By John Portch

As the 2025-26 season drew to its conclusion, Pep Guardiola made up his mind to resign as Manager of Manchester City.

That tales is told in Amazon Prime’s new four-part documentary series A Beautiful Obsession, which captures the highs and lows of his final two seasons in Manchester, largely through the type of fly-on-the-wall dressing room footage commonly seen in another notable Amazon sports docuseries All or Nothing.

In episode four, director, Kevin Macdonald sits down with Guardiola in Barcelona. It is several weeks after his City departure and Macdonald asks him when he decided it was time to leave.

“This type of decision doesn’t happen overnight. No, it’s a process,” says Guardiola. “Like when you are driving your car, when you are on the plane, after the games with a victory, after the games with a defeat, with a glass of wine. These are little pieces of the puzzle, and I said, ‘Okay Pep, it’s enough.’ So… And… all stories arrive to the end.”

In his decade at City, Guardiola won 20 major honours. His run included a treble of the the Uefa Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup in 2023; overall he won six Premier League titles (including a record four-in-a-row) and built some of the most accomplished teams in English football history. City’s 100-point season in 2017-18 is unlikely to be matched anytime soon.

But it was never going to last forever, and though it is almost certain that Guardiola will return from his sabbatical to add to the 41 trophies he has won in his 17 active years as a coach, he knew this summer was right time to leave City. In capturing some of the pivotal moments of his final years in Manchester on film, A Beautiful Obsession raises a question for all coaches: what signs would show you that it was time to go?

Here, we explore four signals that prompted Guardiola to call time on his City career.

Signal 1: When you can no longer replenish your energy

In November 2025, City lost a Champions League match 2-0 at home to Bayer Leverkusen. Guardiola made ten changes to the starting lineup and the defeat came as City endured one of their worst runs in what would become a second season without winning the Premier League. In the two seasons covered in A Beautiful Obsession, City never quite reached the heights of Guardiola’s earlier years.

“I am really fucking tired,” says Guardiola in the City dressing room after the Leverkusen match. “When I see that, I am exhausted, I am drained. I want to quit. I’m tired my friends, I’m so tired. I feel alone. When you play like this, I feel alone.”

On its own, given the emotions that swirl after a match, it may mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but such moments can accumulate. For a coach such as Guardiola, whose intensity and emotional investment are such drivers of his standards of performance, the ability to recharge is crucial.

He later tells his players in a more formal setting: “I had energy, I have energy but deep inside, I will not have it anymore.”

Guardiola recognised he could not continue to coach City to the standards he expects of himself. He has previous in this regard: after leaving Barcelona in 2012, he took an extended break, primarily basing himself in New York, before returning to coach Bayern Munich in 2013. Potential suitors have already picked up the phone, though Guardiola has spurned their advances thus far.

Question for leaders:

Am I tired or simply no longer able to replenish what this role asks of me?

Signal 2: When you can see the organisation needs something different

A Beautiful Obsession depicts the emotional departures of players such as Kevin De Bruyne and the recruitment of younger players, including Marc Guéhi, Antoine Semenyo and Rayan Cherki, as well as the rise of City academy graduates such as Nico O’Reilly.

In one scene, Guardiola stresses how important these individuals will be in building the club five or six years into the future.

“Are you going to be there for that? Five, six years?” asks Macdonald.

“Absolutely not. That’s for sure,” is Guardiola’s response. “No, no. Five, six years, no. Life is not just football, right?… I don’t have time to read, to watch series, to travel… it’s too much to be honest.”

It becomes clear by the end of the series that he does not doubt his abilities as a coach, but, equally, does not think he is the right person to take the project forward.

Question for leaders:

Does the organisation need more of what made me successful or does it now need something different?

Signal 3: If you are only staying because of identity

Towards the end of the first episode, Guardiola describes watching his team play well as the reason he gets up each morning.

“It comes from the joy, still. The joy and the pleasure to see my team play good. That is the motto and the target I wake up in the morning every single day to do it,” he says, before adding. “It’s so addictive.”

That last line is telling for a person whose public identity has been built first on being a footballer and then being a coach.

“Winning gives you the chance to extend your contract, to give you a job, but it’s not the final product of your happiness,” he tells Macdonald. “It will be difficult to come back. Many things happened in my personal life, and professionally I need to find myself in different things, especially sitting and seeing time go by. There is a word in Catalan called ‘badar’, and badar is this…” He mimes being spaced out. “So I’ll do that.”

Question for leaders:

Am I staying because I have something distinctive to contribute or because I cannot imagine myself without this role?

Signal 4: When the evidence starts to mount

For this, we simply need to reflect on the accumulation of signals presented onscreen.

“Don’t ask me the reasons I am leaving,” Guardiola says in his recorded farewell message to the club. “There is no reason. But deep inside, I know it’s my time. Nothing is eternal, if it was, I would be here. Eternal will be the feeling, the people, the memories, the love I have for my Manchester City.”

Question for leaders:

What evidence would tell you that your own time had arrived?

What to read next

Who’s your Next Leader? We Discuss the Key to Creating a Clear & Robust Approach to Succession Planning

By John Portch

“We’re spending a wonderful amount of time today thinking about cultivating the human, figuring out what it takes to build that capability and execute under pressure,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership specialist was speaking just moments before she introduced Seth Meyers to the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City.

Meyers, a comedian, broadcaster and producer, instantly built on the theme, with his tales of watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis produce sketches that died a death during read-through sessions (and all too often live onstage) at Saturday Night Live.

“Watching them succeed is something you can do,” he said, “but watching them fail at the table was the real education.”

Meyers made clear his admiration for the writers and producers of SNL who, as he said, “have seen and heard more sketches than anyone in the history of the world”. “It was a reminder of how hard comedy was,” he added. “To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”

Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it.

And it was not just Meyers’ musings. Across both days, we heard from leaders in high-performance environments as diverse as the US Air Force, Juilliard School and the Brooklyn Nets, who lent us their home for two days. Together they delivered insights on how leaders can cultivate environments in which people fail cheaply, learn quickly and perform sustainably.

Below is a selection of five insights that paint a picture of proceedings.

1. You have to cultivate people, not merely manage performance

The Brooklyn Nets have been on an exciting trajectory since the arrival of Sean Marks as General Manager in 2016. His tenure began with a question: “What are we going to stand for?” Marks believed that the Nets needed an identity that meant more than mere wins or losses and he landed upon ‘Brooklyn grit’ – a system of behaviours that extended beyond one, single individual. “It’s really important that you take the responsibility to drive a culture that everybody can observe,” he said.

Marks and the Nets have continually hired the best people, regardless of their professional background. A quick roll call of their staff would reveal people with experience in fields as diverse as soccer, baseball, finance and, of course, basketball. Each is given the platform to perform. He said:

If you give people the opportunity, you empower them to speak up, you empower them that they do have a voice, they’re motivated far more than a group that isn’t empowered to have a voice.

Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks in coversation with host Holly Ransom. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

2. The best leaders listen

Across both days, listening emerged as an important performance tool. Whether building an NBA franchise, leading a writers’ room or cultivating future performers, the speakers repeatedly stressed that leaders who genuinely listen create environments where trust, challenge and innovation can flourish.

Marks for one said:

I want a diverse train of thought [and] if I’m going to hang my hat on hiring the very, very best, shame on me if I don’t listen to them.

Similarly, Seth Meyers’ beliefs have been shaped by his time in improvisational comedy as well as his time as a talk show host. He said:

One of the first rules with improvising is you have to be a listener. You can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when you’re talking… and don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to.

Seth Meyers on a different New York stage. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

3. Safe experimentation helps to breed resilience

So what actually happened when a sketch died during SNL read-throughs? What would Meyers do? What if the sketch actually died onstage?

“You have to shake it off,” he said. “You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it with you to your next week’s effort.”

As one of the longest-serving head writers in SNL history, Meyers was responsible for managing exceptionally talented people operating under intense deadlines and, if writers carried every disappointment into the next week, their performance would deteriorate. The key was to try ambitious ideas, accept that many would fail, then learn quickly and move on.

Meyers was echoed by Evan Yionoulis, the Director of the Juilliard’s Drama Division. “If we’re worried about fear, we have to foster an environment where you can be brave,” she said. She tells her students:

‘I believe in you, I brought you into the school. You’re going to graduate, and I’m going to take you all the way there, and I’m going to be patient… I’m not judging you, good or bad’. I’m going ‘what’s the next step to take it further? What’s the next step to take it deeper?’

Evan Yianoulis of the Juilliard School. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

4. Replace blame with curiosity

Dr Wendy Walsh is the Chief Learning Officer for the US Air Force, a role in which she oversees education for approximately 700,000 personnel. Her work goes beyond training to the creation of conditions that enable learning across a sprawling, complex system. She argues that high-performance environments are “complex adaptive systems made up of continuously changing people, relationships and influences. She argued that learning starts from observation:

It’s the most important thing that we do is to be present with each other… I might not agree with you, but it’s a requirement for me to understand a different person’s perspective, because that will reveal more possibilities.

Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer of the US Air Force. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

Walsh was joined onstage by Andrea Tullos, who explained why the US Air Force pivoted from focusing on factors such as strength, endurance and swimming ability in recruitment. Ultimately, they were alarmed by the numbers of recruits dropping out. They shifted the focus to factors such as resilience, learning agility, tolerance for discomfort and motivation. Tullos said:

We need to know who they are before we understand what they can do… [and] it’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better.

Andrea Tullos, former lieutenant general in the US Air Force and Founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

5. It’s not about medals but building the conditions that make medals possible

Team USA finished second in both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic medals table (behind Norway) and Paralympics medals table (behind China). The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee wants to be No 1 in both tables in 2030, which means creating the conditions that make future medals possible.

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance, told the audience of her organisation’s continuing efforts towards meeting their target. She said:

We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games [Milano Cortina]. We needed to spend time building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance… We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline… [we asked also ourselves] How are we keeping athletes in sport and then the opportunities to bring new athletes into Olympic sport?

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

What to read next

Want to Be an Adaptive Leader? You’d Better Prepare

By John Portch

There are some scenes that no-one wants to imagine, but that did not stop Dr Stephen Rashford, a trauma specialist, painting a gruesome picture of a casualty at a road traffic accident.

“Sometimes a motorcyclist with an open-faced helmet will use their face as a brake when they hit the road, and they will tear their face to smithereens,” he told the audience at February’s Leaders Meet: Australia with a tone that suggested it was an all-too-common occurrence.

“And so you’re looking at this person thinking ‘how am I going to anaesthetise them? How am I going to place that tube down into their lungs?’”

So what is the answer in a moment like that?

“We teach our people to rely on your training, rely on the data; because the data tells us we can perform. In our most adverse situation, we want them to take a breath, redistribute that blood to the prefrontal cortex and make critical decisions – not primitive ones.”

In setting the scene for his work as Medical Director at the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), Rashford recounted the tale of airline captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009 when bird strikes took out the aircraft’s engines.

“All Sully’s experience over 40 years of flying before that had deposited information in his brain; and when he needed it most, he withdrew from that bank of information,” said Rashford. “And we do exactly the same. If you haven’t seen someone with 95% burns before, you will have been at an audit where we’ve looked at it in detail. And so when you’re confronted with your first major burn at that level, it won’t be a surprise to you.”

Whether it’s a paramedic attempting a difficult tracheostomy at a roadside accident or a pilot attempting an emergency landing on water, there is an element of individuals responding, or adapting, to conditions of uncertainty. As Rashford says:

“We never know what’s going to come down the line.”

How successfully they manage those calls is due in part to leaders, such as Rashford, empowering their people to solve problems on the fly.

“As a leader, you need courage to back your people at the front line.”

Here are four ways Rashford empowers others to solve problems when certainty is unavailable.

1. He gets people to back themselves

Rashford himself said it:

“I’m always telling our teams to back themselves. When you’ve got a really complex decision to make, and you’ve got to make a decision on care, you’ve got to back yourself.”

Much like Sully, they are specialists with the tools to do what is required.

“Generally, your instincts are correct and you’ll make the right decision.”

His role is not to make every decision. It is to create an environment in which others can make them confidently.

“It may not always work,” he added with reference to failures in the field, “but you need to be the person who’s there for them the next day or the next week when other people are looking at it. And you need to wear it because that’s your job.”

2. He promotes continuous improvement

This is not unique to trauma medicine by any stretch, but it is still a major feature of QAS’s approach.

“We do detailed performance reviews, just like you do, and that’s really important,” Rashford told Leaders Performance Institute members. “We get people together, we watch the videos, we analyse the data.”

It is also a world of KPIs where “everything is measured down to the second”.

That said, it is always brought back to QAS’s purpose: ‘We will deliver timely, quality, and appropriate, patient focused ambulance services to the Queensland community’.

“We try to explain to our staff how that translates to the performance of the team or patient outcomes,” said Rashford.

“When you can do that, you get buy-in. It’s actually incredible – they want those KPIs, so it’s not just a box-ticking exercise. It actually means something.”

Rashford also recalled a former medical student who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury.

“The most important thing as part of his care before we got to hospital was someone touching him on the brow, reassuring him that he was going to be okay and he was safe,” he said.

“For all the fancy things we do, not to forget about the basics.”

And underperformance, when it comes, is viewed through a lens of empathy and support.

“Generally speaking, we want to analyse whether it’s something else going on outside work,” he added.

“We just talk to them and explain ‘we’re worried about the performance’ and ‘how can we improve it?’”

Invariably, the individual is already worried about their own performance and, as Rashford said, “we take them on that journey.”

3. He enables frontline decision-making

Rashford recognises that those on the frontline are best placed to make decisions.

“While we think the pyramid starts at the top, for us it actually starts as close to the patient as possible,” he said. “The team leader needs to stand back; ideally not get involved. It always runs better when you stand back.” Rashford is more of a coordinator than a controller.

4. QAS medics do not wait for ‘perfect’ conditions

While Rashford is an advocate for evidence and performance analysis, QAS team members must not be held captive by the data. In chaotic or complex environments, complete certainty is a pipe dream. Informed, justified confidence matters more.

“If you look at medicine, we’ve gone into evidence-based care, and it stifles innovation,” he said, citing the example of cervical collars (neck braces).

The medical industry favoured hard collars, but QAS noted that they too often led to secondary injuries in trauma victims. Using frontline experience and available evidence, they switched to soft collars and, Rashford argued, the result has been a better experience for patients.

“The numbers are really important,” he added, “but don’t let them rule your life.”

What to read next

‘Some Skills of Adaptive Leadership Are Obvious, But That Doesn’t Make them Easier to Learn’

By John Portch

Spain’s 2026 Fifa World Cup triumph was more than a decade in the making, and Head Coach Luis de la Fuente helped to build this generation of Spanish players.

Having joined the Spanish federation in 2013, he worked with many of the same players through the Under-19s, Under-21s, the Olympic Games, Euro 2024 and now a World Cup triumph, making him one of the rare international coaches to oversee an entire generation from adolescence to the sport’s biggest prize.

“When I was made seleccionador I said that if I had an advantage it was that I knew the players. That allowed us to ‘bet’ on the future,” he told the Guardian in 2024.

It is a model many sports organisations would love to replicate. Yet, as performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler observed during a recent Leaders Performance Institute roundtable: “I don’t think anyone’s solved this. That’s why we’re still talking about it; we’re still trying to work out how to do it most effectively.”

Spain would not claim to have cracked the code. Nevertheless, their success focuses attention on one of the most enduring questions in performance: how do organisations consistently develop talent capable of succeeding on the biggest stage?

That discussion was just one of the standout conversations among Leaders members in July.

We share some of the choicest cuts in this month’s Debrief.

Insight of the month:

When it comes to talent pathways, are we designing programmes around the needs of the athlete, or around the needs of the system?

Brunnschweiler wrapped up his presentation during the aforementioned roundtable with a reflection on his career working on elite talent pathways:

At the upper end of the talent pathway, the highest potential athletes can get the ‘worst’ programme.

An athlete may look as though they are receiving the best possible opportunity when they are training with senior professionals, yet if that exposure comes at the expense of match minutes, individualised development, physical preparation and psychological support, they may actually be receiving a worse developmental programme than peers lower down the pathway.

“They were being utilised more as a training mechanism for senior performers rather than a really high potential young player,” said Brunnschweiler, who worked with his colleagues to find a solution.

“One mechanism we did put in place was having a transition coach whose specific role was to go with that high potential player or group of players when they went into the senior training environment.”

Read the full roundtable report here.

Myth buster of the month:

Strategies don’t deliver outcomes – that’s the reality.

Michael Bourne, the Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association, admitted he loves a strategy. But as he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy in April, ideas count for little without coherent actions.

He continued: “I’ve talked about a strategy that was written in 2018. So the idea of that being accurate to what we have to do today, well, a realism needs to be brought to that. The critical factor in those clear and coherent actions is if you still believe in your basic principles, you’ve got to have rapid review cycles that can tell you what you need to do today against the mission and the vision that we’ve set ourselves.”

These reviews are tracked on a dashboard, which contains 56 metrics that enable the LTA to link their strategy to “the bigger picture, to what everybody’s doing.”

Last month, with Wimbledon underway, we returned to that session to explore Bourne’s role in delivering the LTA’s ten-year performance strategy.

Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

Good to know:

My work has taught me that you cannot overcome biases by simply trying to be more rational. The optimal path is to create processes that prevent us from succumbing to them.

Behavioural economist Dr Benjamin Kelly used the start of rugby union’s Nations Championship to run the rule over the biases that most commonly present themselves in the sport.

He advocates a structured intervention, as depicted below:

‘By understanding how these biases manifest, leaders can design and implement structured processes to counteract them,’ he wrote. ‘The journey to mastering the mental game is one of discipline and a commitment to process over outcome. The critical insight is not to eliminate bias, but to build systems that account for it. For any leader, in any field, that is the ultimate competitive advantage.’

Read the full article here.

Quote of the month:

Do the common things uncommonly well.

So said performance specialist Rachel Vickery at a roundtable on the topic of performance under pressure.

She argued that an ability to manage pressure is less to do with fancy tricks or even an attempted recreation of pressure moments in training, and more to do with reducing an athlete’s allostatic load – the accumulation of stressors and demands over time that push a person into a heightened state of physiological arousal.

“What they end up seeing in finals is not a sudden, unexpected failure of performance,” she said. “It was something that was actually built because of that accumulation in the system as a whole.”

The secret lies in increasing an athlete’s ‘buffer’ – the spare capacity between a person’s current arousal level and the point at which performance starts to deteriorate. When someone has plenty of buffer, the pressure can rise naturally, their arousal can increase, and they can still stay below their threshold.

Vickery argued that many organisations make a fundamental mistake by treating sleep, recovery, relationships and gratitude as wellbeing initiatives rather than as performance interventions that create buffer.

Read the full story here.

Best advice:

There’s this quote: every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else. You’ve just got to make sure you’ve got the energy and the headspace to provide the appropriate level of support that your performance team need.

Ian Costello became the General Manager of Munster Rugby in 2025 and, in assuming the role, took a strategic leadership position after two decades of coaching on the grass.

He admits it has been a steep learning curve, but with a shared vision he has allowed Munster’s domain experts to flourish while finding the space to spot performance trends and nip issues in the bud.

Read our interview with Costello here.

Ian Costello (centre) has been the General Manager of Munster Rugby since 2025.

What’s coming up for members

Why Succession Planning & Sustainability of Handovers is Critical

By John Portch

Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby, has loved being back on the grass this summer with the province’s women’s team.

“Matt Brown, the Head Coach, enjoyed putting me through a rigorous interview process,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute with a smile.

Costello’s appointment to his current post in 2025 came after more than two decades working as a coach in various capacities, including academy coach, defence coach and head coach. “This is the least I’ve been on the grass in the last 20 years,” he continues.

“I love many elements of this role. I love the complexity and how challenging it is, how all the different parts of the performance system are interconnected. It’s like having multiple plates spinning and making decisions on which plates to leave alone to keep spinning and which ones to take down and put under the microscope. Then deciding on any necessary interventions, putting the plate back on and keep it spinning.”

We would say that’s easier said than done, but it actually sounds pretty hard. Costello agrees. “There’s this quote: every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else. You’ve just got to make sure you’ve got the energy and the headspace to provide the appropriate level of support that your performance team need.”

Here, with Costello’s help, we pose five questions that all leaders should be able to answer.

1. Are you the lead expert or creating the conditions in which expertise flourishes?

“I don’t see my job as leading on the expertise,” says Costello. “I see it around leading on the system and trying to create the conditions where that expertise can flourish; where it’s aligned, where it’s connected, where it’s integrated.”

As a collective, Munster are working towards what he calls their ‘North Star’ (the shared objective of producing winning performances). It’s a phrase Costello enjoys using. “My role is to get the best people in the building, support and challenge appropriately, and create the best conditions for them and the team to succeed.”

He is not there to delve heavily into the coaching, sports science or medical decisions but to build and oversee a system that enables domain experts to succeed together. “How can we be greater than the sum of our interconnected parts?”

2. Do you keep the most important thing the most important thing?

That North Star is essential for Costello when ensuring that the domain experts on the team are all pulling in the same direction, even if they advocate for different courses of action.

“My job is to ensure that we have a shared understanding on what our purpose is and what our direction of travel is,” he says. “We’ve identified what’s the most important elements for performance. We align our energy, our resources, our focus towards that and protect that.”

The key questions are: “Do we provide a clear direction on what it takes to win? And do we keep the most important things the most important?”

3. Have you built enough trust that people will challenge you and each other?

Costello must “understand the demands and pressures of a person’s role, understand their personality and character, how they cope and the support they need” if he is to establish deep, meaningful connections and relationships with his colleagues.

“You want to reach the point where you’re comfortable having difficult conversations where tension is normal,” he says. He refers to it as “task conflict, not relationship conflict.”

“You know it’s all about what makes a team or individuals better, which gives you that necessary and healthy tension in a high-performance environment.”

Costello wants to be “visible and connected” to his team. He ensures he’s “asking good questions and trying to demonstrate a real interest in their role and how it contributes to the team’s performance.” He likens it to providing a soundboard. “They have to bounce things off you or, depending on the area, maybe I’ll provide some suggestions”.

It is, he says, “an iterative process that takes place over time and is based on developing relationships and trust”. To be fully accountable to that process, Costello needs to be “close enough to understand the detail, the context and the situation, but far enough back to see the patterns and the trends” so that he can “understand the important signals versus if they’re just noise”.

4. Do your decision-making processes reduce bias and improve judgement, or simply amplify the loudest voice?

“Everyone’s opinion and input is valued and none of us are smarter than all of us,” says Costello, who emphasises robust processes and strong frameworks when it comes to decision making.

Yet a decision-making framework can only be as good as the information provided, which is why psychological safety is critical.

“You want to build a culture or environment where people have the safety to speak up, offer their opinion, and it’s genuinely welcomed,” he continues.

Again, everyone has to be “really sure on what that North Star is so that if people have certain biases they’re brought to the surface with really good conversations”.

That is not to say that there isn’t a decision-making hierarchy. “You have to have real clarity over who owns a decision because if there’s six or seven people involved, not everyone’s input carries the same weight; it depends on what decision needs to be made and the risk-reward associated with that decision, which will depend on a range of factors.”

5. Are your people connected, aligned and integrated?

Costello wants to avoid silos at all costs. “My role isn’t around specific expertise. It’s around how we connect, align and integrate that expertise.”

He sees this idea reflected in the work of Richard Young, whose writing on performance systems has influenced his thinking.

“Richard Young talks about robust and resilient systems,” says Costello, taking up the theme, “and a robust system is where all the parts are strong independently; and while that’s good, if they’re robust and resilient, it means they’re strong independently and their interconnectedness is strong too.”

At Munster, Costello emphasises the importance of integrated working practice. “We encourage individual departments to be excellent, but stress that the quality of integrated work between departments can potentially have the biggest impact on elements of team performance,” he says.

He highlights the club’s cross-departmental collaborative projects, which bring together specialists around shared performance objectives. “An excellent example of this at Munster is how the medical team and the athletic performance team collaborated around changes to the systems around injury prevention. This had a significant impact on player availability for the season; a factor considered to have a strong correlation with success in high-performance sport.”

What to read next

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

By Paul Downes PhD

The National teams of Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) assemble periodically across a calendar year for qualification windows or pinnacle events as set out in the FIBA schedule.

In senior 5×5 teams, athletes are commonly not selected from within domestic systems given the time of year for FIBA competitions. Instead, they are selected whilst under contract within professional (and semi-professional) environments across various global leagues. Athletes for FIBA 5×5 age-grade tournaments (Under-15 to Under-19) are typically selected from performances across school, Association and National camp assembly periods.

Supporting the selected athletes are coaches and management that also are operate in decentralised, time‑limited contexts. No role holders are employed full-time and, as such, are operating without the contractual levers that traditional high‑performance (HP) models assume. Across the 5×5 HP pathways, BBNZ runs six age‑group national teams (male and female), plus select teams that provide ‘best vs best’ exposure to support development (on and off court) and prepare for FIBA tournaments.

Within this reality, management team members are asked to balance a number of competing demands. Examples include: short‑term competitiveness versus long‑term system sustainability, respect for professional autonomy versus national‑team standards, and redefining ‘success’ in an international sport increasingly dominated by wealthy, highly resourced nations. These challenges, among others, sit outside of being simply tactical or financial rather the most complex challenges that present are systemic and relational. Therefore, a crucial leadership question what presents itself to the BBNZ HP team is no longer whether leadership is required, but instead what kind of leadership actually works when authority is limited and commitment is discretionary.

The purpose of this article is to apply the research pertaining to Leadership Climate and Followership to the context of the 5×5 National Teams of BBNZ and demonstrate the opportunities that the constraints presented offer HP leaders for generating elevated levels of engagement and commitment to the HP strategy.

What is Leadership Climate and why does it matter?

The National teams of BBNZ can be considered to have compromised formal authority outside of assembled periods due the nature of management composition and contractual status. Without the ability for HP leaders to rely on extrinsic levers such as significant salaries, full-time contracts and formal hierarchies there could be supposed to be high risk regarding team culture and operational effectiveness. Powerful research from Goleman into Leadership Climate (1, 2) supports organisations such as BBNZ to succeed and maximise the opportunities that come from such constrained circumstances.

Goleman (1, 2) describes Leadership Climate as the emotional tone of the working environment created by leaders’ behaviours, which in turn shapes motivation, engagement, wellbeing, and performance outcomes. When HP leaders cannot rely on extrinsic motivation levers or formal hierarchy the notion of Leadership Climate becomes the primary lever for sustaining commitment and discretionary effort.

Unpacking climate further

To make Leadership Climate assessable and actionable, JCA Global (3) developed the Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI) as a behavioural measure of how it feels to be led within a given system. The LCI translates leadership behaviour into four distinct climate quadrants made up of twelve observable scales:

Green climates: the Inspiring and Including quadrants represent green climates – those that build clarity, trust, energy, and commitment through behaviours such as visioning, encouragement, collaboration, reliability, and appreciation.

Red climates: by contrast, the Controlling and Withdrawing quadrants represent red climates which, while sometimes effective in short‑term crises, erode trust and engagement when used habitually through behaviours such as micromanagement, aggression, avoidance, or rigidity.

In decentralised, tour‑assembled environments like BBNZ’s National teams, this framework provides a practical lens for understanding why some campaigns generate ownership, voice, and discretionary effort, while others default to compliance, silence, or disengagement under pressure. In these teams leadership climate can be considered to be the felt experience of being led by the HP team. This spans the experience one has at the recruitment stage, their subsequent onboarding, the connections leading into a camp/tour, tours themselves and the review period after each assembly. They are the conditions created by leaders’ behaviours during both stable and complex, high-pressure context and govern whether people think, speak up, and commit fully, or retreat into compliance and self‑protection.

Defining and contextualising Followership

Contemporary leadership research is explicit that leadership is not delivered one way from leaders to followers but is instead co‑produced through the active judgement, engagement, and agency of followers within relational and contextual systems (4,  5, 6). Within this literature, ‘Followership’ is defined as the behaviours, decisions, and choices individuals make in how they support, challenge, and contribute to collective goals – not simply their positional role or willingness to comply. It is an active function requiring judgement, commitment, and moral courage.

Kelley’s foundational work (6, 7) was pivotal in reframing organisational performance as being driven disproportionately by effective followers. These being followers who think independently and engage actively rather than by compliance‑based execution alone. This reframing shifts attention away from what leaders do to people, and toward the conditions leaders create with others.

Figure 1. Kelley’s Followership Model (1988)

Figure 1 and Table 1 provide a summary of the five types of followers and what these mean in the context of BBNZ’s HP management teams. For Kelley, the ideal follower was a critical thinking contributor, termed the ‘exemplary follower’. Kelley argues that most leaders prefer ‘conformist followers’ because they are easy to control. ‘Alienated followers’ are critical but do not contribute; and ‘passive followers’ have little to no value other than bring present. A critical thinking follower who is alienated is far more likely to be a negative team member.

Table 1. A summary of Kelley’s five followership types

A clear understanding of Followership theory and the interaction of critical thinking with active contribution is valuable for organisations like BBNZ, where management teams operate in periodic, decentralised, and contractor‑heavy environments. Once national teams assemble for FIBA events, organisational charts flatten quickly, formal authority as a national sporting organisation (NSO) reduces, and the HP system functions largely through trust, clarity, and discretionary effort. In these contexts, the quality of followership becomes visible in what people do when conditions are uncertain, pressured, or imperfectly resourced.

In tour‑assembled environments, followership quality is a strong determinant of whether standards are sustained, problems are surfaced early, and judgement is exercised when it matters most. Kelley’s insight remains deliberately uncomfortable. Leaders often gravitate toward conformists because they feel easier to manage, yet doing so suppresses the independent thinking and ownership that complex, time‑bound campaigns depend upon.

How Leadership Climate and Followship exist across BBNZ’s national teams

An example of system logic is provided in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A system logic view of BBNZ HP Strategy spanning the NSO’s Strategic Statement of Intent (SSI) to HP Strategy (HP Plan 2028+) into HP Team Plan that support HP team member’s individual plans that inform how HP constructs and operationalises Campaign Plans and Roles and Responsibilities across various National teams.

In this example, clarity is treated as a primary leadership behaviour. Through making purpose, expectations, roles, and decision rights explicit HP leaders are able to reduce anxiety and guesswork in management teams and create the conditions for Inspiring and Including climates. These favourable climates elevate the quality of followership the HP system produces. Across the HP team’s ways of working there is a deliberate emphasis on a clear, shared purpose, psychological safety, empowerment with accountability, and inclusion.

These act as necessary prerequisites for ‘exemplary followership’ which are characterised by independent thinking and active engagement. Examples of how this is achieved are engaging in collaborative approaches to define ‘What It Takes To Win’ (WITTW), clarifying campaign roles early in a cycle, and making HP expectations visible through Team Charters to allow management and athletes to exercise judgement rather than wait for instruction. When management are recruited and onboarding takes place there is a priority to build early senses of belonging and clarify the conditions for constructive candour and continuous learning. With reference to Leadership Climate terminology, such conditions actively strengthen Visioning, Trusted, Collaborative, and Encouraging behaviours while reducing the likelihood that pressure induces Controlling or Withdrawing patterns.

In the realities of global FIBA tournaments existing in dynamic, uncertain, complex conditions the benefits of positive team climates and exemplary followship are experienced. By making purpose, boundaries, and expectations explicit before and during campaigns, BBNZ increases the probability that touring parties will act as capable followers. Ones who can think ahead, raise issues early, hold standards without being policed, and sustaining discretionary effort under fatigue. The latter is imperative with international travel and compressed recovery windows between competition. In this sense, the HP frameworks developed and communicated are not just management tools, they are deliberate climate interventions that enables leadership and followership to be co‑produced in conditions where formal control is neither realistic nor effective.

At age‑grade level, clarity is what allows people to coach and support with judgement rather than hesitation. When purpose, roles, and decision‑making boundaries are clear early in the cycle, staff don’t wait for permission—they act in the best interests of the athletes. That creates trust, encourages honest challenge, and allows learning to happen quickly. In high‑pressure tournaments, those conditions matter because we need people thinking and contributing together, not just executing instructions.

Mel Bennett (Head Coach of U15-U17 Women and Assistant Coach of 2Degrees Tall Ferns)

From a medical and recovery perspective, clarity changes everything. When roles, decision rights, and expectations are explicit, I don’t have to guess whether to escalate an issue or wait—and neither do the players. It allows us to act early, manage load properly, and hold standards without friction. In the middle of a FIBA campaign, that clarity creates trust, reduces stress, and lets everyone contribute their judgement rather than just follow instructions.

Mikayla Rosieur (2degrees Tall Ferns and U17 Men’s Physiotherapist)

To help better illustrate the interactions of Leadership Climate, the types of climate conditions and Followership, Table 2 maps the JCA Climate Types to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Table 2. The JCA Climate Types mapped to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Recently the BBNZ HP team has constructed Team Charters as an initiative to elevate leadership climate and followership by replacing hierarchy with shared clarity. These charters make purpose, expectations, and behavioural norms explicit so that independent thinking, early voice, and accountable contribution become safe and expected, even under pressure. Through the removal of ambiguity (the primary trigger for anxiety, silence, and defensive followership) the Charters serve to stabilise the emotional climate whilst actively strengthening Inspiring (Visioning, Stretching) and Including (Trusted, Collaborative, Appreciative) climates by ensuring people know what matters, how decisions will be made, and how they are expected to contribute.

Concluding remarks

In decentralised, time‑limited national‑team environments, the decisive leadership task is not to demand compliance but to design the conditions for exemplary followership. That begins with making the why unmistakable for all parties. There needs to be a clear purpose, realistic success markers, and alignment surrounding how each role contributes. These conditions enable the setting of mutual expectations about standards, decision rights, and escalation pathways to hold teams steady under pressure. There is a requirement to create permission for feedback and insights by rewarding early problem‑raising, building trust through reliable follow‑through and predictable communication. HP leaders need to recognise the contributions that sustain standards, energy, and learning throughout campaigns. Create conditions, not compliance because international performance is built on the effort you cannot mandate.

References

1. Goleman, D. (2000). “Leadership That Gets Results.” Harvard Business Review, March–April.
2. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
3. JCA Global. (2016). Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI): Survey Group Sample Report. JCA Global Ltd. Available at: https://www.jcaglobal.com/pdf/sample/JCA-LCI-Survey-Group-Sample-Report.pdf
4. Uhl‑Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–676.
5. Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.007
6. Kelley, R. E. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142–148.
7. Kelley, R.  (1992). The Power of Followership. New York: Doubleday.

By John Portch

When Chris Fagan took the reins as Senior Coach of the Brisbane Lions ahead of the 2017 season, he was nervous.

Not only was he walking into a foundering team (it is rare for a coach to inherit a winning environment) but he was keenly aware that his own modest playing career meant that he arrived with less coaching clout than some of his AFL peers.

“I felt like I had to work harder to earn the players’ respect,” Fagan told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in February.

For all that, he was no novice. The reputation he had built at Hawthorn (first as Head of Coaching and Development, then as General Manager of Football Operations) between 2008 and 2016 is what attracted the Lions in the first place.

Fagan, with typical self-awareness, understood the assignment. “I think the key is when the players realise that you’re just there to help them and make them better and that’s what you’re going to bring to work every day,” he continued.

“I think it makes it easier to coach them. They know that you’re on their side and you want them to be as good as they can be, both as athletes and people, which is what I tried to do in the early days. I think that works and resonates with young men.”

The first two seasons on Fagan’s watch were poor but from 2019 onwards they have made finals each year. In 2024, they won the Grand Final; in 2025, they won it again for good measure.

As such, few are better placed to answer one of sport’s most pressing questions: what is it that environments that sustain success do?

Fagan has ensured that four factors work in his favour.

1. Everyone understands their value and how they can contribute

Fagan recalled his arrival at the Gabba ahead of his first pre-season. “I wanted to develop a group that could almost coach themselves and lead themselves, but we were far from that when I first walked into the club,” he said.

His first move was to arrange an interview with every player. “I had three questions: what’s good about this footy club? What’s not so good? And if you were me and you were in my position, what would you do to make it better? I wanted to start that way because I wanted everyone to understand that for our club to get better, everyone had to play a role and that you would be listened to.”

It took him two months to sit down with everyone. “Some interviews went for two hours, some went on for 20 minutes,” he explained while looking at Lions co-captain Harris Andrews in the Leaders audience. “He can probably remember his interview,” Fagan said, addressing Andrews directly. “He probably didn’t say too much then. Mate, you’d be there for an hour now, wouldn’t you?”

That moment of levity between the coach and a veteran player demonstrated how successful Fagan’s efforts have been on that front.

He added: “The idea was to go ‘well, we’re all in this together, we’re going to build it together, and we’re going to find out what’s not working and we’re going to talk about what we can do to get better; and that’s the way I wanted to start because that’s the way I wanted to continue.”

Nine years later, the personnel have changed but, as Fagan said, “it’s still that club to this day.” Those interviews still happen and buy-in remains strong. “It’s a force. It’s not one person, such as the coach, doing the job. It’s a whole lot of people getting it done.”

2. Failure is framed as a learning opportunity

In reflecting on that first round of player interviews back in 2017, Fagan remembers being staggered by some of the responses.

“Some of the players said that it was better to be in rehab and not playing than to be playing, which I was astonished by,” he said. “It probably said something about the culture of the club and that it wasn’t necessarily a safe place to work at being the best version of yourself. So these were strange things to hear, but I knew that you could fix those things with a bit of work. It was just going to take a bit of time.”

Two elements were critical: Fagan needed to remove the fear and ensure that the team was learning from its failures (of which there were plenty in those first two years).

“I always like to think that we almost failed our way to the top,” he added, while emphasising the importance of a growth mindset. “We learned so many lessons along the way and, in the end, we were able to hold up some silverware because I think we treated failure in a really sensible way at our footy club, because it wasn’t easy in the early days.”

Fagan has joked in the past that his team in 2017 and 2018 were the “happiest bunch of losers” having won just five games in each campaign. Their fortunes were transformed from 2019 onwards when they won 16 games. “We went from being a team that couldn’t win to a team that could win home and away games; from being a team that couldn’t win finals to a team that can now win finals.”

3. Everyone is aligned from the boardroom to the locker room

Behind the scenes, Fagan quickly worked to build relationships with the Lions’ CEO Greg Swann and former Senior Coach Leigh Matthews, who joined the board upon his retirement.

“I arranged to have dinner with those two men and their wives once a week; and we’ve been doing that for nine years,” said Fagan. “It’s been invaluable because I’ve got two allies that work amongst the board; and people at higher level at the club that have always been able to tell my story and tell the story of the team to those who needed to know it. So I’ve always felt very safe in the entire time I’ve been at Brisbane because I took that approach.”

It was not necessarily something that would have occurred to Fagan earlier in his career. “I would have been just so into the team and working at that level that I wouldn’t have thought it was important to manage up, but it is incredibly important because those people can help you.”

4. External noise is dismissed in the face of facts

Fagan is noted for his calm pitch side demeanour. “Leigh Matthews always says to me in terms of coaching that the coach has to be the calmest person in the place even though you’re not,” he said.

It is part of Fagan’s efforts to manage the external noise around his team. “In this country, there’s a lot of experts out there who comment on the game and their favourite activity is trying to bring coaches down. Your job as a coach is to bulletproof your environment against that and always deal with the facts,” he continued.

“I think that’s always helped our players and our coaching group to stay on track when you lose a few games and it gets a little bit rocky, which it always will during a football season. You never know what’s around the corner, but you’ve just got to build your culture.”

What to read next

How to Spot the Need for Change and to Respond Effectively

By John Portch

Arsenal’s 22-year wait for the Premier League title came to an end in May, although there were moments during the campaign when it seemed as far away as ever.

Take the club’s 2-1 home defeat to Bournemouth in early April, which was widely perceived as one of the team’s worst performances of the campaign.

The team looked and felt exhausted, which was not necessarily helped by their Manager Mikel Arteta’s ferocious work ethic and increasing demands on the training pitch. It was a period when injuries mounted too.

But as reported in the Independent, Arsenal attacking midfielder Eberechi Eze, approached his boss and told him in so many words: ‘we can do this, but we need a bit of space’.

To his credit, Arteta listened and though they lost at rivals Manchester City the following weekend, there were shoots of promise in that performance. Arsenal would win their remaining five matches and clinch the title by seven points from City.

They then came within a penalty shootout of winning the Champions League in Budapest.

Arteta swore in the aftermath that Arsenal will be back; and one suspects he might listen to his players a little more readily in the future.

Which brings us on to happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in May, where a consistent theme has been the prioritisation of athlete needs, hopes and expectations.

Let’s dig into it.

Quote of the month:

A lot of coaches are either overdoing the teaching so there’s not any learning taking place or there are too many missed opportunities for the teaching and learning. It’s also changing the perception of the teacher; I’m doing it to you versus facilitating learning.

So said the head of coaching at a British university. He then raised the question of timing. “Do you jump in straight away? Do you wait till the end of the session and reflect? Do you wait till the next day and do some teaching and learning?”

It was an important consideration for a Leaders Virtual Roundtable that focused on what it takes to create an impactful and effective learning environment.

Read the breakdown here.

Insight of the month:

We’ve actually had our coaches start to record 10 to 15 minute videos, send them to players beforehand, and then the actual talk becomes them being able to reflect and digest the information.

So said a player development manager from Major League Baseball at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable where members discussed working with younger people.

Younger generations of athletes (as well as coaches and other staff members) are digital natives and teams would do well to lean into this.

Another voice from MLB, a sports scientist, told the table:

I think there’s definitely a difference in terms of how I have had to learn to communicate with them and include them in various decisions and thoughts along the way — and I’ll be the first to say I fumbled royally multiple times at first.

Read the full session summary here.

Good to know I:

But not everything is collaborative. I think we oftentimes confuse it, but we don’t want collaboration all the time.

So says Teena Murray, the Senior Vice President of Integrated Performance Support at US Soccer. She made the point that when a team has a shared mental model, individuals understand their domain, they know where there’s overlap and where there’s room for collaboration.

She wants her staff to be able to ask themselves “when am I the leader? When am I working in collaboration with another area, whether it’s nutrition, mental performance or sports science with strength & conditioning?” The answers provide “a clear understanding of who owns what but ultimately knowing what it is that we’re trying to deliver upon and what are the target outcomes that we’re really trying to reverse-engineer with all of our processes.”

We caught up with Murray as US Soccer prepared to make its new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Atlanta operational.

She explained why US Soccer aims to be ‘radically aligned and seamlessly integrated‘.

Good to know II:

Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures hosted a virtual roundtable where he gave members some tools to help them become better adaptive leaders.

In part, it means recognising issues when they emerge and tackling them in a calm and methodical manner.

He shared with the table the two types of problem that tend to exist in high performance and what makes each distinct:

Pagliano then gave the table a series of hypothetical performance problems and asked them to decide if their nature was technical or adaptive. They were:

• Performance is consistently dropping off in the last quarter due to competitors fatiguing less
• Despite having the same athletes and same coaches, attack strategies are no longer working as well
• Increase in pre-season training is leading to more injuries
• You have a new gameplan which the team buys into, but they are struggling to execute consistently

“These are the kinds of exercises I find to be really insightful because it helps me as a facilitator get a sense of where they’re coming from when they’re approaching leadership and change management,” said Pagliano.

Read more here.

Finally…

Paul Downes, the GM of Basketball New Zealand, described his approach to his first hundred says on the job. He argues that the idea that a new or transitioning leader can transform an organisation in the first 90 (or 100) days is unrealistic.

Read the first instalment of Downes’ miniseries here.

Image used courtesy of Basketball New Zealand.

Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members:

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

“Does wine make you smarter?”

Adam Kucharski posed this question to bemused members at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“Fortunately, we’ve got some data we can draw on here,” he added while presenting a graph illustrating the results of a study that showed a positive correlation between the amount Cambridge colleges spend on wine and their students’ exam results.

“Now, I suspect a lot of you are thinking ‘hang on, just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one thing is causing the other’; and you’d be quite right. But it doesn’t mean this data is useless, because if one can understand the consistent relationships between things, we can make predictions.” In this case, if they can spend more on wine they can also likely spend more supporting their students.

“If the college has a higher wine spend, it’s plausible that they will have higher exam results, not because one thing causes the other, but because you’ve understood that relationship to make a prediction.”

However, there are limits to just relying on prediction when making decisions. In sports science, for example, an injury risk model cannot tell a coach what to change in training. “‘You want to know ‘why is it happening?’ and ‘what can I do about it?’”

Adam Kucharski speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Over the course of half an hour, Kucharski, a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explored the craft of decision-making as influenced by information availability and behaviour.

“How certain is enough?” he asked. “How do we weigh the different ways that we could be wrong or weigh up the potential to get more information? Then, crucially, how do we think about the communication of that? And in terms of the ambiguity around uncertainty, being able to evaluate our judgements and ultimately get those ideas and innovations into the hands of the people who can make best use of them.”

He encouraged people in sport to consider a range of factors.

Perfect clarity is rare

Hindsight is 20:20, which leads to what Kucharski calls the “fundamental problem of cause and effect”. He said: “You only get to see one version of reality. You take an action, you see the outcome, you don’t get to rewind reality, not take that action, and then see what happens next. You never get to observe the counterfactual.”

Injuries offer a good opportunity to understand cause and effect in sport. With this in mind, Kucharski cited a 2020 study by economist Ian Gregory-Smith on the connection between labour and productivity and how this relationship is impacted by the ‘exogenous shock’ of injuries [because they occur unpredictably and allow causal inference].

“Starting quarterbacks are paid ten times what the backup is,” Kucharski continued, “but if the star quarterback is injured and the backup is used, the team is not ten times less likely to win.” The actual figure is closer to 30% less likely, but that could still be the difference between a losing season and a lucrative playoff run.

NFL teams understand this. “What they found is it’s pretty well balanced in terms of the additional money they pay their star quarterbacks versus the financial loss they estimate if that quarterback isn’t playing. So it seems, at least in this analysis, a reasonably efficient market.”

Some risks are worth taking, some are not

The NFL study is instructive but, as Kucharski said, “we don’t always get the luxury of treating everything with that level of detail.” At some point someone must make a decision with incomplete information.

He told the story of William Sealy Gosset, an English statistician who was hired by Guinness in 1899 as the brewery sought to make their brewing more consistent. Gosset’s job was to help improve crop selection, yield consistency, quality control and the stability of fermentation processes through statistical analysis.

He developed methods that enabled brewers to draw reliable conclusions from small amounts of data. They needed a way to tell whether differences in quality, crop yield or fermentation were real or just random noise, even when they only had a handful of samples with which to work.

“Gosset was a pragmatist,” said Kucharski. “He didn’t like the idea that we needed to demand high certainty for everything.” Unlike some of his contemporary statisticians, Gosset believed that context was key.

Kucharski agreed. He said: “It depends on the situation that we’re dealing with, it depends on the impact of the decision. How much might we lose if we’re wrong? It also depends on how hard it is going to be to go out and collect new evidence. Some datasets are easier to get than others.”

It should not be a “one-size-fits-all” threshold. “You’ve got to be careful that you don’t just end up wanting more and more evidence that’s fairly inconsequential to decisions; there’s a risk you end up over-analysing.” On the other hand, “if there’s a large cost to being wrong and it’s easy to collect evidence, then you should demand that certainty.”

Leaders in sport, Kucharski explained, are likely to face high-impact decisions where it’s hard to gather additional evidence and build higher confidence. “In those situations, as well as making use of your judgement, the evidence you have available, you also need to be careful where you set the threshold for action.”

Inaction is also a decision

Set your bar for action high and you’ll avoid bad ideas, but you may also miss out on something groundbreaking.

“There’s a temptation amongst leaders to want more certainty,” said Kucharski, “but that in itself is making a decision. If you never make a decision unless you’re 100% confident, you won’t take risks or make progress; and that requires us to think more deeply about what we mean by being ‘wrong’. What are the different ways we could be wrong and how do we balance them?”

To illustrate his point, Kucharski referred to Albert Einstein’s irritation whenever his papers were peer-reviewed following his emigration to the United States. This was in stark contrast to his experience in his native Germany where, to cite one example, Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory who also served as Permanent Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, promoted Einstein’s early research on relativity through the academy’s journals, always without recourse to peer review.

“Planck’s philosophy was it’s better to set the bar low and get ideas at the price of making some mistakes than set it too high and miss out on both,” added Kucharski.

A leader must assess the trade-offs and decide which metrics define success.

‘Weasel words’ help no-one

Sherman Kent co-founded the CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE) in 1950. A year later, as Kucharski told the audience, the office published a report entitled ‘Probability of an Invasion of Yugoslavia in 1951’. It concluded that there was a “serious possibility” of a Soviet invasion that year.

Kent later asked the different analysts involved what numerical probability they had in mind when they agreed to that phrasing. Their answers ranged from 1:4 to 4:1.

“He got quite frustrated with this,” said Kucharski, “he said ‘in intelligence, like in a lot of crisis and decision-making environments, you don’t get certainty and clear facts; you often have to use judgement’. He noted that people hate being pinned down to judgements; and they use ‘weasel words’.” These are intentionally ambiguous or misleading turns of phrase.

Kucharski admitted he had been guilty of using weasel words himself in the past. “The value in pinning people down to a judgement is it allows you to evaluate their judgement, particularly under uncertainty.”

Your network is critical when selling decisions

Kucharski argued that it is critical for leaders to balance the interaction between evidence, people and methods of communication.

“It’s not just about models,” he said. “It’s about how they interact with people; those end users.”

Leaders should look to create a “network effect”. “If you get the flu, you probably got it from one specific person; but ideas and the adoption of innovations don’t work like that. There’s a lot more need for social reinforcement.”

It helps to build credibility (“if you hear about something independently from lots of people, it gives you increased confidence about it”) and social legitimacy (“you might believe something is true, but if other people aren’t acting like it’s true, you might be less likely to act”).

What to read next

How the Science of Decision-Making Under Pressure Explains Both Successes and Failures at the Ryder Cup

By John Portch

“I knew it was a mountain,” said Johann van Graan, “but I didn’t know it was Everest.”

The South African, then with Munster, had agreed to become the Head Coach at struggling Bath in December 2021.

A few days later, he switched on the TV only to see Bath go 0-28 down after just 25 minutes of their Champions Cup tie with Leinster.

It prompted the Everest comment, as Van Graan told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“My oldest boy was worried,” he said onstage. “He almost broke into tears and he said ‘no, we can’t go to Bath’.”

Van Graan took the reins at Bath’s Recreation Ground six months later on 11 July 2022 and, over the next three years, led one of the most remarkable transformations in English rugby history.

By the end of the 2024-25 season, Bath had lifted three trophies: the European Challenge Cup, Premiership and Premiership Rugby Cup.

Here, we explore their ascendancy under Van Graan through the lens of transformational leadership theory, which was made popular in the mid-1980s by American scholar Bernard M Bass, an expert in leadership and organisational behaviour.

Transformational leadership theory has gained traction in the world of high performance in the subsequent four decades and, here, we take the four core dimensions of Bass’ model of transformational leadership (‘the four I’s’) and ponder how they define Van Graan’s work at Bath.

The four I’s of Bernard M Bass

1. Idealised influence

The transformational leader is admired for ‘walking the walk’. They embody qualities their followers want in their team.

In several respects, Van Graan is the embodiment of Bass’ idealised influence. He strives to be a role model of authenticity, fairness and purpose. By the same token, he is not merely a charismatic leader and does not see himself as a hero, even if he told himself at the start of his coaching career in 2023 to “back yourself because no one else will”.

“There’s a quote by Pep Guardiola,” said Van Graan. “‘This beast called football will eat you alive if you’re not always, always, always yourself’.”

Onstage, Van Graan repeatedly returns to the idea of authenticity; his views are sincerely held and he hints at the vulnerability expressed by the Manchester City Manager.

“It took me many years to figure out who I am first and then to become comfortable with that,” he continued.

This attitude has served Van Graan well in his nine years as a head coach working abroad, whether it was getting to grips with St Stephen’s Day rugby in Munster (“in South Africa on 26 December it’s the summer and you go on holiday”) or bracing himself to deal with Bath’s dire situation (“firstly, I had to understand the club’s issues”).

2. Inspirational motivation

Transformational leaders have the ability to inspire and motivate followers through fashioning and presenting a vision.

On his first day at Bath, Van Graan pinned a picture of the Allianz Stadium on the dressing room wall and said, “There’s no date attached to this, but we will get there”.

“I’m in,” said Bath hooker Tom Dunn in response, “but I’m not sure how we’re going to get there.”

It set the expectations suitably high and represented a compelling vision into which any rugby player could buy, not least a group with such raw potential.

For his part, Van Graan knew that performances and, later, the trophies would come when his team was bound by “connection, clarity and commitment”.

“One of the things we underestimate is what alignment truly looks like,” he continued. “I think we as coaches are sometimes scared of that word. We can never communicate enough. Do we really let people know what the standards look like? What the boundaries actually are? What are we actually going to attack?”

He also posed a question to the team’s leadership. “I asked ‘what does the club stand for?’ and nobody would give me an answer. I picked three words: ‘tough to beat’.” They made sense for a team at a low ebb.

“In a rugby context, most of us coaches go after the sexy stuff, but I think you have to go after the important stuff first. That’s defence, set pieces and managing your kicking game; ultimately, it’s a game where you have to go backwards to go forwards.”

Fast-forward three years, following that successful 2024-25 season, Van Graan turned to Dunn and said “we did this together”.

3. Intellectual stimulation

Transformational leaders challenge followers to be innovative, creative and open to new ideas.

Van Graan invited his players to challenge his thinking from day one.

With one player in particular, he played a game of ‘20 questions’. “I didn’t quite know how that was going to go,” he said. It led to a critique of the style Van Graan employed at Munster.

“His first question was ‘why did you kick so much at Munster?’ and I said ‘because we had the best lineout in the world’.”

Additionally, Van Graan runs an open-door policy. “You can make an appointment or knock on my door, come in, close the door, and in that way you can tell me anything. I won’t always agree with you but I will tell you exactly what I think.”

He will also listen. “We’ve all got two ears and one mouth,” he said, underlining the point.

“It’s very easy as a leader, specifically in a successful time, that you think it’s you. It’s not you. It’s the sum of all the others around you.”

Van Graan told the audience he has six mentors, one of whom is Frans Ludeke, whose coaching staff he joined in the mid-2000s at the Pretoria-based Bulls. In 2017, Van Graan flew to Tokyo to meet Ludeke and show him the presentation with which he hoped to win over the management at Munster where he had just applied to be head coach.

“Frans just said ‘you’re not going to get this job’. I asked why and he said ‘because it’s not you. You wrote on here what you think they want to hear. You’re not being yourself’.” Van Graan took the next 24 hours to rework his presentation and was ultimately successful in his candidacy. “I’m not saying it’s because of my presentation but Frans is someone who’s spoken into my life.”

4.Individualised consideration

Transformational leaders demonstrate concern for the needs and feelings of followers and help them fulfil their potential. They establish strong relationships and act as a supportive resource.

Van Graan, who recited a series of quotes during his time onstage, delivers a line from German philosopher Albert Schopenhauer: “talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

“I’m in no way saying I’m a genius,” said Van Graan. “The point I want to make is people want to dream, people want to belong, so you’ve got to give people hope, whether it’s players or staff, you’ve got to be able to see something first and then bring people along with you.”

He hoped to pursue that dream by co-creating a “new culture” at Bath. “‘Culture’ is a word that gets used by so many people. For me, it’s embracing everybody in the group, setting clear boundaries as to what you want and who you are. I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you speak, the colour of your skin: everybody’s welcome at our club.”

This is particularly important when delivering bad news, such as telling a player their contract will not be renewed. In the past, he would make small talk. “Now, I walk in, shake your hand and say: ‘unfortunately, this will be your final season at the club’. I’ve become comfortable with the silence; and people respect that a lot more than not telling them.”

As part of Bath’s collective sense of trust, belonging and psychological safety, Van Graan encourages his players to take perspective. They led Northampton 21-18 with five minutes to go in the 2024 Premiership final and went on to lose 25-21. “We were six minutes from tasting greatness.” They walked out of Twickenham with their heads held high and, 12 months later, defeated Leicester Tigers 23-21 to win the 2025 final.

“We actually played a lot better in the final we lost than the final we won,” said Van Graan. “We haven’t reviewed the previous final at all. We spoke about how close we were but just moved on. The next journey had started.”

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