe Ancelotti. It is impossible to pin a style on the only coach to have won national championships in five countries with five different clubs: Milan, Chelsea, Paris St-Germain, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid (across two spells). He has also worked with varying degrees of success at Reggiana, Parma, Juventus, Napoli and Everton.
Some of those spells are remembered more fondly in some quarters than others, but he has always stressed the importance of getting to know the characteristics of players, the culture, and traditions of a club.
Even if something has made him very successful at one club, he won’t just come in and impose that style on another. Ancelotti understands that there are many cultural differences from club to club and within different countries, and he has to adapt his style to get the best out of the players and team.
His time at Chelsea between 2009 and 2011 is a fine example. He discarded the 4-2-3-1 formation that served him so well at Milan for a 4-3-3 that propelled the Blues to the Premier League and FA Cup double in 2010.
“What I really loved about Carlo is his man-management, the way he adapted as well – because he had a way of coaching that probably didn’t suit English football,” John Terry, Ancelotti’s captain at Chelsea, told The Coaches’ Voice in 2020. “But he adapted very quickly when speaking to me, Frank [Lampard], Didier [Drogba].”
There are few coaches for whom it is so hard to find a bad word about them, but Ancelotti is popular with some of the sport’s biggest names.
“He had fun with us,” Cristiano Ronaldo told ESPN in 2015. The duo had won the Champions League together at Real a year earlier. “Mr Ancelotti was an unbelievable surprise. In the beginning, I thought he was more a tough person, more kind of arrogant, and it was the opposite.”
He protects his team from the stressors of elite football by masking the pressure he’s under. Ancelotti takes the situation – but not himself – seriously, and can often be found telling jokes in the changing room before a big game to help diffuse the tension.
Bellingham described a moment prior to the first leg of Real’s Champions League quarter-final with Manchester City. “Before the game, I caught him yawning and asked him ‘Boss, are you tired?’” Bellingham told TNT post-match. “He said ‘you need to go out and excite me’ – that’s the calmness and confidence he brings.”
Few coaches in European football are as equanimous as Ancelotti. He has enjoyed unprecedented success but has also been unceremoniously sacked on more than one occasion. Memorably, he was not Real’s first choice when he returned to Madrid in 2021.
‘[He] understands, probably better than anybody working in the most cut-throat businesses, the transient nature of employment in any talent-dependent industry,’ wrote Chris Brady, in Quiet Leadership, the 2016 book he co-authored with Ancelotti.
He is well aware of the concept of ‘energisers’ and ‘sappers’ too. ‘It is the energisers who are the reference points for everybody, including me,’ Ancelotti wrote in Quiet Leadership.
Ultimately, beyond the white noise, Ancelotti understands that football is not life and death, a point he made at the 2015 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York.
“Football is the most important of the less important things in the world.”
9 Apr 2024
ArticlesIn a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, members discussed the enablers and barriers to sustaining a successful culture.
There are a wealth of barriers that work against the creation of strong and positive cultures in high performance.
However, there are also enablers that have served members well in their teams.
This split was in evidence during a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable when we asked attending members to rate their organisations’ cultures on a scale of 1 (‘very weak’) to 5 (‘very strong’).
While 43% considered their team’s culture ‘strong or very strong’, 14% perceived their culture as ‘weak’, with a further 43% suggesting their team’s culture was ‘neither strong nor weak’.
There is plenty of room for the weak to improve and for the strong to get better too.
Here we explore how to best build, sustain and renew your team culture.
Before we get into that, let’s look at the main barriers.
Poor results. The inevitable starting point. Negative results can lead to a blame culture and, in some of the worst cases, the beginning of a downward spiral. Even teams with good intentions can stall. One attendee said: “we have strong expectations at the start of the season, but as soon as the season starts, there’s lots of grey areas and we find it difficult to upload our expectations and we end up going off in silos.”
Differences of opinion. If there is minimal alignment or collective belief in what matters between the senior representatives of your team then it can be a killer for culture, especially if results begin to go south.
Unconstructive / non-existent feedback. Blame culture is one thing, ultra criticism another, but several members admitted they can struggle to glean feedback from younger generations of athletes in particular. This hinders their team’s efforts to create an environment that is about more than just winning.
A lack of psychological safety. While also recognised as an enabler (see below), is psychological safety truly attainable in a high-performance (and therefore high-risk) environment? The jury is still out for some people in sport.
With these barriers in mind, let’s turn to the positive influences on team culture.
Clarity and alignment: these are by-products of environments that have been able to define, manage and model their expectations – essentially those that take the building, sustaining and reviewing of culture seriously. Get this right and it helps to provide a framework for constructive feedback that extends beyond culture to performance. Moreover, if the performance side of your team has meaningful interaction with the business side (and vice versa), it can enable the different groups to see how their work impacts others and it provides the foundations for wider cultural alignment.
Celebrate positive behaviours: no, this is not a silver bullet but it can work wonders as part of an intentional and consistent approach. “It’s about giving it more than lip-service,” noted one member. “It’s about calling it out when people aren’t meeting expectations but also celebrating culture in action.” Crucially, this practice is not results-based. It separates the desired behaviours from the performance outcome.
Storytelling: this is a useful tool for instilling purpose, inducting new athletes, and enabling periodic cultural resets. There is a tendency to fall into the trap of not renewing your culture at the end of a natural cycle and basing your work on the assumption that everyone knows where they need to be. Yet sport is transient in nature and the central cast is continually changing. Meet that challenge by giving your athletes, old and new, the opportunity to write the next chapter of your story. Storytelling can build connections and help people to explain where they see themselves and how they want to be known both individually and collectively.
Let’s wrap up with some key questions to ask yourself:
Who are your cultural leaders? They need not be your head coach – in fact they may be the wrong person – it is important to identify and empower your cultural architects, whoever they may be. They will be able to ensure you are consistently celebrating positive behaviours.
Are you hiring the right people? One attendee shared they would rather have the “right” person doing the job not quite as well than the “wrong” person having the skill and competency but continuously undermining the collective.
Do your people feel they belong? Belonging is a significant enabler and comes from psychological safety, where individuals feel safe to take interpersonal risks. These dynamics play out differently in each environment. How it looks in your environment is for you to determine. One attendee, for example, suggested that female athletes need to feel they belong in order to play well, while male athletes need to play well in order to feel like they belong.
Our Leadership Skills Series turned its attention to the people at the heart of cultural change and the steps they can take to become more skilled as architects of their team’s culture.
We revisited the definition of culture, explored a newly formed hypothesis around sustaining high performing cultures and discussed six levers for leading a culture.
What is ‘culture’?
To frame our conversations, we revisited the definition of culture to set the tone for the insights that followed. It’s fair to say that culture does have a multitude of definitions but the ones we landed on as part of this call were:
‘The norms of behaviour and thinking that influence how people behave in a given group’.
‘Culture emerges as a result of the behaviours that are encouraged, discouraged and tolerated by people and systems over time’.
Four core components of sustained high performing culture
As part of our roundtable conversations, we had the opportunity to explore the latest research into sustained high performing cultures and took the opportunity to learn from organisations that have made genuine progress.
The research hypothesised that if you can excel in these four areas – purpose, belonging, psychological safety and cultural leadership – you are in an excellent position to drive, influence and sustain your organisation’s culture.
To bring these areas to life for our members, we ran a series of interactive polls at the table to score on a scale of 1-5 how well we think our organisations do at these four different elements. The data from the polls are as follows:
We asked: to what extent are people in your environment motivated to serve a purpose that feels bigger than them?
We asked: to what extent does everyone feel valued, a sense of belonging and safe to be themselves?
We asked: to what extent do people feel safe speaking up and challenging each other?
We asked: to what extent is their shared ownership for our culture from staff and athletes?
This poll highlighted that there is a lot of development work and intent required to drive our cultures forward.
The six levers needed to lead a culture
What are you keen to pay more attention to in strengthening your culture? As we came to the end of the skills session, we explored six key levers for leading culture and, specifically, cultural change.
For any individual, a message needs to be heard at least six times for you to take it in. That message needs to be continually repeated, so if the principles are sticky, they naturally become easier to remember. Think about your straplines or strategy and reflect on if they meet that level of ‘stickiness’. A good example from the Olympic world is the question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’
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. When we consider inclusive leadership, the research shows that leaders can influence the people, the athletes, the organisation around them by up to 70% with their behaviours.
Constantly reviewing your organisation and your culture to make sure you are reflecting on where you are. 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 in how they provide insight into the health of the culture at a specific moment in time.
One attendee shared they had invested a lot of time around the theme of psychological safety. As an example, if you want to go after psychological safety as an organisation, one of the key skills that underpins psychological safety is enabling people to speak up. Providing these opportunities supports the intent to make positive change.
Feedback is so critical. One of the things that we see happen in a large percentage of organisations is that people don’t deliver skilful feedback; and feedback can feel quite personal. Therefore, it’s about creating that feedback loop and that culture of what we call ‘skilled candour’, so that people are able to deliver feedback in a skilful manner.
When engaging in culture change, do you have the right people in the environment? Ultimately, it may come down to a time when you have to make a decision as a leader about getting the right people on the bus.
