By Luke Whitworth

As part of our final Performance Support Series virtual roundtable series of 2023, we are focusing our attention on the overarching topic of performance planning.

Over the course of the three sessions, it is the intention to focus on three core areas as part of this topic:

• Leading with purpose: the relationship between personal and professional purpose on shaping organisational and team planning.
• Goal harmony vs team harmony: how can you create team alignment to galvanise and focus your team performance?
• Debriefing: implementing effective debriefing to create a learning culture in your team.

 The importance of leading with purpose

Leading with purpose was our first port of call and the aims of this particular session were to reflect on and share what we value and what our professional purpose is. Why is the notion of leading with  purpose important when considering Performance Planning? We are operating in both a complex world and landscape, such is the pace of high performance sport. This quote below from Ronald Heifetz et al (2009) in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership captures why this is important.

“When you understand your orienting purpose, you can understand and make day-to-day decisions in that larger context… When things get tough, you orienting purpose serves as a reminder to you and to others of the reasons you are seeking to lead change.”

Harry Kraemer (2011) supports this thinking by suggesting that ‘becoming the best kind of leader isn’t about emulating a role model or historic figure. Rather, the leadership must be rooted in who the leader is and what matters most to them. When the leader truly knows themselves and what they stand for, it is much easier to know what to do in any situation. It always comes down to doing the right thing and doing the best you can’.

Living and leading with purpose is so important in a complex world.

Engagement is driven by clarity of values

What makes us have a great day at work or engaging effectively with the environments we are in? Evidence from researchers Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner (2007) points to our engagement being driven by clarity of values, in particular alignment of organisational and personal values. Finding alignment in both values is a multiplier and developer of oxytocin. Do your personal and organisational values connect?

The late Steve Jobs talked of this dynamic – “I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit”.

The science of connection

How does purpose create trust and joy? As part of this next segment of the conversations, we explored why being clear on our ‘why’ creates a sense of wellbeing and joy.

Research by Paul J. Zak shows that having a sense of higher purpose stimulates oxytocin production – as does trust. Trust and purpose mutually reinforce each other, providing a mechanism for extended oxytocin release, which in turn produces happiness. Joy or engagement with others comes from doing purpose-driven work with a trusted team.

Are you connecting your values? Do you have a real sense of purpose? Does that give you joy? A simple but effective exercise for you and your teams to do is a ‘professional purpose statement’. Take the time to reflect or write down what that purpose is. Start with the words: ‘my professional purpose is to…’.

How to find purpose?

It can be challenging to find and define your purpose. To help guide this discovery, there are a few simple questions you can ask yourself or have members of your team reflect on themselves to identify core values and purpose:

• What are my strengths?
• What inspires me?
• What fills me with energy, accomplishment and passion?
• What impact do others say that you have?

In summarising session one as part of this series of learning, we leaned into the work of Hubert Joly, businessman and Harvard Business School faculty member, on five core principles of purpose leadership. Joly suggest that these five principles include the below:

1. Being clear about your purpose – how are you connecting to your company purpose?
2. Being clear about your role – not your job title.
3. Being clear about whom you serve.
4. Being driven by values.
5. Being authentic.

By Iain Brunnschweiler

Your heartbeat is racing, and you’ve got a sick feeling in your stomach.

You are about to walk into a meeting with the rest of your leadership team and you know that you’ve got something to say to add value to the conversation. However, the dynamic in the room means that you already know that you will hold your tongue and won’t feel comfortable to say what you really think.

Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, then you’ve done extremely well to navigate a career thus far without this experience!

For the majority of us, this kind of feeling may have occurred a handful of times, or it may have occurred hundreds of times. You might be reading this thinking that this is exactly how you will be feeling either tomorrow, or later this week.

Seeking optimal

This situation surely cannot be optimal. It cannot be optimal for the individual who is suffering the anxiety-inducing thoughts, and it certainly cannot be optimal for the business who is deploying this group of people to work together.

Whether in business, music, sport or military, the ability for us to maximise the combined forces of those ‘in the room’ is absolutely paramount for success. And, more importantly, for the humans involved to feel comfortable enough to contribute and feel valued.

One of my key focus areas in recent years has been supporting people to work better together. In sports, a key objective has been to look at what is broadly termed ‘co-coaching’.

Co-coaching is the ability for multiple coaches to work together in the same coaching session. With growing support staffs, often in elite team sports today there will be two or three technical coaches, along with multiple other specialists such as strength & conditioning coaches, analysts, psychologists and physiotherapists. With all of these expert practitioners on the same field at the same time, the coordination of their roles and responsibilities is paramount. So, co-coaching could describe two coaches working together with the same squad, in the same session. Or it could be an entire support staff of seven or eight working together at the same time. This can get pretty complicated, and it is very easy for their to be a lack of role clarity, which results in a lack of impact on player development.

In my experience, there are three broad, fundamental qualities needed to co-coach effectively. They are:

1) Having an aligned purpose or intended outcome.

2) Having clarity on individuals roles in order to achieve the outcome.

3) Having a level of respect for the other members of the team and the contribution they are making.

The special sauce

As my old boss, the relentlessly successful Simon Timson (currently the Performance Director at Manchester City) once said to me, we need “no precious professional boundaries”. What the heck does that mean, I hear you cry!?

Well, I learned, and then experienced exactly what that meant during my time at England Cricket. We had a performance support team comprising technical coaches, an operations team, a physio, S&C coach, analyst, psychologist and education/welfare coaches. Similar teams will be present in many sports performance/development environments.

However, I have rarely experienced these teams operating anywhere near optimally together. And that’s where Simon’s wonderful phrase comes in.

For example, as the head coach of a national age group team, I embraced the view of the physio. This is not uncommon, he is a highly qualified technical expert in his field. However, it was not just his physio-medical view that I would be seeking. I would also genuinely embrace his view on the way a batter had approached an innings, or the field setting that we were going with during a youth international match. That’s what it means, that is what Simon meant. As a staff, we were aware that there was a high level of technical expertise in our own fields, but the special sauce was that we trusted each other to provide a view that wasn’t necessarily in our lane. The fast bowling coach could genuinely provide a view on the gym programme or the analyst discuss the education provision. This feeling that we had amongst us is rare. Too many times I have seen people being shut down because the leader in the room was not open to a level of cognitive diversity. Their mind was shut to the fact that someone deemed to be a non-technical coach might actually have value to add.

So what led this group to come to this place? I think there was one fundamental skill that we worked on, got better at, and evolved: listening.

It sounds simple, but how often do you REALLY listen to your colleagues? Listen to understand. Listen with all of your senses. Listen for the story behind the story, for the values or beliefs that might be guiding the narrative. To create and hold space for the contribution of others, as a leader, rather than to fill it with your own preconceived ideas or to confirm your own biases.

Listening is a whole lot harder than it sounds. Especially when the heat is on, and decisions need to be made. Listening takes energy and it takes attention. It is also really easy to hear what you want to hear rather than what is really being said. I have often asked a player “How was training today?” To which the answer is almost invariably “Good, thanks”! Only by asking a better question such as “What did you learn in training today?”, or “What made you think the most in training today?”, and then really listening carefully to the answer have I unlocked conversations with players that I never thought I would have.

So when you reflect on your own contribution to a team, or specifically a team meeting, please do consider the role you are playing. Are you causing anxiety in others, to the point at which they may not say the one thing that could be critical to success? Are you creating and holding the space to genuinely listen? Because if you aren’t, then you’ll almost certainly be making much worse decisions due to not having the full picture from all of the minds you’ve got in the team.

Questions for leaders:

• How aware are you of how members of your team are feeling in different meetings?
• To what extent do you embrace the thinking of someone who may not be a technical expert in that area? (Some call this a ‘naïve expert’)
• How much of your energy and skill are you protecting to genuinely listen?

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and most recently was the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.

By Luke Whitworth

For the latest edition of our Leadership Skills Series, we delved into the skill of strengths-based development.

Which areas of skill should we focus our energy on? If you were to rank those skills on a scale of 1-5, the tendency is for individuals to focus on the weakest link and what is ‘holding you back’ from a development point of view. This is the traditional way of thinking about the development of skills.

Think about your own world, what is one strength that you know that you have? Secondly, what is one area that could hold you back? As part of the interaction on this particular session, we asked attendees to reflect on the time spent on their development based on whether they spend hours, days, week or they don’t spend time on their development because it is too hard or they don’t have time:

• Hours: 72%
• Days: 22%
• Weeks: 3%
• I Don’t Because It’s Too Hard: 3%

The consensus is that we invest time in developing the areas we are weakest at and the most popular response to this with 72% was that a large percentage of people dedicate hours to this focus of development.

A strengths-based approach

A Strengths-based approach (part of positive psychology) is based on the assumption that each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of their greatest strength. Research by Gallup over the last 22 years indicates that when we focus on strengths, productivity can increase by up to 40%.

How would your development look if you invested those hours, days or weeks into making your strengths super strengths, as opposed to focusing on weaker areas?

The notion of a strengths-based approach sits in the field of positive psychology which is a science of the positive aspects of human life such as happiness, wellbeing and flourishing. Psychologist Martin Seligman offers the definition that positive psychology is “the scientific study of optimal human functioning (that) aims to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals to thrive”.

When considering a strengths-based approach that sits within the space of positive psychology, it is important to outline the differences between positive psychology and traditional psychology which can be evaluated by two different types of modelling – disease and health:

Disease model (psychology)

• Focus on weaknesses
• Overcoming deficiencies
• Avoiding pain
• Running from unhappiness
• Getting to a neutral state

Health model (positive psychology)

• Focus on strengths
• Building resilience
• Fostering strengths
• Pursuing happiness
• Nurturing positivity

Dr Ilona Bonniwell stated that ‘psychology has more often than not emphasised the shortcomings of individuals as compared with their potential’. Seligman supports this point by stating that positive psychology ‘is the psychology of what is “right” with people. What are people doing when they are in ‘peak performance’ state, optimistic and positive?’

Identifying our strengths

How do you know that something is a strength to you?

• Something feels core to who you are as a person. It’s part of who you are. Your identity. It captures your uniqueness.
• It energises you when you use it.
• It more than likely comes quite naturally to you.
• You sometimes go into a ‘flow state’ when using it, losing track of time.
• Others might notice you using your strengths.

If you reflect and think about your teams, who in your teams are positive and thriving, and what is the potential for them if they actually unlock that even more? For those who aren’t perhaps thriving – what are their strengths? What are they not yet perhaps conscious and aware of? Actually, if we focused on those things, could they unlock their sense of self-belief and, therefore, their development?

The notion of realising your strengths forms a key component of positive psychology. In the literature, you will often come across the equation referring to Talent x Effort = Realised Strength. If we were to focus on the traditional model of psychology, we give maximum effort to the weakest components.

Developing strengths in others

Our roles as leaders is to help others be their best and we can use a strengths-based approach to do that. Gallup’s State of the Workplace report explored what happens when managers primarily focus on employees developing a weakness and employees developing strengths:

• Employees developing weaknesses: this led to a 20% chance of the employee being actively disengaged.
• Employees developing strengths: this led to a 1% chance of the employee being actively disengaged.

Creating opportunities for self-awareness in others feeds part of developing strengths in others. Are they aware of who they are when they are at their best, and how to do that? Do they have strong strategies to be that?

To explore the landscape of self-awareness, we ran another interactive poll to explore the awareness of those in your team. What are they more aware of?

• They are more aware of who they are when they are at their best? 32%
• They are more aware of who they are when they’re not at their best? 68%

The responses were overwhelming in suggesting that our team members are more aware of who they are when they’re not at their best (68%) as opposed to being at their best (32%).

Enhancing awareness of strengths

Who are we when we are at our best?

• ‘Peak’ performance state: our mind and body are in a state of congruence.
• Strategies to make the best of our strengths and resources: when you are in that peak performance state, how do you do it? How do you think, behave and communicate with yourself and others around you to get the best outcomes?
• Intention and attention: who do you intend to show up as and are you aware of that person?

The five concepts below recreate the Logical Levels of Change model devised by renowned thought leader Robert Dilts. The model identifies our experiences when we are at our best:

1. Identity: how you (and others) might describe you.
2. Beliefs & values: what is important to you. What you believe. The Values you navigate yourself by.
3. Capabilities & resources: your skills, talents, strengths and capabilities – the unique inner resources you draw upon.
4. Behaviours: your behaviours, habits, routines and communications – the things you do.
5. Environment: your environment and your impact on it.

What can unlock the awareness of strengths in ourselves and others? There are three ways that leaders and managers can do it. It is useful to ask yourselves the questions of what do we want our teams to experience and who do they need to be in order to experience that?

• Intention: to unlock that potential.
• Attention: what do we need to pay attention to?
• A coaching approach: how do we give ourselves the best chance? Countless studies show that a coaching approach sits in the highest performance of managers.

To support a coaching approach, we explored Professor Angus MacLeod’s Three Instruments of Coaching to provide us with some simple but effective tools in developing this approach:

1. Questions: focusing those questions on their strengths. Ask them, what is it that that you want and who do you want to be? If you want to develop that strength, where do you already have it?
2. Silence: coaching can often be about being silent and expecting them to have an answer because they have beliefs and desires. So what is it they want? And then who do they need to be to be able to get there?
3. Challenge: challenge them to explore who they are when they are at their best, and when you see it.

By Bobby L Scales II

When organizational change is needed it usually means something has not gone well.

Results may have slipped, your culture may have drifted. Perhaps the market is telling you there’s something you need to improve upon.

Recognizing the need for change is one thing, coming into a new environment and selling that change to the team you have inherited is quite another.

We know change is difficult. Change can illicit feelings of fear and uncertainty and when those feelings arise, as humans we naturally go back to what is comfortable and safe. The problem is that more often than not what is comfortable and safe is exactly why the change is needed. Your team may feel isolated or alienated. Even when the change is 90% good, people are going to worry about the ‘bad’ 10% and how it inevitably affects them. The leader needs to create an environment where people are willing and able to embrace change.

Leading a team or organization through times of change is a heavy lift and there is no escaping that, but there are things a leader can do to give themselves the best chance during those first 90 days and beyond.

Below is the ‘30-60-90’ model I would follow if I were leading a team or department through a period of transition and development. For the uninitiated, the 30-60-90 model divides those first 90 days into three phases where you sequentially identify your team’s issues, formulate your strategy, and begin to execute your plans.

Know your personnel

Your first 30 days should be spent asking the people around you a ton of questions. You need to have an idea of what needs to change but, in those early days, you must get a proper gage of the temperature ‘in the room’. How are people feeling? What was the sentiment of the group previously? Allow them to ask questions of you. Find out about the ‘who’ first, then you can begin to ask questions about the ‘what’. It is important to ask what happened in the past and understand why things were done a certain way before. This will inform your ideas of where you need to go. It’s impossible to do the latter until you win the people first.

In my view, this is the most difficult phase during those first 90 days because you and your staff are learning and, oftentimes, you’ll have new personnel either in management or in the rank and file – or just an entirely new group on both sides – because something has not gone to plan. You are not changing for the sake of change: you’re changing because something needs to happen in order to grow whatever group you are part of.

It is crucial to know your personnel, as former NFL Head Coach Herm Edwards memorably put it, you need to learn who is in front of you and to whom you are talking. Staff members cannot be bucketed into broad categories as you solicit their feedback. You need to understand each and every person on your team as an individual to fully understand where they fit or if you need to move on.

Identify the right people, get them in the correct seats on the bus

One thing you’ll find with long-tenured individuals is that they can become stifled or bored, which does not alter the fact that they may have some great ideas stifled because there is no real pathway for advancement and bored because there have been ideas that have been put forward and for whatever reason haven’t gone anywhere. If you have a smart and sharp talent base, you need to afford staff members the space to run with those ideas. Another way to put it is that you need to make sure that your people are sat in the correct seats on the bus.

All people want to be challenged in their job. People want to feel they can master their job and excel in their role and grow into more. As a manager, that can mean being secure in the fact that you are not the smartest person in the room. Part of the first 30 days is understanding that and then folding that into your plan.

It also speaks to your authenticity as a leader. Yes, ‘authenticity’ is a buzzword these days but, when you’re creating an environment, people want to know you are real. You have to be yourself, you have to be honest, and you have to be up front. It goes hand in hand with your integrity. People need to understand that you’re still doing the right things when no one else is watching too.

With the right questions asked of the right people, we then turn our attention to days 31 to 60. This phase is about formulating your plan and how you’re going to put all the pieces into play. Towards the end of that period you need to tell your group: ‘this is what we’ve got here and these are the answers I got from you all. This is not me making this up because I was not part of this group before. Here’s how we got here, these are the answers I’ve gotten from you and this is the path forward as I see it for this group’. You have to lay out your vision and plan for innovating or iterating in your environment and, when you have buy-in, it alleviates a lot of those questions such as ‘what’s in it for me?’

Here’s what’s in it for you: a chance to grow your career that you didn’t have before because you were stifled. You were bored and now you have the opportunity to stretch your legs and run with it.

It is also a question of communication and there also needs to be an intentionality to your strategy. There are key people you should have identified inside your department that are your influencers, people whose words and actions carry weight. It is important to communicate effectively with and through those people.

Full steam ahead

By the time you reach day 61 you’re going full steam ahead as you put your plan in place and you let your people run with it.

Your plan must also be nimble. Having a process and a framework is important but if market factors change then you will need to have the space to amend your approach. In that scenario, you need to be honest and open. You need to communicate that message in a way that is supportive rather than aggressive. Again, it comes down to communication and being genuine in gathering people’s ideas about how to remedy the situation when things are not going according to plan.

It is amazing what you can ask people to do when they feel like they are part of a team and in the know.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

How well are you serving your female athletes and what more could you be doing?

That was the question at the heart of Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, our two-day event at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester.

On day one, speakers from organisations including Hockey Canada, British Cycling, High Performance Sport New Zealand, Harlequins and the UK Sports Institute all answered that question in their own way.

This is a snapshot of their responses, four factors pulled from the discourse to illustrate that while female sport has come on leaps and bounds in a relatively short period of time, there is still a long way to go before female athletes, coaches and practitioners achieve parity with their male counterparts.

1. Coaches: are you doing enough of the right things?

Male and female athletes are more similar than they are different, but there are differences, such as in bonding dynamics or the need to ask ‘why?’ on the training pitch (this is a trait more widely noted in female athletes than male). The most astute coaches recognise this and adapt accordingly. Danny Kerry, the Head Coach of the Canada women’s field hockey team, has worked with male and female coaches and has, following considerable self-reflection, learned to tweak his approach to male and female cohorts. Emma Trott, an Academy Coach at British Cycling, has called upon her own experience as a rider to inform her work with Britain’s young prospects to develop her coaching style. Kerry and Trott arrived at the same conclusion: when trying to optimise athletes, it is the environment that gets the performance out and that comes down to the coach.

What they said

Danny Kerry on managing team vs individual dynamics:

“All facets of coaching [consist of] trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping people adapt to the bell curve, finding their value in that, finding what works for them in that is the real craft of coaching – and in my experience that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”

Emma Trott on listening to athletes:

“People don’t listen all the time. We hear what we want to hear and we want to hear it because we’ve already made a decision in our head about how we’re going to impact something rather than listening to what is actually being said. It’s that question: ‘How are you?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ – what does that really mean?”

Next steps

• Coaches need to be empathetic to the needs of female athletes and that often requires the coach to be mindful of their own conduct and adapt accordingly.
• The issues that arise from female biology are numerous and there can be limiting factors on performance. However, it is important to understand that gains can still be made when the athlete is not at 100%.
• The coach needs to understand what is required of them at any given point in time. Sometimes it will be heavy instruction, at other times they need only offer words of encouragement or a serene demeanour.

2. Is everyone on your team speaking up?

In 2017, Helene Wilson took the reins of a talented but under-achieving Northern Mystics side in the ANZ Premiership, the national netball league of New Zealand. Two years later, they finished bottom of the table but, in 2021, were crowned champions. Wilson, who worked concurrently as a mentor at High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ, where she works full-time today], realised that her playing group were skilled but their diverse backgrounds, rather than representing a strength, created division and hindered alignment in the pursuit of high performance. That needed to change.

What she said

Helene Wilson on the HPSNZ Te Hāpaitanga pilot programme [launched in 2019, it initially paired 12 emerging women coaches with experienced mentors, giving them guidance through workshops] and how it influenced her coaching at the Mystics:

“During this time the penny dropped for me. We were busy teaching the coaches about tikanga, the customary system of values and practices. I realised that space for ambiguity where we translate our different approaches and lenses to what really drives high performance was missing in my environment.”

Next steps

• Understand that everyone is a leader and leadership is defined by your actions and behaviours. Some have more responsibility in their role, but everyone has a role to play.
• Ensure that everyone feels included while also not fearing rejection, because they are the first to comply, first to be passive, and not speak up when you really need them to.
• Deploy yourself against a problem last. Lead from behind rather than from in front.

3. Removing the physiological barriers to participation

In the afternoon, Dr Nikki Brown, the Associate Professor in Female Health at St Mary’s University in London; Emma Brockwell, a specialist women’s health physiotherapist at PHYSIOMUM, a female pelvic health specialist clinic; and Dr Amal Hassan, the Women’s Team Doctor at Harlequins, took to the stage to explore issues in female physiology, from skill acquisition during the menstrual cycle, being able to show up as best you can, and the risks presented by fashion over function in the use of sports bras.

What they said

Nikki Brown on breast health:

“It’s important to recognise that breasts will impact participation. Half of school girls drop out of participation because of their breasts, with one in three adults seeing the breasts as a barrier to participation. Then there’s that performance aspect, with breast support, because [an athlete’s] breasts will move during activity, and it changes how they move, it changes their confidence, changes their breathing, changes their muscle activity and movement patterns.”

Amal Hassan on the impact of the menstrual cycle:

“Periods can be a barrier to participation, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it can stop certain players from developing at crucial points.”

Emma Brockwell on issues related to female pelvic floor dysfunction:

“It’s understanding that pelvic floor dysfunction is not just in the perinatal population or the older population. In fact, it occurs in younger girls and female athletes.”

Next steps

• There is more work to be done in normalising the conversation around periods, breast health or other concerns. These terms cannot remain taboo.
• What is your ethical code? If you’re encouraging a practice you need to put in place a structure, decide who is leading the programme, who is driving the educational aspects, and who are your go-to people for answers.
• Teams with bigger budgets can fit out a sophisticated programme or offer bra-fitting assessments, but action could be as simple as putting up a bra-fitting poster in a changing room or on the back of the toilet door. Even little nudges can make a difference or spark a conversation about breast health issues.

4. Bridging the gap between innovation and research in women’s sport with practical application

The UK Sports Institute [UKSI] has a major aim: to develop a nationwide programme to advance the science, medicine and application of female athlete health and performance support. However, as Richard Burden, the Co-Lead of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UKSI, explains, there is a gap between innovation and research and delivery in female high performance environments.

What he said

“When delivering education sessions you can’t assume that because you’re talking to female athletes they know about the menstrual cycle, they know about bra fit – they don’t all know about these things. Even when it comes to female coaches, you can’t assume they know how to prioritise for female athletes.”

Next steps

• It is important to find ways to increase the translation and applicability of research.
• You have to bring athletes and coaches on a journey through knowledge generation, education and the delivery of a programme.
• Ask yourselves: are we giving them a reason to engage? How can we be resourceful? How can we create more time? How can we improve practicality?

By Graham Turner PhD

People that think sport is easy don’t know the amount of time and effort you have to put in #f***ingopenyoureyes

Tweet from an athlete featured in The Young Athlete’s Perspective

In my book The Young Athlete’s Perspective, six young athletes share their talent development stories, reveal what it is really like to be a young person in a sports talent development programme and share what they think, but dare not say.

The book provides valuable insights into key topics and issues, such as:

• How to support young athletes to progress in the sport that is right for them.
• How a positive talent development experience relies upon personalised and holistic athlete development.
• How to guide the young athlete through competing physical demands and psychological challenges.
• Why optimal athlete and coach collaboration relies upon a genuine relationship and authentic communication.
• How autonomy, connectedness and a sense of competence are critical to a young athlete’s motivation.
• How to teach the young athlete to become the best learner.

The key to becoming the best learner – self-regulation                                                                                        

In this article, I have focused on self-regulation and its role in enabling young athletes to become better learners.

To be successful, young athletes must be proactive, independent, resourceful, and persistent. Self-regulation is the process by which an athlete continuously monitors progress towards their goals, evaluates outcomes and redirects unsuccessful efforts. Key to this process is the individual’s awareness of and knowledge about their own thinking (metacognition). Each athlete must be behaviourally proactive in their own learning process and learn to be self-aware, problem-focused and goal-oriented. Higher-level athletes learn to self-regulate by exerting greater control over their feelings, thoughts and actions during three distinct phases:

• Forethought – the processes and beliefs that occur before the effort to learn is initiated.
• Performance – the process of behaviour that effects planned execution.
• Self-reflection – the processes that occur after each learning effort.

Through the use of direct quotes, the book explores the developmental journeys of these young athletes and provides examples of how young people demonstrate initiative, take responsibility, and optimise learning by:

Seeking out specific environments

At the end of this season I think I am going to move to ######… Yes, it is a much better team.

Rowan

Creating specific structures

Time management is the only way I’ll ever get anything done otherwise I end up just leaving it. But if I set myself out what I need to do every day, then I’ll get it done and it’s fine.

Eboni

Implementing consistent processes

I use my diary a lot, the goal setting is really helpful, you just need to keep doing that, that’s how you are going to improve as a player.

Steve

The level of learning achieved by an athlete will vary depending upon the level of their self-regulatory skill. Young athletes’ accounts of engagement with adults within the talent development environment demonstrate how being listened to and understood positively impacts this process.

Yes, they are much better, much better coaches, yes. They have one on one conversations with you about things, like what they want you to do next game or how the last game went, and they seem like they care a bit more and they are actually happy that we have done well.

Steve

And athletes who successfully self-regulate eventually become distinguished by their sensitivity to the social context and a proficiency in the ability to recognise how an adult may,

Help learning

Author: Do you think he (your Athletics Coach) stepped it up as well?  You said, “I’m serious.”  And suddenly he’s thought, oh right…

George: Yeah, definitely.  Yeah as soon as he saw I was making decisions to focus on it a lot more, he’s given me a lot more time and he’s given me a lot more focus.

Or hinder learning

I didn’t feel like I got anything out of it. The coaches weren’t very helpful they kind of told you what to do but weren’t very good at correcting the stuff that you had wrong.

Steve

The young people in this book have revealed that for them, the essence of being in a sports talent development programme is hard work. Each young person details an individual set of contextualised circumstances that has subsequently influenced the extent to which they have been able to take control of their own learning. Individual stories depict how the behaviour of different adults teaches young athletes how to act and how for the young person, their interpretation of and response to this is key to their talent development experience.

I spoke to my coach recently and said well I don’t really see the point in doing it anymore if I’m not going to get any further so then we had a talk and she said I need to improve my fitness, which I did, and I needed to get to the next step and need to go through regional for another half a year, so I can get moved up to the next level.

So now she has moved me up again, so I am half in regional and half in the local Academy.

Eboni

The self-regulated learner incorporates self-motivational beliefs with task strategies (plans and methods) to develop and apply self-regulation processes and is influenced reciprocally by the results of those efforts.

Positive collaboration

When the young person is motivated to find solutions to the challenges they face the key to positive collaboration is dependent upon the adult’s ability to create conditions that promote engagement. The narratives of the young athletes in this book demonstrate how for them, the experience of talent development extends far beyond the time spent in training and competition and can come to influence every area of their life. This existence requires the young person to live in a reality where the expectation is that they are continually striving to improve performance, and so for as long as they commit to meet this demand they must constantly search for ways to positively influence individual progress.

The Young Athlete’s Perspective is available now from all good booksellers.

Graham works for the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) as a systems leader, supporting sports to establish world’s best High Performance Pathways that identify, develop, support and progress talented athletes to achieve medal winning performances. He has previously worked at organisations including Wolverhampton Wanderers, Gymnastics Australia and Leeds Beckett University. He holds a PhD in Talent Development in Sport.

By John Portch

“The hardest thing with elite level para athletes is that you tend to gain experience and learning from mistakes,” says Victoria Moore. “Because you don’t have a large group of people to compare an athlete to.”

The Head of Performance Support & Solutions at Athletics Australia oversees athlete support for both the Olympic and Paralympic programs. When it comes to the latter, the first thing she says is that no two para athletes will have the same high support needs.

“It’s hard to know everything about everyone on the team and what might happen to them in different environments,” she continues. “So having a breadth of knowledge of a range of issues, any comorbidities and being able to adapt, is really important. That’s why I try to upskill people where possible and share knowledge and what I’ve learned.”

She spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute earlier this year as Athletics Australia prepared to take a team of 39 athletes to the 2023 Para Athletics World Championships, which took place in Paris in July. Australia would claim 14 medals: three golds, eight silvers and three bronzes. It was a haul that placed the nation eighteenth in the medals table.

A year from now, the 2024 Paralympic Games will also come to the French capital. This year’s worlds afforded Athletics Australia a rare opportunity to run tests in near identical conditions. “That doesn’t always happen, but when we can align then we try to align.”

Moore was a contributor to our Performance Special Report Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions. She also found time to discuss her role, which sees her work across both Olympic and Paralympic sport.

“You need to be specific about how you manage each team environment. I’m a connection point, joining the dots, and giving people as much information as I can to be able to support them to do their role effectively.”

Here, we highlight four lessons from Moore’s work meeting the needs of para athletes and how they may provide food for thought for the wider sporting world.

1. ‘You can’t have a lot of peacocks’

When Athletics Australia sends a team to a meet such as the Para Athletics World Championships, it is important for coaches to have both humility and a capacity to build rapport. Or, as Moore puts it, they must have the right amount of ‘awesomeness and awkwardness’. She says: “I have this thing about teams, it’s my ‘awesome and awkward’ theory. Generally, what it means is, when I put a team together, I’m quite considered in how I do it across performance support. The awkward and awesome theory is that people need to have the right amount of awesomeness with regards to technical capabilities but the right amount of awkwardness so that on a team they are able to fit well. So you can’t have a lot of peacocks. Whereas you might be able to have them in a daily training environment because they all go home at the end of the day, people need to be able to pick up the roles of others in camp environments. They need to be humble and they need to be able to build rapport quickly.”

2. Identify opportunities to upskill your support staff and blend complementary skillsets

Moore will not rely on prior experience alone when preparing to support para athletes at a major games. “I really need to understand the needs of the athletes that make up the team and then put support structures around them,” she says. “For a para team, that means anything from underlying medical conditions that require extra support to the skillsets of the staff that are going.” If there is a large contingent of athletes that compete in wheelchairs then it could be that Moore prioritises doctors or physios with expertise in pressure sore management, for example. “If there is a gap then I need to upskill the team so they can manage in those conditions.” This approach has led to numerous adaptations, such as the employment of performance psychologists with mental health training. Where limits on staff accreditation press upon Moore, she will work backwards with her team to enable them to cover as many bases as possible. “Our carers’ roles have evolved. We used to just take people who had good relationships with the athletes. Now we take very highly skilled occupational therapists who help manage the daily planning and can pivot towards other areas.” Support staff roles at a competition are defined by their necessary skillsets, which are determined by documenting athletes’ needs. “People are more accountable now and better able to deliver.”

3. Try to test athletes away from their home environments

Athlete assessments of need are better done away from home. “We always try to create camps where we can get these athletes away from their daily training environment so that we can truly understand what their needs are going to be away from home – it’s hard to know what those things are until you see them outside their home environments and away from their traditional support systems,” says Moore. The athletes themselves also need to experience being away. “They probably wouldn’t know [their true support needs] until they leave their home environment,” she adds. “We haven’t taken individual carers away with us. We don’t want to create a dependency. We’ll always make sure that we build rapport with the athlete and our support person. We also have to think of the needs of the whole team.”

4. Devise frameworks that capture the wisdom and knowledge of your team

When considering para sport support services, learning tends to come through a process of trial and error as much as through evidence-based practice or interventions. Therefore, it is important to capture knowledge gained in the field. “You can create efficiencies by synthesising information,” says Moore. The potential issue is that budgets will only stretch so far and requests for funding can come from all angles. Moore cannot risk support systems and processes becoming unwieldy and inefficient. She recommends a framework that enables the transition of knowledge from one cycle to the next (“an information dump”, as Moore herself puts it). “People want to be innovative but they tend to not know where the big rocks are in doing that. If you can have a person coordinate that, you can be efficient, you can understand themes, you can see what’s been done and not reinvent the wheel. Then you can help people to put in frameworks to begin to implement change.”

Victoria Moore was a contributor to our Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Athletics Australia, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Hockey Ireland and Welsh Rugby Union. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

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By Luke Whitworth

In more recent times, buzzwords such as ‘belonging’, ‘experience’ and ‘connection’ have re-surfaced as key considerations for the design of your performance environment.

Friend of Leaders, the author Owen Eastwood, has often referred to a piece of research conducted within the UK Olympic system, which outlined that “70% of our behaviour is determined by what environment we’re in”.

So if we are to obtain the behaviours we seek, the look, feel, engagement and connection to and within the environment is crucial in making this a reality. As part of this Leaders Performance Institute member Virtual Roundtable, we sought to explore how those on the call are trying to drive engagement and connection to get the best out of others in their environment, and collectively, what we think are the most effective and impactful ways of doing this.

1. Being intentional

Before we think about best practices in bringing people together, the notion of engagement and connection requires intent. As part of the responses from the group on this particular roundtable around what is important to get right when looking to drive engagement and connection, a number of responses suggested that upfront work needs time and attention first and foremost.

What does engagement and connection look like for you in your environment? What is the definition of this and what sorts of behaviours and interactions do you want to see that aligns to this?

One attendee shared that the process of fostering engagement and connection takes time and needs patience. Don’t jump to conclusions if you aren’t seeing rapid changes in behaviour, stick to the process and give it the opportunity to cultivate in your environment.

2. Focus on individual relationships

Now we’ve appreciated the need to be intentional and have patience, we can look at some simple things that can have a positive impact of moving things in the right direction. The most common response from the group was placing an emphasis and focus on developing relationships with individuals in the environment. Simple, but effective. How often are you creating these opportunities for your people?

Ensure that individuals in the environment are connecting with one another on a one-to-one basis and not just in groups. It provides an opportunity to better understand someone, creates opportunities to listen and engage with intent and often is more comfortable for people than group settings.

Within many high performance sport environments, we often hear the challenges with the siloing of information or practice. A very simple way to prevent this from happening is building relationships and understanding of others, especially when operating in different disciplines. Linking back to point one about intentionality, many of these types of interactions happen organically, but we also shouldn’t be blinkered to the idea that not everyone engages in them organically.

3. Understanding others on a human level

A common phrase in the industry is the idea of knowing the person before the performer. This isn’t just in the context of athletes, and it absolutely extends to staff within the environment. Getting to know someone personally provides an opportunity to learn more about their purpose, ambitions, objectives and development needs. If we are able to support our people by combining ideas to develop their practice, that also tap into the core parts of their personality or purpose, we will likely witness a higher level of impact and buy-in. Plus, it drives a heightened sense of belonging and their place within the environment which we know is vitally important to get the best out of one another.

Specifically related to development needs, are you making sure you are taking that insight you are collating and providing opportunities for people? As leaders, authenticity and reliability are valuable traits, so it’s important to do what you say you’re going to do or taking the time to progress ideas and opportunities for people.

4. Organisational alignment

Taking the point above a step further, we also want to strive to connect our people to the values and larger goals of your organisation. The notion of higher purpose is powerful, and if we are able to outline common and shared goals within the organisation or environment, a strong chain of people, beliefs and understanding is created. One attendee on the call had suggested tapping into the concept of action learning in this process – action learning consists of insightful questioning and reflective listening, focusing on providing clarification, reflection and solution-orientation. Integrating your people into this process and the wider goals of the organisation seems simple, but many on the call still felt it’s an area for improvement.

5. Balancing structure and freedom

Allow people to be themselves but in a productive way. A final common response from the group around important considerations for engagement and connection, was finding a balance of structure to support staff and athletes to head in the right direction, and a sense of freedom that allows them to feel like they can be themselves in the environment.

It’s important to show your people you care, which is why finding the balance of structure and freedom is important. Often people don’t know what they don’t know, which is why some structure is effective – provide space to experiment with a bit of support wrapped around it.

By Iain Brunnschweiler

Picture the scene: it is day one of the men’s Ashes, the biennial Test cricket series contested between England and Australia, with the famous cricket ground at Edgbaston in Birmingham bathed in glorious June sunshine. The moment is set. This is one of the most historic, most competitive and highest pressure sporting events of the year.

Zak Crawley, England’s 25-year-old opening batsman, could have been forgiven for feeling the pressure. At the time, his batting average was much lower than one would historically hope for an international batsman, and a bumper crowd awaited the first ball from Australia’s captain Pat Cummins. Yet Crawley crashed the ball through the off side for four runs, with one of the most dominant shots you could ever see, to spark an eruption of rapturous applause from the crowd.

This was different. What proceeded to unfold over the next six hours or so was without doubt one of the most scintillating days of Test cricket you could ever see. England played with a freedom and a joie de vivre uncommonly seen in elite sport. Joe Root made an impeccable unbeaten hundred, including some outrageous shots, against some of the best bowlers in the world, and all delivered with the biggest of smiles on his face.

The England men’s cricket team produced some quite remarkable, yet publicly divisive, performances against the Australians this summer in a series that was drawn 2-2. The media labelled it ‘BazBall’ (a phrase which Coach, Brendon McCullum, and captain, Ben Stokes, refute), however, it is clear to me that there is significantly more behind England’s approach than simply smiling and smashing it. There has clearly been a process of strategic thought, some well-considered internal communications and an integration between those in dark trousers at executive level (Managing Director and Performance Director) with those in the white trousers on the pitch.

In my experience in elite sport, seeking genuine alignment of philosophy, leading into strategy and ultimately performance, is like searching for a unicorn. Every organisation will have a VMOST [Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics] or similar, but how often is the MD really singing off the same page as the practitioner on the grass? How often when the going really gets tough, do we see players overtly playing for themselves and their own agenda, rather than that of the team and the organisation? Unfortunately it is all too common for misalignment to occur somewhere along the chain of command.

What can other sports, and businesses learn from the approach that England have adopted? I believe there are three headline areas:

• Strategic alignment 
• Performance psychology 
• Change management 

Let’s consider these one by one.

Strategic alignment 

England have consistently provided the media with a stated intention: they want to entertain. They have seen that this format of cricket (Test cricket is played in whites with games often lasting five days) has witnessed declining attendances in most of the world. England have strategically aligned themselves, from the Managing Director, Rob Key and Performance Director, Mo Bobat, through to the Coach (McCullum) and team captain (Stokes). They have taken the responsibility to seek to have a bigger purpose than just winning a game or a series – they are inspiring a nation and inspiring an audience with a specific style of play. Of course, they are doing everything they can to win every game, but at the heart of things, this is about something bigger. This is about keeping this format of the game alive by playing a brand of cricket that will entertain, regardless of the result. Not every team in the world has the resources at their disposal to deliver this super attacking approach – with the likes of Stokes, Root and younger players Crawley and Harry Brook, offset with the experienced bowling attack spearheaded by Jimmy Anderson and the now-retired Stuart Broad.

It was clear to me, that even when things got tough, losing the first two matches of the series against England’s ultimate enemy, that every player was clear on the strategy, and they did not deviate. Despite incredible levels of scrutiny and challenge from high profile media personnel, they were trusted from the upper echelons of Key and Bobat, and provided the psychological safety to be themselves.

Did the Aussies have genuine strategic alignment too? Currently the best team in the world, with many of the world’s best players, they are an outstanding unit. However, at times it looked like they were not sure whether to try to match England’s uber-positive tactics, or to maintain a more traditional approach and seek to grind their opposition down. I listened to a podcast recently where one of the phrases used was that the Australians were ‘fighting fire with water’!

Questions to ask yourself: 

• How aligned is your organisation both philosophically and strategically? 
• What is the ‘bigger purpose’ that might get more out of your team? 

Performance psychology 

England believe that players are at their best when they focus on their strengths. McCullum and Stokes have facilitated a psychologically safe environment whereby every player is encouraged to understand their strengths (just like when Crawley played his imperious cover drive) and then to deploy them with 100% commitment. Under the immense heat of battle, it is incredibly easy to become within yourself and therefore more risk averse. This leads to missed opportunities and can easily swing the momentum back in the opposition’s favour. We saw England batsmen and bowlers attacking the game with such a refreshing and entertaining approach that it seemed infectious. It also is very apparent that the players are enjoying their sport! Typified in many ways by pace bowler Mark Wood. Not only capable of bowling at extreme speeds (he hit a top speed of 96mph!), but falling over, joking around both on and off the pitch and generally demonstrating a level of joy that is normally reserved for the under-10s team. How often have we seen bland, almost robotic performances in sport…pre-defined patterns of play dictated by control-freak managers and directors. This is normally caused by personal insecurity and our ‘audit-driven’ approach to simplify the complex for a spreadsheet or boardroom. This England team are encouraged to do the opposite. To seize the moment and to play the game as they see it, with a personal plan focusing on what they individually do best. Genuine leadership and belief from the top, that the individual skills within the troops need to be unleashed. Rare indeed.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How well do you and your staff know your strengths? 
• To what extent does your environment encourage every individual to play to their strengths and enjoy their role? 

Change management 

England are administering a change programme. Any of us who have operated in more senior roles will no doubt be very accustomed to the challenges that come with delivering change within an organisation, let alone promoting it to the outside world. This normally comes with doubters, as change is hard. One of my observations during this period of time, has been how the commentators and media (mainly the ex-players in their 50s and 60s) have struggled to comprehend England’s approach. ‘It’s just not cricket!’ they have cried, ‘Why would you play such high risk shots, surely you would be better off getting out defending it!?’ or ‘Why would you choose to declare at that point!?’ This to me is like the member of staff who has been at an organisation for a long time, struggling to get their heads around a new approach. However, by the conclusion of the series, I think even the stalwarts are finally starting to understand. England DO care about winning, they just care more about entertaining a global audience with a brand of cricket that will inspire a future generation. They have consistently explained this to everyone who will listen, and the penny seems to finally be dropping. Change is difficult, but with an inspiring vision, consistent communication and a core of early adopters it is possible.

Questions to ask yourself:

• When leading on change, how are you going to deal with the doubters? 
• To what extent have you considered your messaging your vision to all stakeholders through the change programme? 

In summary, I was absolutely captivated by this summer’s Ashes series. The viewing figures released by Sky Sports in the UK, and the levels of social media engagement, also indicate that England are achieving their lofty goal of having a higher purpose. Most importantly to me personally, my two kids aged 10 and 7 have been captured by the entertainment. They wanted to watch the highlights every morning, and then run out into the garden to emulate their heroes, Ben Stokes, Joe Root or Mark Wood. This is a new era for the game, an exciting one, and one which I believe we can all take learning from.

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and most recently was the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.