29 Jan 2024
ArticlesFrom the English Premier League to the NBA via the AFL, the Leaders Performance Institute Think Tank gives coaches, managers and directors the opportunities to share lessons and ideas around the performance questions of the day.
The Think Tank is designed to connect general managers, coaches and directors of performance – the people with responsibility at the highest levels of world – sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best.
The discussions on the day were wide ranging, as the participants delved into five common problems and identified possible approaches and solutions.
Renewal is a continuous process in sport, which is not to say that it is always easy, frictionless and without complications. If you are the person tasked with delivering upon your team’s vision, consider:
It is often incumbent on the head coach to provide the energy to the playing group, but who is looking out for the energy of the coach? At a time when coaches fear coming across as ‘weak’, here are some tips for coaches seeking to protect their personal energy.
Succession planning is hard, particularly when one considers that generation-defining coaches are more a product of circumstance than formal programmes. Nevertheless, how can we give aspiring coaches a better chance?
No one has the fully come to terms with talent development pathways, hence the ever-present questions around attributes, development gaps and purpose. What can we do to better identify and then develop our young athletes?
No other area is as widely misunderstood by coaches and practitioners as artificial intelligence and its role in sport. There is, however, no need to stray from your performance principles in putting them into practice. Remember:
Participants
Mo Bobat, Director of Cricket, Royal Challengers Bangalore
Michael Bourne, Performance Director, Lawn Tennis Association
Matti Clements, Executive General Manager, Australian Institute of Sport
Steve Cooper, football manager
Chris Fagan, Senior Coach, Brisbane Lions
Rob Key, Managing Director of Cricket, England & Wales Cricket Board
Marc-Oliver Kochan, Managing Director, Red Bull Athlete Performance
Sean Marks, General Manager, Brooklyn Nets
Tabai Matson, Director of Performance & Development, Harlequin RFC
Sara Symington, Head of Olympic & Paralympic Programmes, British Cycling
Jess Thirlby, Head Coach, England Netball
Simon Timson, Performance Director, Manchester City FC
Gregor Townsend, Head Coach, Scotland men’s rugby team
23 Jan 2024
ArticlesMembers of the Leaders Performance Institute answered this question from their own experience and shared responses ranging from environmental renew to the power of positive storytelling.
The notion of ‘belonging’ can be simply defined as ‘a sense of connectedness to others and what you are doing’. The Cambridge English Dictionary extends the definition of belonging to ‘a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a particular group and having a good relationship with the other members of the group because they welcome you and accept you’.
Psychology research shows that in cultures and environments that show autonomy, competence and belonging, individuals will elevate their engage in tasks and activities they are asked to commit to.
It’s clear from both the literature and lived experiences of the group that creating belonging is a powerful tool for a harmonious and high-functioning environment. The aim of this particular roundtable was to share best practices and examples of how we are trying to foster belonging in our environments.
It starts at the induction stage
In one of the breakout groups, they reinforced the idea that the process of creating positive belonging starts at the induction or onboarding phase and how important it is to dedicate time and intent towards this process to set the right tone. The work to create belonging continues week on week during this onboarding phase, with the acknowledgement and value that an individual or individuals bring to the team. From a team perspective, it is an opportunity to acknowledge the variety and diversity of backgrounds, skills and views of those in the department or organisation from the outset.
In summarising this first point, there was an excellent reflection that how we make people or an individual feel is the most important thing. Every interaction matters and what you do is about making them feel the way you want them to feel.
Setting the stall out around the culture
There were a number of reflections on how to give your environment the best opportunity for positive belonging. Identify the values and culture expected of individuals within your environment, and perhaps most importantly, find practical ways to instil them. Is everyone in the environment crystal clear on what the behaviours and expectations are? If you have this in place, there can be collective accountability. Similarly, it is important to be consistent in positively reinforcing, noticing and celebrating positive examples of those behaviours.
A couple of people on the call also suggested that coach buy-in is really crucial in this process. If the head coach buys into the values then the majority of people in the environment tend to follow, such is the influence the head coach carries.
In setting yourselves up for success, create opportunities for athletes, coaches and staff to convene and build the culture together. Creating opportunities for discussion on values and behaviours supports the idea of creating a sense of belonging. It is widely acknowledged that engagement, contribution and a love for what you do leads to a sense of belonging, therefore lies the challenge in ensuring we are bringing this to life.
Finally, there was a discussion around language and its importance. There was a fantastic phrase shared on the call that ‘above-the-line language is powerful, but below-the-line language is powerless’. There is a responsibility to own the standards of the language.
The power of storytelling
A common response from the group around effective ways to instil belonging was utilising the power of story. Find the story that connects to the people that you’re working with, whilst recognising the significant cultural differences that exist in the environment. The story that you use must align with the culture. One environment on the call shared how they leant on metaphor in creating an overarching theme that is reframed every year.
Story also presents the opportunity to connect those across the backroom staff, athlete population and other forward-facing roles. There was a suggestion this should also extend to family members of those involved, bringing them into the culture and environment, knowing the importance of the environment off the field. Do they feel that sense of belonging as well?
Finally, we also discussed the impact story can have around connecting individuals to the cultural environment of the country that you are in. It also presents the opportunity to embrace the culture that individual is bringing into the environment.
Create opportunities for shared experiences & collective input
Responses from the group indicate that every interaction matters and it is important to be mindful of that. Therefore, how are you intentionally creating opportunities for shared experiences and opportunities for collective input from different stakeholders?
A simple initiative to instil is celebrating ‘the good’ when done well and highlighting small wins and successes.
Encourage active listening and understanding of everyone’s opinions – providing a space and opportunity for everyone to have a voice in key decisions is found to be an effective way of supporting belonging in an environment. To ensure the above is both effective and a success, organisational leaders require an openness and receptivity to ensure the environment is designed to be safe.
There were also a number of reflections around the power of ‘inclusive initiatives and rituals’ that bring people together. Finally on this point: are you formally capturing information from the stakeholders in your environment in a consistent way? This is a simple tactic to remain on the pulse of the environment, ensure those in the organisation have a chance to provide feedback and contribute to decision-making and the state of play on the culture.
Providing space to better understand the ‘whole person’
One of the final key buckets of discussion around instilling a sense of belonging in your environment was formal and informal opportunities to better understand the whole person. We should strive to provide space to celebrate authenticity and our true selves. Does your environment provide an opportunity for employees to breathe and express themselves?
A foundation stone of the High Performance Strategy in the Australian Olympic System is the athlete’s voice. The idea is to provide opportunities to understand one’s journey, both as an athlete and as a person. The self-determination theory concept is something that is really key in this piece and its relatedness to belonging. Creating opportunities to understand the whole person allows for further insight around ones intrinsic motivation and the opportunity for honest, open conversations within the environment.
Final reflections
At our Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments event in Melbourne back in 2023, we ran an Open Spaces session on this exact topic. The aim of the session was to allow the audience on the day to share stories, experiences and perspectives on belonging. Five things came through strongly from those in the room that day around what we can do to enhance belonging in our environment.
15 Jan 2024
ArticlesHelene Wilson led the Northern Mystics to the ANZ Premiership in 2021 but not before taking her playing group on a individual and collective development journey.
“Working in netball, in a woman’s environment, and coming from a background of being a teacher, I think that learning is incredibly important,” she told the audience at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.
“And how do we create an environment where high performance comes from out-learning your opposition and people are on a journey together to get there?”
Wilson, who currently serves as Manager of High Performance Sport New Zealand’s [HPSNZ] Women in High Performance Sport programme, was primarily at the Etihad to discuss her five years as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics, a netball team in New Zealand’s ANZ Premiership.
She took the Mystics’ reins in 2017 and would eventually lead the Auckland-based franchise to success in the 2021 Premiership Grand Final, ending their 24-year wait for a national championship. But not before the team bottomed out in 2019. “We were the wooden spooners,” she said.
The team had performed promisingly in the preceding seasons but, in 2018, the unforeseen departure of goal shooter Maria Folau due to personal reasons left the Mystics underpowered. It showed on the court and Wilson admitted that she was perhaps fortunate to retain her job at one stage given the turmoil behind the scenes, “but the players wanted to come back and play for the team because they believed in what we were trying to do.” Two years later they were champions.
Beyond reaching and winning a Grand Final, Wilson and the Mystics wanted to rewrite the history of netball underachievement in New Zealand’s Northern Zone, where Wilson coached the sport for three decades.
“The Northern Zone has the biggest number of participants in netball – a third of our netball-playing population is there. There is also a population of ethnic diversity, age diversity, socio-economic diversity,” she continued. “We had 17 netball centres across that area and I inherited a narrative over that time that we’re talented – more than anyone else – but it’s actually a curse in high performance because that doesn’t matter.”
There had, according to Wilson, been a history of disharmony in the Mystics ranks. “The landscape of where we come from, and thinking about the land, it was actually quite disjointed. Auckland, our biggest city in New Zealand, is groups of little villages that are quite insular and quite different to each other. And we were also sitting on volcanoes and literally it was pretty explosive the way we used to behave.”
By the time they won the championship in 2021 and went close again the following year, this was a team transformed. “We won the Premiership after 24 years of trying, but really the learnings, what happened between 2017 and 2019 and up to 2021 was massive and it’s not just about me and what I did – it was about what we did together.”
Finding energy and bringing clarity to the changing room
The “catalyst for change”, as Wilson describes it, was her involvement in HPSNZ’s Te Hāpaitanga: Women in High Performance Sport Coaching Initiative. Its pilot programme ran in 2019 with Wilson serving as a mentor to women applying to be high performance coaches.
The cohort visited a ‘marae’, a Māori meeting ground, of which the focal point is the ‘wharenui’, the communal house where people meet. A wharenui, with its ornate wooden carvings and elaborate design, is steeped in Māori metaphor. It provides a space for collective, inclusive, reflective practice (‘Rongo’ in Māori) that enables people to reengage with problems in the world beyond (‘Tū’) having formed a consensus on the best solutions.
“There is an energy about it,” she said. “The process and energy is like a coming together and moving apart in a state of clarity, which is collectively built together. The process of ‘Karakia’ – transitioning from one realm to another – takes us from the worlds of Tū and Rongo.”
It was a cultural element that resonated first with Wilson then with her playing group. “You don’t need to know it’s Māori,” she said. “If I stood at the front and tried to be Māori I think people would think I’m a fraud and I’ve got to be respectful, not being Māori, but having a deep understanding because I do come from New Zealand.” Wilson encourages coaches working in other regions or nations to find the cultural artefacts that are authentic their groups. “There’s stuff around us everywhere that you can apply in different ways and it’s the framework that is key.”
Coming away from the pilot programme, Wilson drew on the work of corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson who wrote a book in 2014 entitled Above the Line. According to Henderson, people will come to a team with their own beliefs, which play out as behaviours. People’s values are born of their beliefs and behaviours and, in a team setting, these all help to construct the group’s collective behaviours. These eventually become the team’s culture.
At the Mystics, group behaviours tended to be a product of the disharmony that denoted the team’s decades of under-achievement. The group would seemingly generate a lot of heat but not necessarily much light.
It ultimately comes down to the leader. “The mistake we often make is starting at values rather than giving space for beliefs to be heard,” said Wilson. The trick was to create a space where everyone felt empowered to share their beliefs. “We came together as a group and said ‘everyone’s a leader. The standard we walk past is the standard we are prepared to accept’ and it’s super important not to walk past unacceptable standards. So we redefined our environment so that everyone on our team was a leader and ‘leadership’ was simply our actions and our behaviours. It wasn’t the role or the position we were given.
“We needed to have a better understanding of what being valued and contributing to value looked like and how that would affect performance. So there was intense learning at this time because the players wanted to be a leader but there needs to be clear evidence of what that means for performance – and intense learning is how do we care, listen and bring those diverse opinions to the table, as well as skillsets the people bring. I think we learned that together as staff, performance experts and players.”
Learning from the ‘moment of truth’
In his 2021 book Belonging, Owen Eastwood cited Harvard professors (the late) Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman, specifically their renowned 2008 publication on corporate leadership teams entitled Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make them Great. ‘Of all the factors we assessed in our research,’ they wrote, ‘the one that makes the biggest difference in how well a senior leadership team performs is the clarity of the behavioural norms that guide members’ interactions’.
It was on Wilson and Sulu Fitzpatrick, who was appointed as the Mystics captain in 2021, to create the right environment. “We were trying to learn what stuff we will deploy in that circumstance to ensure that the collective performance outcomes we needed were going to happen. In the Māori world we call this ‘Kotahitanga’. ‘Ko’ meaning a central point’; ‘Tahi’ meaning one; ‘Kotahitanga’ meaning collective unit.”
For the Mystics, Kotahitanga meant reaching a consensus through ‘Wānanga’. “It’s a word that means coming together and meeting to discuss, collaborate and consider,” Wilson told the Etihad audience. “It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and Wānanga happens in many ways. Conceptually, it happens in the world of Rongo; you’ve got to go deep. At a Wānanga, I put a concept on the table, a picture of performance that I may see as a head coach, or someone else may put it there depending on who’s taking a lead that day, and the Wānanga takes the form of questions, from multiple perspectives, and we keep going until we get some sense of alignment. It doesn’t come with any level of expertise or experience, it comes with everybody’s level and everybody contributes.”
The Mystics would typically hold a team-wide Wānanga once a week and any time the group deemed one necessary. Wilson’s role was to ensure: “enough creative tension in the room to drive performance and shift performance but also making sure that people were able to learn the art of listening, hearing, weaving different perspectives and energy that people brought to the Wānanga.
“Wānanga can get heated, it can be soft and gentle, it can be all of those things, but Wānanga is about is that you sit there in the world of Rongo until you get it done. Sometimes we had training or practice [in the world of Tū] straight after and we were running late because the Wānanga is more important than the physical practice – practice had to happen whenever it needed to happen based on the Wānanga.”
Wilson explained that there were three broad categories of people, characterised through their ‘energy’, who would join a Wānanga: people who connected to others from the heart, those who had insight from their intellect, and people with the drive and willpower to perform. “My shift as head coach was to connect to those three levels of care of where I was with an individual.”
It was not easy. At first, there was a lack of intent, decisiveness and the results did not necessarily translate into performance. “I think setting this up was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done and one of the spaces where I learnt so much as a coach.”
Crucially, the group bought-in, even after the underwhelming 2019 season and the disruption of the pandemic. In time, the group developed its own lexicon, which included the term ‘moment of truth’, meaning a reference to the key moments in a match as defined by players and coaches individually, who would then weave their ‘moments of truth’ together in a Wānanga. “We would stay there until we were ready to define the moment of truth that was going to give us the greatest learning going forward.”
As she said, it was not always Wilson who led the Wānanga. She recognised the need for others to take the lead in order to feel that they belonged and that their input was valued. ‘We look for proof of our values from our leaders,’ wrote Owen Eastwood in Belonging. ‘We do not want our leaders’ personal beliefs forced upon us – we want our tribe’s authentic values articulated.’
That is where Wilson felt the key knowledge sat in any case. “My learning was to sit at the back and know that my knowledge was not sufficient; that the knowledge was in the room and I was there to sense the problem and the Wānanga would sort out what the problem was. I needed to be the last one talking in the room.”
In Part II, we explore how the coaching staff helped the Mystics players to transfer their personal and collective development to the court.
In the final instalment of this Performance Support Series we explored ways that we can all improve when it comes to debriefing performance.
Over the course of the three sessions, we are focusing on three core areas as part of this topic:
For the final part of this learning series, the focus of the content and conversations centred around implementing effective debriefing to create a learning culture in your team.
Outcomes of the session included:
Debriefing as a critical component of a high performing organisation
In setting the scene for this virtual roundtable, we leaned into the work of Arie De Geus, who was one of the early thinkers in the space of systems thinking and how we can learn and ally new learning to create a competitive advantage. De Geus was quoted as saying that ‘the only competitive advantage the company of the future will have is its managers’ ability to learn faster than their competitors’. Effective debriefing forms a key role in creating a true learning organisation and allowing you to use learning as a source of competitive advantage.
Combining the work of De Geus, Peter Senge in his work for The Fifth Discipline suggests that the highest performing organisations consistently learn and put systems in place where they are able to extract information and collective intelligence. When thinking about the topic of debriefing, there are often questions considered around to how we should do it and when. Answering these questions and systematising will support a shift towards a culture of learning.
Before we move into exploring specific elements of debriefing, we also explored the difference between traditional organisations and those who are termed learning organisations.
Senge defined organisations as where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire. Pedlar provides a definition of a learning organisation as being able to facilitate learning of all its members with the aim of continuously transforming itself.
How are we currently implementing debriefing?
Reflecting on how we are currently implementing debriefing provided an opportunity for those on the call to share their experiences of this process in their environment. There were some differences in responses to how debriefing is leveraged.
As part of this conversation, there were some interesting reflections on the nature of debriefing in some of our environments. A point was made around debriefs or reviews leading to us slipping into planning or a solution mindset. We can experience tangents and not effectively staying on the task of the debrief – effective debriefing requires intent and discipline.
There were also some reflections on debriefing tending to focus on the eventuality of a negative outcome such as a defeat, as opposed to when we win. Participants on the call shared that in the debriefing process, often there is a lack of action, something that other members of the team or players pick up on. Actions are crucial for buy-in – it is easy to review and reflect, but to generate actual change is where the impact of a debrief comes in.
Skills for effective debriefing
We’ve discussed the importance of debriefing and how it is currently being implemented in our environments, but it is also important to consider the skills required for debriefing to be effective. When the question of what skills are required were put to the group, these are some of the responses that followed:
For effective debriefing, having a framework or system in place will elevate its impact. We discussed a simple framework that can be used by anyone as a benchmark:
Planning for action. Planning for the debrief is important, particularly how the debriefs will happen and the skills required to make them effective. Often it is easy for debriefs to become emotional – a process in pre-planning helps to keep things on track.
Action. This is the doing part.
Reflection. How do you reflect accurately, especially in an emotionally charged environment, whether positive or negative? Reflection is a key still to aid questioning and listening.
Relating back into action. Take the learning and do something with it. If you do not do this, it is a waste of time. Debriefing is about initiating change and continuous improvement.
To summarise this section, having the ability to reflect, appraise and reappraise is considered a cornerstone of lifelong learning and performance.
Challenges in debriefing
The group highlighted a number of challenges that are associated with debriefing. The idea was to identify what often gets in the way of being good at debriefing, allowing us to evaluate how we currently approach debriefing. There were six key challenges highlighted that we should be aware of.
To summarise
The influence of debriefing is a topic often talked about within the Leaders Performance Institute. We all know the importance of it but there is a feeling that there remains vast room for improvement in how to do it effectively. As we rounded off this virtual roundtable, we reflected on some of the key considerations and opportunities for debriefing, to ensure you engage in it more effectively in your environment.
It’s worth noting that debriefing is free, yet presents a fantastic opportunity for continuous improvement without financial resource. With any sort of debriefing, using a process to embed and plan out debriefing is a positive first step in its impact. Remove outcome bias and instead focus on the learning, decision-making and impact areas – outcome bias will sway the quality of the debrief. Be sensitive of time and, where you can, engage in debriefs immediately after the performance. Keep them short and to the point. Gather as many facts as possible first, allowing you to be dispassionate and objective. As an observation, watch for people proving vs. challenging themselves. Reflection skills are powerful so ensure you practise them to elevate the quality of the debrief. Finally, keep a journal and a log of the key learnings from the process.
The Bees’ men’s under-18s coach discusses her career journey and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners
“There’s no shortcuts, even though everyone seems to want them these days,” she tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our friends at Keiser.
“Time on the grass, working in different environments, working under different people as leaders will help you to understand what it looks like for you.”
Bedford, who has also coached with underage women’s teams at the Football Association [FA], Leicester City Women in the WSL, and served as an assistant coach at Arsenal Women, talks enthusiastically about her first six months Brentford.
In her new role she is a pioneer. One of the few women coaches operating at the top level of the men’s game.
Elsewhere in this episode, she delves into the importance of her mentors, who include Mo Marley, the current Head Coach of England Women’s under-23s.
Bedford recalls a time at an FA training camp when, at Marley’s side, she encountered the senior women’s England squad. She says: “Every senior player that walked passed her gave Mo a hug and I was like ‘I want to be Mo, I want to have that impact’. But actually, the more I worked with Mo, whilst I love her to bits and still have tremendous respect for her, how Mo leads is not how Lydia leads.
“You learn loads of things, good and bad, from people that you work under and then you find your own way.”
Elsewhere on the agenda, Bedford spoke about:
Henry Breckenridge Twitter | LinkedIn
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
In the final Leadership Skills Series Session of 2023, we focused on this increasingly essential skill, from the required mindset to the need to understand your boss.
It is a popular topic of conversation within the Leaders Performance Institute for those overseeing departments or who have direct lines into executive leadership or board level personnel.
Throughout this session we focused on some key concepts for managing up effectively, taking time to discuss and share best practices around:
Your mindset towards the relationship
Before exploring some of the practical examples of effectively managing up, we need to set the tone through ensuring the right mindset is in place to approach this. Leaning on the work of Richard Boston in The Boss Factor, we focused on four different mindsets you could engage with as part of the relationship and process of managing up.
Boston offers a useful framework to reflect on this mindset towards your relationship with your boss. The key insight from Boston’s framework is to consider the impact of this mindset on the relationship, notably your engagement, motivation and ability to manage up. These are the four mindsets on which we focused:
Understanding your boss
We previously explored your mindset towards your relationship with your boss. As an extension to this point, understand their drivers and pressures so you can both support them and understand their point of view will boost you ability to be collaborative in the conversations.
What can you consider about your boss or direct report which will support these conversations?
Understanding yourself
We’ve evaluated the drivers and pressures of the person you are managing up to. As part of this process we also need to increase our self-awareness around our trigger areas. Before engaging in these interactions, do you have a clear understanding of your own thoughts and feeling to the below?
Proactively develop the relationship
Finally, how can we proactively develop the relationship to make managing upwards effective and collaborative? Below are nine considerations for you to reflect upon:
21 Nov 2023
ArticlesWhat we learned about the importance of uninhibited performance at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
Removing the fear from performance was at the heart of this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval.
Over the course of two days, speakers from organisations including the England & Wales Cricket Board [ECB], the Football Association [FA], Australian Institute of Sport [AIS], Brisbane Lions, British Cycling and the National Health Service [NHS] continually returned to the theme of removing the fear factor from performance.
Here we present seven steps towards generating the clarity and purpose that fills people with energy, delivers alignment, and enables people to adhere to principles when challenged.
When Rob Key, the Managing Director of Cricket at the ECB, took the reins in April 2022, the England men’s Test team was at its lowest ebb in decades. The team had lost its last five series when Key, alongside ECB Performance Director Mo Bobat and new Head Coach Brendon McCullum, decided to adopt an approach to performance rooted in positivity rather than negativity. England were accused of naivety – until the team started performing in fearless fashion. Critically, they stuck with it following setbacks and defeats across all formats of the game.
“English cricket has [historically] spent its entire time looking at the danger… my view is that we have so many talented players… it’s not a lack of talent, it’s the mentality of English cricket, especially county cricket, which is so conservative. That was my thing: we need to change the way we think about the game, the way that we do things, the mentality. It wasn’t about winning. There isn’t a person that doesn’t want to win… this informed every decision that Mo and I ended up making.”
Rob Key
Key readily admitted that he could have achieved very little in his first months without the counsel and support of Bobat. He needed Bobat onside – and free to speak without fear or reservations – if the ECB’s renewed emphasis on positivity was to deliver tangible outcomes. It was not mindless idealism.
“Rob immediately made me feel valued… and then I was going to give it my all. The thing that I enjoyed most from him, having worked with him for a year and a half, has been [the realisation] that I am at my best when I’m playful; and working with Rob encourages me to be playful and I think that enabled you to do not worry so much about the risk and the threat. And I think if you’re playful and you don’t take yourself too seriously what appears like a risky decision or brave decision to someone else just seems like the right thing to do.”
Mo Bobat
Bobat’s point was underlined by Lucy Pearson, the Director of Education at the FA, who has worked in both sporting and academic settings. Pearson explained that playfulness in the FA’s approach to education enhances skill acquisition and attainment for athletes and coaches alike.
“I think play and playfulness is really important if we’re going to achieve high performance in any area. How do you foster playfulness in your workplaces and challenge the seriousness that comes with the serious thing of high performance? Because we take ourselves too seriously at times. That doesn’t mean that everything’s hilarious – maybe it is – but it does mean that we adopted a slightly different approach.”
Lucy Pearson
Positivity and playfulness count for little if every error is pounced upon. The fear factor would return in an instant. Chris Fagan realised this upon his appointment as the Brisbane Lions’ Senior Coach in 2017. He took over a team in turmoil and the results remained poor for the following two campaigns. Then Brisbane started winning and gradually became one of the finest teams in the AFL [Australian Football League]. Their grand final appearance in September showed how far they’d come.
“I told the players at the very start when we got together that we’re going to fail our way to the top and not to worry about that because it’s through your failures that you learn. These blokes were really frightened about failing and I had to take that fear out of it for them… [the concept of having a growth mindset] we’ve pretty much been doing that stuff for the last seven years.”
Chris Fagan
The OSAD [Observational Structured Assessment of Debriefing] tool is a useful way of reducing the fear factor in surgical operating theatres. It was based on studies in the UK, US and Australia and, not only does it allow for analytical objectivity and precision, its emergence has seen processes of debriefing brought into an environment where debriefs were unpopular with those who might benefit the most from self-reflection. As consultant emergency surgeon Sonal Arora told the Leaders audience, OSAD seeks to provide evidence-based performance debriefing so that surgeons and surgical teams can train “the gold medallist” rather than the “runner-up”. However, as she explained, such a system must be baked into the culture.
“People said to us… things like debriefing and feedback need to be part of the culture. People need ring-fenced time for this, it can’t just be an add-on, ad hoc that some people are doing well and other people are doing it off the cuff at the end of a game, at the end of an operation, and the end of the week. It actually needs to be given the time and the importance. And that comes from the top down, it’s not going to be down to the individual person in their organisation – we need to get buy-in from seniors… we looked at the components of the ideal debrief from looking at all of the literature, all of the interviews, gathering all the experts.”
Sonal Arora
The safe spaces and psychological safety stem from people feeling that they belong – something that was not true of the AIS. In 2022, the organisation was still developing its 2023+ performance strategy as the nation prepares for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games on home soil in Brisbane. Before the strategy launched, Matti Clements, the organisation’s Executive General Manager, was given a reality check by some of the nation’s Paralympians.
“[Some Paralympians] felt that they were an afterthought. Our system had been created around able-body and that they were just a consideration once everything else had been done. For them to belong to the strategy, they needed to see themselves as part of that strategy. So we made a very considered commitment to them to ensure all of our programmes, the frameworks, models etc. in the future had inclusive design as a basic fundamental principle, which would not only benefit them but broader cohorts in our system.”
Matti Clements
Similarly, Clements explained that Australia has the “longest living culture in the world yet we are white and middle class and do not utilise the knowledge of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peers about passing on knowledge from generation to generation and getting better. We’ve made a commitment to do better at that.”
Her colleague Bill Davoren, the AIS’s Head of High Performance Coach Development, spoke of some of the progress being made.
“I’m very proud that I’ve got a gentleman in my team who comes from an indigenous background. He is a former Australian boxing coach, an amazing story. Was Australian military before he became a boxing coach and he went on to get a PhD in coaching theory and coaching methodology. He’s probably been my greatest teacher over the past three years. He’s talked to me a lot about the concept of yarning, sharing stories, sharing information, building connections.”
Bill Davoren
Inclusion is not just a nice-to-have or merely a moral imperative. Time and again studies have demonstrated that diverse teams produce better results. Remove the fear, make people feel welcome, and when they are empowered to input you’ll alight on a better performance strategy. The point was convincingly made by Jon Norfolk, the Head Coach of British Cycling, who explains that strategising cannot be the preserve of the few.
“The clearest plan wins… the clearer your plan is the more people can access it, the more people understand it, and the more people you’ll have to back your plan. I’ve seen situations where the plan is the product of the coach and it’s only the coach that’s inputted into it… if you have one person inputting into a plan you’ve got their biases baked into that plan. The more people that input the more that bias is neutralised. The clearer your plan is the more people can input into it and the better plan you get. The clearer the plan, the more impactful the plan.”
Jon Norfolk
The AIS’s strategy for 2032 includes in its vision the need to ‘win well’. They embody the growing belief that wellbeing and performance are indivisible. Taking the idea further, wellbeing is critical to the elimination of fear.
“We believe wellbeing is fundamental to sustainable high performance success in our country and we wanted to make a commitment to our athletes, future and current, that we would do better. When all those leaders signed their commitment to standing behind Australia’s first-ever united strategy, they also committed to a win well pledge. As leaders of the system, they said: ‘we stand here and we’re going to commit to creating cultures that consider wellbeing at the core of all high performance programmes now and in the future and we believe it’s going to be a performance advantage.’”
Matti Clements
How both personal and professional purpose can shape organisational and team planning.
Over the course of the three sessions, it is the intention to focus on three core areas as part of this topic:
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:
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:
23 Oct 2023
ArticlesIn his latest column, Iain Brunnschweiler explains why listening – and having the humility to listen well – is the special sauce of the best teams.
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:
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.
31 Aug 2023
ArticlesVictoria Moore of Athletics Australia discusses her organisation’s approach ahead of the 2024 Paris Paralympics.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
