Man’s Search for Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust by Viktor Frankl

McFarland says: “This book really touched me emotionally and I read it at a time in my life where learning the importance of having a meaningful purpose and diving headlong into living that purpose was critical.”

Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential by Carol Dweck

McFarland says: “Understanding the basis of growth and learning as the willingness to challenge yourself and that that is a great thing.”

More on Mindset here.

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My philosophy of leadership by Bill Walsh with Steve Jamison & Craig Walsh

McFarland says: “I am not sure that I am at all the kind of coach the great Bill Walsh was but I loved the detail and accountability he developed in the setting up of the 49ers machine.”

More on The Score Takes Care of Itself here.

Eleven Rings: The soul of success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty

McFarland says: “Phil Jackson totally understood how important context is to leadership. He demonstrates empathy in equal measure to strong decision making.”

More on Phil Jackson here.

Team of Teams: New rules of engagement for a complex world by General Stanley McChrystal

McFarland says: “McChrystal was able to see the need for change within the military operating systems in modern warfare. He implemented change from traditional military hierarchy to distributed leadership – this level of change in conceptual thinking is mind-blowing to me.”

More from the McChrystal Group here.

A Industry Insight brought to you by our partners Science in Sport.

“I always say: everyone is always excited for someone else to change,” says Jeremy Bettle, with a wry smile. “It’s always difficult when you have to deliver that to the person who has to change.”

The Performance Director at MLS champions New York City FC is the first guest on the Science in Sport Industry Insight podcast series, where he joins the Leaders Performance Institute Editor John Portch and Science in Sport’s Director of Performance Solutions James Morton to discuss his first season at the club, which culminated in the championship.

Bettle spoke to the pair about his arrival in the Big Apple, with Morton sharing from his own experiences of working with seven-time Tour de France winners Team Sky/INEOS Grenadiers and in English Premier League football.

Also on the conversational agenda were:

• Why Bettle feels he has not always handled change management well in the past [4:00];
• The difference between comfort and complacency in winning teams [14:00];
• The reasons why people management are often at the centre of innovation [20:00];
• Why enjoyment should be a practitioner’s personal priority [22:00];
• Reflective practice and how different questions can change mindsets [29:00].

James Morton: Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

An episode of the Industry Insight Series brought to you by our Partners

Not a member and want more content like this? Speak to our team.

“Those first few years really did fast-track my development in management,” says Matt White, who was the Head Sport Director of cycling’s Team BikeExchange Jayco for 15 years, and now holds the position of Director of High Performance & Racing.

“Those first couple of years set me in a really good position to go through some pretty tricky times later in my career.”

White is speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute and Elite Performance Partners’ [EPP] Founding Partner Dave Slemen about his transition from professional rider to management over the course of a single winter in 2007 and 2008.

He also discussed how he has adapted as a leader in the intervening period, particularly in light of cycling’s pivot towards younger riders and an ever more cutthroat development environment.

By John Portch

“The whole idea of self-development, leadership and learning is such a passion of mine,” Jon Bartlett tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

Within a few minutes, the Elite Basketball Performance & Program Operations Advisor at the NBA explains just how interconnected people development, people management and process development is.

When each is done poorly, there tends to be common themes, such as a lack of investment in people, a lack of clarity, misalignment, and fear of challenging the status quo. These return time and again throughout our conversation and Bartlett cites the distinction between ‘discussion’ and ‘dialogue’ in making his case.

“In sport, we often skip the idea of engaging in dialogue – that is being open to and listening with intent to everyone’s viewpoint, willing to understand their perspectives, place value in their backgrounds and their experience – and instead we go straight to the discussion/debate narrative. Without recognising it, the situation quickly becomes a ‘me versus you’ with the actual problem not being addressed or solved.

In the first instalment of our two-part interview, we explore the steps teams can take to promote better people development, people management and process development.

Jon, what is the first step leaders can take towards creating shared understanding, language, meaning, vision and clarity within their teams?

JB: The obvious one, and it’s easier said than done, is making it visible. Does everyone know what the plan and strategy is? Is it evident within the environment you’re working in on a daily basis? Is there alignment between the owners, the board, the GM, coach, performance director and then all the different verticals underneath? Are there routine checkpoints along the way to determine progress or is it just an annual check-in to see how it’s going against the plan? Are there actual processes and opportunities to review the plan as it’s happening and emerging? Is the work of those who are non-athlete facing and those who are athlete facing aligned to the wider goals? Are the actions and words consistent? It’s easy to put words up on a wall, but are the actual actions and behaviours aligned with those?

How can goals and values be effectively communicated to staff members?

JB: It’s about taking people on a journey. In an ideal world they’re somewhat part of the conversation, or involved some way in developing the goals and values. This way you likely get to the point easily and quickly around how those values are embodied. For big staff groups though where this isn’t always possible there are opportunities through behavioural frameworks. If you’ve got a certain set of values and behaviours in which we’re going to operate, what are the actions that embody those values? And how can you live those on a daily basis? I think in having that shared language and that shared understanding, the co-creation and sharing of that responsibility, you’re then reaching all the different verticals. There are many ways to achieve this but, ultimately, I think the more people involved in the process the more buy-in and engagement there is early on.

What about the role of those below the leaders?

JB: To achieve alignment, the heads of department are critical in sharing the values, the language, and the processes. One thing I’ve thought about hard is giving flexibility to staff on how they do their work and how it contributes to the bigger picture. Empower and allow them to carry out how they do their job on a daily basis, but then collectively identify how that work contributes to the bigger picture. Now you’re meeting them in the middle. That is key to that alignment. If it’s just being told constantly, ‘this is what you need to do, this is how you need to do it’. I don’t want to work like that. Flip it around: the work you want to do and how you’re doing it; how is that contributing to the bigger picture? What  piece of the puzzle are you in contributing to the overall strategy? It’s both top-down and bottom-up.

How can organisations track both progress and the development of behaviours?

JB: You always want to be able to track if something is going in the right direction through constant touchpoints on where it’s at, what’s the progress, where’s it getting to, but it’s also a case of tracking what isn’t working as well, what needs to be dropped. So, I like the idea of asking how do we spend our time? And what are we spending our time on? Then you’re almost thinking what’s the problems we’re trying to deal with? Are we asking the right questions? Are we trying to solve the right problems? If you haven’t got the initial plan, vision and strategy, then what are you actually tracking? I think that’s key: you’ve got to have the first part first in order to then track your progress along that lifecycle.

What are some of the signs of poor process management?

JB: This is really talking now to how things are done, the methods in which we account for planning, ideation, creation, implementation, review and evaluation. I think, done poorly, there’s gaps at every stage. Done well, there might be one or two ‘getting there’ stages, which might need tweaking. Done great, there are processes and frameworks contributing to every step of that process, it’s a well-oiled machine and it effectively contributes to decision making. For example, if there’s no review or evaluation of a process, then there’s very little learning happening. And no learning means the same thing is being done over and over; when you want different results and you do the same thing it’s basically insanity. In sport, if you do the same thing over and over, recruit the same, go through the same cycle and expect different results, nothing changes. One of the themes that I think interchangeably gets regarded as poor staff incompetence is just poor process management. Sometimes, it just needs better oversight and better management of the process and then often this can lead to better action plans and development for staff.

Change often comes during losing streaks, periods of staff turnover and other turmoil. How can teams begin to find opportunities in those moments?

JB: You’ve got to ask: what’s the problem? What’s the question we’ve got to ask ourselves? Change is inevitable in sport, it’s a constant. That’s why I think context becomes so important. To get a group of people to work together towards a common goal you have to ask: was there even a common goal established at the start? If there wasn’t, then that’s the problem, not necessarily the people underneath, because they didn’t necessarily know what they were doing. The opportunity is there to ask the right questions and if you don’t know what the questions are then get people in to help ask those questions and find out what the problem is. Subsequent to that, all staff have the opportunity to be a part of something. What do you want your role to be in this and how are you going to contribute to it in terms of turning it around and changing it? Some people will be ‘I’m out of here, I’m done’. Some people don’t have the choice. But in a way, you’ve got to come back to: what is the problem? Poor results isn’t the problem, that’s the outcome. You’ve got to find out what’s leading to those poor results. Context is key and that’s the opportunity.

What is the right way to win over stubborn people within a team?

JB: We are talking here in the context of change, I guess, and with that how you go about convincing someone with a certain mindset and philosophy of practice tweaking how they do things, so they’re aligned to how an organisation or department wants to operate. The first thing is learning about what their perspectives are, what their background and experience is and what their modus operandi is. Gaining understanding of this means building a relationship and respecting that background. Equally it provides the opportunity of asking: ‘how can their background, practice, methodology, philosophy contribute to us trying to answer this problem?’ You want to get to a place where you get them to come up with a solution of how they contribute to the actual problem as opposed to saying, ‘this is where we’re going and this is where we need you to operate.’ Again, it comes down to that ‘dialogue versus discussion’ concept. They might not agree with the vision, strategy and pathway, which might mean a separation of ways, but if they are engaged then for me it’s about identifying with that individual how they align and operate the agreed vision and philosophy of the department.

A Leaders Performance Podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

“How do we make it more difficult for people to do what they’ve always done?”

This question is posed by psychologist and former Leaders speaker Gareth Bloomfield in this edition of the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.

Bloomfield, who works with the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, explores the topic of behavioural change at length and delves into:

• Understanding how the brain works when making decisions [4:20];
• What we already know about human behaviour [6:30];
• How leaders should approach behavioural change [8:00];
• Tips for overcoming the typical barriers to change [16:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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

By John Portch

Brentford Head Coach Thomas Frank has been a breath of fresh air in the English Premier League, but some of his experiences are wearily familiar.

“It can be very lonely at the top,” he tells an audience at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium in November.

“My biggest thing is that I really like my family, friends and social life, and you can’t combine the two. I guess you can, but there’s no balance. So I’m constantly saying to myself to do this for maybe five more years. I’m actually on top of everything so, of course, I like to enjoy the Premier League and I’d like to stay here and all that, but it’s tough. I love it, but it’s tough.”

Frank, if his animated touchline demeanour is anything to go by, lives for the matches at the weekend and dies by the results, so to speak. Session moderator Michael Caulfield, who works with Frank and Brentford as a psychologist, asks how he copes with the work-life balance.

“It’s really simple, actually,” begins Frank in response. “My wife, she has absolutely no interest in football. So that’s good. I have two fantastic daughters, one 19, one 15, not interested in football – especially my 19-year-old daughter – she never knows if we’re playing.” Frank clearly values the division between work and his personal life, although he also tells the audience he has a son who takes a keen interest in football.

The Dane has been the Head Coach of Brentford since 2018, when he was promoted from his role as Assistant Head Coach. Three years later his team were promoted to the Premier League, although it might have been sooner had they not lost the 2020 Championship play-off Final to Fulham. The Bees made it in the end having successfully navigated the playoffs at the second time of asking last May.

As he takes to the stage, Frank has been a Premier League Head Coach for a little over three months and was still coming to terms with the increased scrutiny. “The media circus is totally insane,” he tells the audience. “I’m so happy I’m not on social media – I don’t know if any of you are – I will say get rid of it. It’s not worth it.”

Controlling the hurricane

Brentford made a positive start to life in the top tier. Their opening day defeat of Arsenal at their new Community Stadium was quickly followed by a creditable home draw with Liverpool and the Bees looked at home in the Premier League. Before the clocks had gone back observers were citing their success as vindication of their data-informed approach to performance under the owner Matthew Benham.

Frank had been identified by the club as a coach able to give life to their values when he was appointed Dean Smith’s assistant in 2016. He was as far removed as could be from the managerial merry-go-round that characterises English football and it’s questionable whether he would have been given a chance in the Premier League had he not been promoted with Brentford. Frank had worked with Denmark’s men’s underage teams in his homeland before taking the Head Coach’s role at Danish Superliga side Brøndby, where his tenure lasted three years.

The enthusiasm around Brentford has been tempered in some quarters by the club’s mid-season travails – not that Frank was ever carried away by the external narrative – and the west Londoners retain an excellent chance of staying up at the end of their first top-flight season since 1947. “We never say ‘stay up’, by the way – we try to achieve instead of avoid.”

Frank, who infamously lost eight of his first 10 matches in charge before building one of the best sides in the Championship, has developed a healthy self-awareness, which is just as well given the emotions he feels during matches. After 20 minutes of the 2021 play-off final, Brentford were cruising and the Premier League was within touching distance.

“I was thinking ‘have we done it? Have we done it? No! Just stay cool’,” he said, “and there’s just a hurricane inside you; and it’s for 70 minutes and it’s crazy emotions you’re feeling.”

Caulfield, who enjoys a weekly walk with Frank at Brentford’s Jersey Road training ground, asks how he controls that hurricane. “It’s very difficult. I use a lot of energy to stay calm. I’m quite an open, passionate person, but try to be very level with it. When I’m really shouting or anything I can lose my temper, of course, can I do that but very rarely. I’m aware of it and thinking about it every day.

“I think we – Michael and I – find coming in and among the staff and the players really good. We have a catch-up, walk around the training ground for half an hour. [I ask] How’s the staff? How’s the players? All the information I don’t get. Of course, confidential; so if it’s really confidential stuff I don’t get it. I talk about myself as well. I think that’s extremely important. Trying to work on your weaknesses and try to improve your strengths.”

Confident but humble

Frank, a former amateur player, turned to coaching at the age of 20. He says: “I never had a dream when I started coaching when I was 20 years old, 28 years ago, that I wanted to be a Premier League manager. Step by step, I was lucky and privileged to get all of these opportunities. I studied so much: how to be a good coach on the pitch, how to be really good at analysing games, and how to be specific in what I wanted to do.”

Frank recounts a tale from his time as Head Coach of the Denmark men’s under-17s team, a role he held between 2008 and 2012. “Back then, I analysed the game myself – I had no analyst. I got up, 5:30 in the morning, rewatched the game. It took me three and a half hours because I cut it down so that I could present the analysis to the team.”

Each player was presented with 10 clips and he spent 10 to 15 minutes evaluating those clips with each of them. “That gave them something to improve but also the way I wanted to play. So it was of course their individual development but also in their role. I wanted them to succeed. I don’t have the same time now but I have the same mindset.”

Privileged or not, there was nothing inevitable about his ascent to the Premier League but both he and Brentford made it happen. “In all kinds of sport, money is a big part of it. We speak a lot in football that money is 70 per cent and then the last 30 per cent is knowledge, culture, those margins. I think we do these 30 per cent and maybe let’s say 35 per cent unbelievably well.

“We have a fantastic group of staff where we have this unique togetherness and a really good group of players that we built over time and we’re really strong on culture. Togetherness, hard work, attitude and performance; and that’s what I try to drill into the players every single day. Two things I’ve stolen – I can say that out loud, no problem – I love the All Blacks book, Legacy, and that phrase ‘no dickheads’ – a fantastic one-liner.”

Caulfield says that he uses that a lot and Frank agrees. “You know, we only want good people and I think it’s extremely important. People need to be themselves and express themselves, but they need to think for the team and the club.”

Frank is also fond of phrase he first heard from Stuart Worden, the Principal of the BRIT School, a renowned performing arts college in South London. “His one-liner is ‘the right attitude is when you are confident but humble.’ You need to be confident, you need to trust yourself. I need to trust myself, the players need to trust themselves, but if you’re not humble for the work you need to do every single day, we can never achieve anything.”

He expresses deep affection for his players. He does not let sentiment get in the way of his decision-making but feels he can be better at having those difficult conversations, whether it is telling a player they are not playing tomorrow or that their future lies elsewhere.

“The most difficult thing is to keep everyone happy in the squad. It’s impossible and it’s breaking my heart when I can’t play some of the players who aren’t playing. But I trust my gut feeling and, you know, what I believe in, so I go with all the players. But it’s really tough to see some of them giving their all and they’re just not good enough. Maybe it’s only in my opinion, or maybe they are not good enough. You never know before they maybe move club, or I move, and see how their development is. I think that’s really tough. I haven’t found a way, I try to get around them, I try to speak to them, but that’s one of the things I’d like to do better, because it’s so important.”

It is a journey rather than a destination and Frank still “massively” enjoys developing as a coach. “I know when I was 30 I thought I knew everything, but even now I know nothing and I’m constantly trying to develop.”

His claim to know nothing is self-effacing but he is still trying to find the optimal level of control that enables his staff to grow and permits Frank himself to recharge his batteries. “If you don’t delegate then your staff never grow and you can never take a step back, I think that’s extremely important. But I just love to be hands on.” He then permits himself to future-gaze. “Maybe in 10 years I’ll back off a little bit,” he says, already doubling the five years he suggested earlier in the conversation.

As Caulfield draws the session to a close Frank shares a lesson he learned while listening to some fellow coaches at the Leaders P8 Summit the previous day. “We have a player who’s rarely playing but I think he’s so good for the culture. He’s such a culture builder, because he trains like a beast every single day. Now I think I’ll say that to him in front of everyone, when we meet in the coming days.”

By John Portch

The Toronto Blue Jays’ new practice facility, their $100m Player Development Center in Dunedin, Florida, is one of the first to feature a barbershop next to its clubhouse.

“But the key principle is that human-centred design,” said Angus Mugford, the Blue Jays’ Vice President of High Performance, when commenting on the addition. “We really were trying to think about the player experience; and areas that were not just functional but fun and enabled them to relax and connect with others.”

Mugford was talking to an audience at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham Stadium in London. “It’s thinking with the end in mind, really thinking about people using that space, making sure they’re included in that process,” he continued, “and even if you’re not building a new facility that you’re thinking about [solutions] within your existing constraints. If collaboration is one of the key things you’re driving for, are there ways you can shift and move your environment to really maximise that?”

The Blue Jays have dotted the Player Development Center with QR codes that allow players and staff to provide instant feedback on their experience of their new facility. “Whether it’s putting QR codes and just doing a survey around your facility now and seeing what feedback people would give. You can get some incredible ideas that you may not necessarily generate, or an architect may not generate.”

As Mugford came offstage, the Leaders Performance Institute approached him to further discuss the topic of human-centred design, athlete empowerment and mental wellbeing.

Angus, how have you and Toronto sought to address the challenges of the pandemic and apply the lessons learned along the way?

AM: Something that we’ve learned is the power of design. You’re trying to surround the problem with all these key stakeholders and really trying to identify and define what it is. What is the objective and what are all the elements of that so that we can be a lot more intentional and driven about all the pieces that come together? Because goodness knows, sometimes when we’re in reactive mode, we spend half our time cleaning up the mess of our efforts in good faith, but if we do take more time up front and really think about designing solutions in a more thorough way, we get way better results. Certainly being more intentional; and human-centred design specifically has been a great tool in being able to do that.

Your relationship with control – how do you know when to delegate or take something on yourself?

AM: ‘Control’ is a great word, right. It’s so much better for your health and anxiety to have your finger on the pulse of everything, but empowerment is one of our core values at the Toronto Blue Jays, and as easy as it sounds, it can be incredibly difficult. But certainly the ability for any member of the organisation to feel like they have an impact and to communicate their voice is massive because the things that someone sees from a different perspective are often the best solution and a blind spot to someone like me who doesn’t see it from the trenches. So for us to feel safe and valued and feel that every voice contributes is really huge. Conversely, I think with empowerment it is easy to give people a lack of support, so I think a high challenge, high support environment is necessary. Empowerment with the right level of expertise and support is really important – and empowerment and low support can be a lonely and difficult place too. It’s a really complex area but we’ve seen the value of empowerment with stories like Harlequins’ and a lot of the great teams out there are listening or empowering their staff and players more.

How do you ensure that everyone in the build feels able to speak up and contribute to performance questions?

AM: I think the psychological safety is huge. That people are willing to put their hand up, that they are willing to be wrong, that we’re not going to be judged for saying something stupid, and I think also feeling a responsibility that their voice matters, that they have something to contribute, and people will listen even if the team doesn’t choose to follow. Great facilitation and great leaders make sure that everybody has a voice and has a stage to be able to share that. But safety and being able to do that and take positive risks is critical and hard to do.

How and in what ways are mental health and wellbeing part of the performance equation at the Blue Jays?

AM: Mental health and wellbeing has become heightened in terms of the awareness of people living through the pandemic; and while it’s always been there, I think people are more comfortable talking about it now because it’s affected all of us in so many different ways. And I think ‘mental health’ in itself is an interesting term because we often associate that with mental illness but we have mental strength and we have mental health all-encompassing around health; and making sure that we understand that continuum of providing the resources and making it comfortable for people to talk about an acknowledge. And that’s not just for players: I think that aspect for all of our staff is really important too. High performance is not often a balanced world. There’s a lot of time on the road, away from families and high stress. And I think that acknowledging that we’re human beings and physical and mental health are really important aspects that we need to focus on, provide resources for, and work on too.

In what ways is self-reflection a useful tool?

AM: Self-reflection is a critical aspect of learning, period. At the Blue Jays, we have a framework of prepare, compete, recover. And it’s amazing, both as players and staff sometimes, we’re really good at prepare, really good at compete, and terrible at recovery. The recovery is not just physical, it’s that mental aspect; making sure that we’re reflecting and learning, taking all of the positives and opportunities to get better, and that we’re also letting go and moving onto the next day. Being able to be fully engaged in the present and make the most of that. But without reflection, there is no learning; experience is really a reflection on experience that allows growth, learning and development.

By Bobby L Scales II

David Ortiz was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in January.

‘The Hall’ is the single greatest individual award that can be bestowed upon anyone in American professional baseball. The numbers he amassed over 20 seasons in Major League Baseball place him among the greats, and the joy of watching ‘Big Papi’ stride to the plate with bad intentions for opposing pitchers satisfied millions over the course of his career.

People will debate his greatest contribution to the game and if you pick up any one of the hundreds of articles written about him you will read that his personality and natural ability to lead are even larger than his physical stature.

I learned all this in person at Spring Training in 2007, when the impact he had on a certain 29-year-old journeyman minor league player kickstarted my journey in leadership.

Reaching your leadership ceiling

I am a big believer that leaders can be born but they can also be made in the sense that even if people have natural ‘born leader’ qualities the true height of that ability can’t be realized unless they continue to learn, train and exercise those abilities. Everyone is born with what I call a ‘leadership ceiling’. Whether that person reaches their leadership ceiling or not is dependent on a multitude of factors, such as, how influential can that person’s leadership be in a multitude of environments? Does a person have the requisite skill set to lead in any environment and most importantly can they activate those skillsets when it matters most? The best leaders on the planet exhibit a few crucial qualities regardless of who they lead.

At the Boston Red Sox’s Spring Training camp in late February 2007, I carried my bags into their clubhouse in Fort Meyers, Florida, and began to learn that Ortiz had those qualities in spades. I was heading into my seventh season as a professional, with my third club, and had yet to crack a Major League roster. Honestly, with my 30th birthday coming in October, I was questioning my time in professional sport.

Nevertheless, Spring Training can be a tremendous opportunity for younger guys or journeyman like me to make an impression on the coaches and decision makers. The second I walked into that clubhouse the place was different. There was a feeling of calm, easiness and focus on the task at hand: winning the World Series. This team was laser-focused on doing just that. This team was different too in that it was a very veteran clubhouse, including Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez, Mike Lowell, Julio Lugo, Curt Schilling and, of course, ‘Big Papi’.

The origins of Ortiz’s nickname are rooted in American baseball culture. The most senior Latin leader in the clubhouse is referred to as ‘papi’, which loosely translated from Spanish means ‘daddy’. Major League teams and their affiliates will have rosters filled with players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia and Curacao. They are signed between the age of 16 and 18 and usually start their careers in club-operated academies in the ‘DR’. The best will progress to the US where these young men are asked to learn a foreign language, assimilate to another culture and, oh yeah, play ball at a high level! On the flip side, you have a group of young American players who are yet to be exposed to Latin players.

What we know about human behavior tells us that people tend to assimilate in groups of similar people. Clubhouse culture in baseball is no different. In each of these groups – white guys from the West Coast, black guys, Northeast guys, Southern guys, the Latin guys – leaders tend to emerge from within these groups and, usually, these guys are comfortable enough in their own skin to bridge the gaps and pull people together. For the Latin players, the role of the ‘papi’ is crucial. With that moniker comes responsibility and, often, this man is not just the leader of the Latin players but a bridge to the coaching staff and everyone else on the team.

Intentionality and integrity

At Fort Meyers, I was assigned the number 76 – an awful number. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter but we all know it’s terrible. I would arrive at 5:30am for the workouts that typically didn’t get started until 9am because you never know what might happen. Lift, eat, sort equipment, adjust to any changes, whatever needed to be done. I remember the third or fourth day of camp at about 5:50am. I had just changed into shorts and a t-shirt and, out of the weight room having finished his workout, comes ‘Big Papi’.

‘Hey, what you doing here? It’s too early,’ he said in a deep voice with a heavy Dominican accent.

‘Papi’, I said, while pointing to the #76, ‘man, unless you’re early they forget about you!’ Part of me was kidding, part of me was dead serious. His answer was something that I’ll never forget.

‘Nah, you get invited to this camp, you have a chance to help us win a World Series and we gonna do that. Get your bat… let’s go hit!” He didn’t know me from the next guy but I was in that clubhouse and I had the same uniform on. At this point of his career he had been a three time all-star, a World Series champion and a World Series Most Valuable Player. At 6am he was changing his shirt post-gym workout and heading to the batting cage.

With his actions he was saying ‘we win things around here, this is how we work and you’re part of it’. This was his routine and he was going to do this whether I was in the building or not. I happened to be there so this was his opportunity to show me the culture in the building without saying a word. Leaders such as ‘Big Papi’ act with intention because they have a vision of where they see themselves and their club and a clear plan of how they can get there.

It spoke to his accountability too. Accountability and integrity are essential and connected, as it’s very easy to call for accountability in those you are leading. Holding people to account for their preparation, performance or work is easy – holding yourself to those same standards signals integrity. What are you doing when no one is watching you? Are you holding yourself to the same standard that you expect from those you lead? In world sport today, managers, coaches, or technical directors have a vision of what they want that culture to be but ultimately it must be player-led.

Bobby at the Boston Red Sox’s 2007 Spring Training in Fort Myers (Photo: Getty Images/Nick Laham)

Communication and personal connection

It was 6:10am and I was sat in the batting cage with Big Papi, and Wily Mo Pena (a massive prospect at the time for Boston) taking turns. While Manny and Wily Mo would hit, Papi and I were in deep conversation about all number of things. He’d ask: where are you from? Where have you played? Are you married? Do you have kids?

When he hit, I watched him work through his hitting routine, how professional it was, how detailed and demanding he was of himself, how he watched Ramirez work (Manny is a legend himself). After I had my turn he asked me questions about my approach and the things I thought about when I was at the plate: did I like hitting left-handed or right-handed better? He was asking me about my baseball journey, how I ended up signing with Boston? Where did I feel most comfortable playing defensively? How did I believe I could help the club? What did the administration tell me about the opportunity I had in the organization?

Papi wanted to know who he was working with. He wanted to know what I was about. His approach in asking me these questions made me want to answer them without hesitation. Additionally, this was a two-way street. I didn’t know him, I just knew what I saw on TV. This was my opportunity to find out, besides talent, what made this guy tick. What was his journey to this point? One of the core beliefs I have in leadership and people development is the player resides within the man: if you want direct access to the player you better know the human first. He had an innate understanding that people’s talents, whatever they are, shine the brightest when there is a level of comfort in the environment.

That day the #76 felt important – like I really did have a chance to impact this club. Remember, this is 2007 and we weren’t talking about psychological safety then, but that’s exactly what it was. There was an easiness about him that was contagious. I hit early with that group the next ten days and every day was just like this. We got into real conversations, and it was incredible.

The ability for leaders to connect with everyone is vital to that person reaching their leadership ceiling or simply just having leadership qualities. ‘Big Papi’ went all out.

Authenticity

About two weeks into camp, the exhibition games against other teams start and the biggest beneficiaries of these early opportunities are guys just like myself. And I played terrific.

Early one morning I was in the cafeteria and in comes ‘Papi’. ‘Oye [Spanish for ‘listen’], I see you, you playing your ass off,’ he says. He grabs a bowl of oatmeal and takes a seat next to me. ‘There is a guy in this clubhouse that come up for one game – one series to help us win the division.’ I remember sitting in my locker later that day thinking this guy is unbelievable. The level of professionalism in his preparation.  The respect he garnered not just from his play but also by how he treated his teammates, coaches and support staff.  Most importantly, he was REAL!!!

There is a saying in baseball: ‘just remember, you can’t fool the clubhouse’. People know when you are real and people know when you are phony. When you are in a leadership position and you are an imposter in any way, you will lose the group.

Later in camp, the big boys were playing five to six innings and then the subs entered the game. We were playing the New York Mets and I replaced Ramirez in the sixth. When those guys get out of the game, they get whatever recovery they need from the physio team, shower, then leave. Well in the top of the seventh inning I was playing left field and Lastings Milledge hit an absolute rocket down the line near the corner. I took off full speed, located the baseball and laid flat out to make the best catch of my entire 14-year professional career.

The catch that caught the eye of David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz

At the end of the inning, I ran into the dugout and waiting on me at the top step in street clothes was ‘Big Papi’. He was watching the rest of the game as he was doing his recovery with the physio staff. When I’d made the catch he’d ran outside and was waiting for me at the top step. ‘Oye, that was unbelievable! I’m telling you, you gonna help us win something!’ When he’d first said that to me almost a month earlier, I’m sure he said that to put me at ease in the beginning of camp. Now, I had played well and he noticed. I believe in that moment he really believed ‘this guy really might be able to help us.’

Well, he wasn’t kidding the Boston Red Sox won something in 2007: the World Series and, believe it or not, they did it without me! I spent the entire season at Pawtucket, the Triple A affiliate. I had one of my best seasons as a professional and I never got called up. The younger version of me was crestfallen that I didn’t get promoted to the majors that year. The version that is writing this piece realizes the intellectual currency that I took from that experience. What I got was a six-week case study on what high level leadership really looked like up close.

Leaders connect on a personal level with those they lead. Leaders are vulnerable and transparent, understanding that authenticity in relationships is central to culture creation. Leaders realize they will accomplish nothing by themselves, and they need the contribution of everyone in the operation. Leaders make everyone in the operation feel like their contribution to the group is important. Leaders set the tone for what the standard is in the organization. Leaders do all these things and do so in different styles – we will cover that in later posts.

David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz is a three-time World Series champion, a legend of the sport and now a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’m not going to pretend that I know him because I don’t. We don’t talk and I don’t have his number. Here is what I do know: Papi has influenced countless lives by modeling what real leadership looks like. For me, that makes him a Hall of Fame leader.

Bobby is one of six Leaders Performance Advisors, a group of leading performance thinkers providing more subject expertise to our member-only content and learning resources. To find out more about all our Performance Advisors, click here.

By John Portch

• The athlete needs the coach but you cannot be selfish

• Coaching innovation can be driven by the needs of your athletes

• How well do you find those moments for a cup of coffee with your athletes?

From selfish to selfless

Kate Howey was a two-time Olympic medallist who appeared at four consecutive Games from 1992 through to 2004, she was also a world champion and perhaps the poster woman of British judo. She instantly became a coach and admits her ego got in the way at first. “It was very much about winning,” she told the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London last November in her former role as Head Coach of British Judo. “I had an ego and if I could produce somebody who was winning medals that would be good for me. Then you get a bit older and wiser and realise it’s not about me, it’s about the athlete. That was a massive learning curve.”

Howey had made the journey from selfish to selfless. “It’s about how I break down the barriers and the softer skills of coaching,” she continues. “Get the human side of the athlete out to then build the trust to get the performance.”

It needs to be this way in a sport such as judo where the coaching is close-up and personal. “I’m probably from here to the photographer [about three metres away] coaching them matt side; and something can change in a second. I have to be on it and I have to have the trust from the athlete that I am giving the right instruction.”

Never say ‘back in the day’

If a self-referential approach was outdated in 2004, it is not going to serve any purpose with current athletes who were barely in school at that time. “‘Back in the day we did this’ – never ever say that to this generation because they’ll say ‘you didn’t even have TVs in your day, Kate.’ They’ve got a totally different understanding of what goes on in the world.

“Your coaching changes and you have to be innovative with that. You can even coach using somebody’s Instagram. You have to be super innovative.”

Find out what makes them tick

In judo, as Howey says, “It has to be athlete and coach working together rather than coach-centred or athlete-centred, because sometimes the coach does make the athlete tick as well, as much as the athlete needs the coach, the coach needs the athlete.”

She can be on the road up to 250 days per year, which means it is essential she develop rapport with athletes who might be half her age. “You’ve got to know the generation that you’re dealing with,” she continues. “They’re very clued up; mental health, tech savvy. You get to learn these things so you can have an ‘in’ on a conversation or just get down to their level, as hard as it may be, and challenging as it is.” She tails off for moment. “[I’m often] sitting there watching Married at First Sight for an hour.”

Howey does not necessarily enjoy this reality TV show but it is a worthy sacrifice. “The softer skills have to come in, which is possibly knowing what they’re doing that evening, knowing what’s going on in their life, knowing what’s going to make them tick – and what’s not going to make them tick – more to the point.

“How do I motivate them? How do I bring them down when they’re slightly high in terms of they’re too eager to do too much? Then they do too much and they get hurt. It’s a two-way thing and you have to have the conversations to get the information out.

“Sometimes it’s a chat over a cup of coffee that you don’t get in a training environment. You need to get to know your athlete in order to get the best out of them.”

An article brought to you by our Partners

“In sport,” says Jeremy Bettle, “you start out as a practitioner and you get better and better as a practitioner. The next thing you know, you’re a manager and a leader, and it’s an area we’re really poorly prepared for.”

The Performance Director of MLS champions New York City FC is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute and Elite Performance Partners [EPP] about his own experience as both a practitioner and a leader.

“In my first leadership roles,” Bettle continues, “I really thought having the best strategy or having the best ideas, that was what was going to make me a great leader, that people would just hear my idea and say ‘this is brilliant! Let’s do it!’ And you very quickly realise that it’s all about the people that you’re going to be leading.”

Bettle speaks from his experience leading performance divisions at teams including the Anaheim Ducks and Toronto Maple Leafs. “Yes, you have to have a strategy but the other side of it is that you need to have empathy for what people are going through, their sense of threat from your new system, and the humility you must have to go into a new environment and take it all in. There’s a huge component of leadership you almost don’t realise until you’re in the job already. Hopefully you ride that storm out where you last and get to take that next step.”

The Leaders Performance Institute and EPP’s Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards are also joined by Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics.

Although the trio offer three different perspectives from three different sports, systems and countries, they hit on the numerous performance principles that EPP, a performance consultancy and search firm, discuss with their clients on a daily basis. One such principle being the need to ensure people are developing a range of ‘human skills’ over and above their technical competence in order to prepare for leadership. Here are some of the other key considerations they identify for performance directors going into new roles.

Cultivating high performance habits

The environment is uppermost in the minds of all three, playing to EPP’s belief that culture and strategy hold equal weight in an organisation – like two strands of a DNA helix, with strong leadership binding the two together and enabling the team to retain its core structure when pressure is inevitably applied. “You don’t have to get it perfectly to succeed at all because talent will probably beat that, but where talent is equal, the environment becomes really important,” says Burgess, who has led high performance teams in the English Premier League at Liverpool and Arsenal, as well as in his native Australia, where he helped Melbourne to win the AFL Grand Final last year.

The dynamics are not quite the same in Olympic sport but the need for a clear performance vision is paramount, as Thomas explains. “I’ve always described culture as turning expectation and beliefs into behaviours, and then behaviours into daily performance habits,” says Thomas, who has previously worked with British Judo, Welsh Boxing and Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby. “The people I’ve seen be successful have had consistently high performance habits in an environment that allows people to express those habits daily, to allow them to be reinforced and celebrated in training and competition.”

It takes time to reach that point, as Bettle points out. “People need to be open-minded and have humility, both me coming into an environment and the people there,” he says. “In a positive environment, there’s a lot of work done to prepare for your entry, but that isn’t always the case and staff can have no clue as to what’s expected and why we’re making a change. You have to spend a significant amount of time on the front end just letting the staff know exactly what the new org chart looks like.” Even when you get there, leaders need to remind their teams of the culture they are trying to build on a daily basis, EPP’s Dave Slemen adds.

Stop, look and listen

That said, it is important not to rush. “I think the most important thing that I’ve done is taking some time to not do anything,” says Bettle. “Really just observing the current culture, the current systems; really taking it all in before you actually start plugging your system into it.” He admits it is an error he has made in the past. “You go in too quick and you’ve got a system that you want to drop on this new culture and you miss things that are being done really well. You lose sight of the fact that this is a big change management project, and so people can’t change as fast as you would like them to if you just go in on day one and start to change systems and processes and reporting lines.

“For 60 days, you should observe and plug in little pieces where you can, and then once you’ve done that evaluation, you can plug in your system to really complement the things that are being done really well; and you can give them small pieces to change over time, and look at it as more of a long-term project than ‘at day one you’ve got to come in and produce results’.”

Burgess concurs: “People need to feel safe and they need to feel appreciated, and they need to feel that just because there’s change that doesn’t mean there will be wholesale change, and that’s a tough balance because, in a lot of clubs, in a lot of situations, you’re brought in for a reason, and they know that and you know that and the players know that, so there is a delicate balance there you have to find.”

The performance director role must begin to engender trust. “Unless you spend the time to build the connection with somebody I’ve often found it falls a little bit short,” says Thomas, who understands the importance of giving his staff a sense of psychological safety. “I’ve always taken the time to stand next to a coach during training, watch, ask questions, be inquisitive, and give them a sense that I’m interested rather than coming in and make a big change. It might not need a big change, but unless you talk to people and find out, you’ll never really know. It’s probably quite simple, but I just stand, watch and ask questions and try to be humble. I’ve come in, I’m not going to fix everything for anybody, but I’ll happily try and help. But I need to know about what you feel, what you think the issues are, and what you think doesn’t need fixing. What you think is great and really sacred to the sport, what needs to be maintained for the next few years.” Burgess points out you also need to speak up when it’s required, which fits with the definition of psychological safety held by EPP. “It’s not just about creating an environment in which everyone can speak up and be heard, it’s about creating one where you have an obligation to if you think something is wrong,” adds Slemen.

Thomas’ inclusive approach proved useful as British Gymnastics devised its plan for the 2024 Paris Olympics. “By the time we’d launched our plan, which was just before Tokyo, everybody had seen it and heard the words, heard the language, and heard the ideas of change, so it felt quite normal,” he says. “It felt like people took and breath and just said ‘onto the next four years’. There’s a few changes and I’m sure people will have to work through that, but we’d taken on such a journey and evolved the team quite early on. There was actually a big sense of togetherness rather than a secret thing that was cooked up in a boardroom that no one had ever seen and all of a sudden now you were putting it on them.”

The importance of a criteria-based approach

As Bettle says: “You want to be clear about your standards and how people are going to be held accountable and, within that, being as supportive as you can.”

To that end, Burgess has adopted a criteria-based approach. “I tend to give the staff a practical job description and say ‘there’s your practical day to day responsibilities’ and then there’s a real clear expectation and they can be as little as ‘you’re putting out the cones for the warm-up’ to as extensive as ‘you’re responsible for delivering the training analysis to the coach’, he says. “Whether that’s a physio, doctor, psychologist, a performance analyst, they all have their practical job description and therefore they know what they’re going to be held accountable for, and that tends to be a little bit more specific and practical than a human resources-designed job description. That’s helped a lot. It’s helped us to get people aligned in what they’re doing, it’s also created its own issues when people fall short because it’s only mine and it’s not HR’s, but within our staff context it works quite well.” Which is perhaps why he’s such a good fit for EPP, who take a similar criteria-based approach to their hires, taking time upfront to ensure all are aligned on the key priorities for any role and why they are hiring, rather than getting blinded by names of prospective candidates or silverware.

For Thomas, it is a question of impact. “I’ll say, ‘where do you, as an analyst, as a physiotherapist, show impact? Can you talk me through where you impacted on performance?’” he says. “And then we move away from KPIs and job descriptions to actually showing me or telling me a story about where they impacted and connect to the team going after world championships and winning four medals; the nutritionist can tell me a story of the six weeks before and you get a real sense that somebody really can give you a great story of where they’re adding value; or if someone can’t quite describe that to you that’s where I start to think where are they? Where are they working? Where are they impacting? Moving forward, is this an area that we might want to change?”

Find your authentic voice

Authenticity is important and, in Edwards’ view, the most important leadership trait, alongside vulnerability. “It’s just what is right for me and what allows me to be my best, draw from my experiences, inspire others, but in a way that suits me,” says Thomas. “I’m not a stand on top of a desk and beat my chest person, I try to inspire through relationships, caring about people, good strategy, but actually allowing other people to feel empowered to do it. So for me it’s been learning about myself, trust myself, but do it the way it feels right for me.”

For his part, Burgess initially noted down the qualities he liked and disliked in his leaders. “I would just come back and check those quite often,” he says. “The big one for me, in every organisation, was that I barely got feedback and that might be a conversation on the pitch or more formalised feedback and those things are really important because most of the staff are just craving some sort of information on how they’re doing.”

Mentors and blind spots

Thomas found a mentor early in his career. “I wanted someone to challenge me outside of the gymnastics space,” he says. “It was a safe space where someone could really push me, get me asking the right questions, and give me feedback about how I was doing and how I was coming across.”

It’s something that I always quite pleased on, my ability to make tough decisions, and someone held the mirror back at me and said ‘you’re great at making tough decisions, but do you have tough conversations before that?’ That’s something different. Making a tough decision and just doing it, that’s one thing, but actually telling people beforehand or getting their views beforehand and having those tough conversations, that was a little bit of a blind spot for me and maybe I’m shying away from the tough discussion but then going straight to the tough decision. That’s something I’ve learnt, that they go hand in hand, but they’re two very different skills.

The importance of mentors came out as a key theme in Slemen’s dissertation for the Executive MBA he completed last summer. In interviewing ten of the UK’s top performance leaders, he found all had leant on mentors throughout their careers, and most highlighted it as the most pressing factor in their success.

Thomas advocates the same for his team. “It was something probably two years in that I pushed really hard with my senior team; ‘get yourself a mentor, get someone who can support you outside of the work environment’. It’s been a massive success for gymnastics in terms of the growth I’ve seen in my team and them enjoying more leadership responsibility. A lot of that has been in seeking feedback from other members of the team.”

Quarterly 360-feedback is now part of British Gymnastics’ programme and Thomas relies upon it. “They might not even be involved in performance, it might be PR or marketing or finance, but tell me how I’m doing, tell me how I’m coming across, what grates on you that I do that I’m not aware of, that I need to think about, where my blind spots are that I’m just not aware of day to day; and it’s that ability to reflect based on other people’s feedback has been really important.”

Bettle agrees. “I’ve worked with a mentor and coach for some time now and I think that that process of self-reflection has been one of the most important things in my career, certainly transitioning into leadership, just general self-awareness, self-reflection and getting to know yourself better, getting to know what my defaults are and what my blind spots are has been really important coming into environments as we try to increase diversity within an organisation; and you just know that you’ve got blind spots that you’ve got no way of knowing how other people are really thinking unless you’re really seeking it out.”  Having seen the importance of such guidance in the careers of many of the leaders they work with, Edwards has undertaken a Master’s in Mentoring & Coaching, allowing EPP to offer this as an additional service to those with whom they work.