By Luke Whitworth

We want to start this Debrief with a big thank you to those who made it to our Sport Performance Summit in LA last month.

It is always wonderful to see the great and the good of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to discuss the pressing performance challenges of the day.

Speaking of which, the happenings at Red Bull were far from the only opportunities on offer at the Institute in June, with roundtables and community calls packed with members sharing both challenges and best practices on a range of topics.

Many are covered in this month’s Debrief. As ever, do check out our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions, which are designed to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.

Right, let’s get into some reflections on June.

What we learned at the Sport Performance Summit in LA

We had a great couple of days with those of you who made the trip; and there was plenty of thought-provoking content for us to get our teeth stuck into (full account here). Below are a few snippets that particularly caught our attention:

Four tips for avoiding the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen that explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations. It resonated with Jen Allum, from X, the Moonshot Factory and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, who understand they could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Onstage, Allum shared their four top tips for avoiding this scenario:

1. Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
2. Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
3. Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
4. Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

Allum added that X, the Moonshot Factory “rewards project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty” in the work they do.

How to optimise your energy as a leader

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.” Here are her thoughts on how leaders should show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.

• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.

• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?

• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

The biomarkers of a healthy culture

Back to the myriad insights gleaned from our June Virtual Roundtables, starting off with the latest segment of our series of learning centred around culture and change. The sessions highlight findings from a recent research project by the Premier League’s Edd Vahid titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. The project examines the key components of cultures that have been able to sustain themselves.

Vahid posits astute leadership as a ‘super enabler’. Indeed, as Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’

What are some strategies we can consider?

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process.
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like.

Vahid’s also research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
2. Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
3. Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

Four features of a great debrief

Effective debriefing skills was the top of conversation for our latest Leadership Skills Series session. If you are interested to join roundtable sessions centred around developing your own leadership, there are some great topics coming up around strategy and cohesion you can find on the Member’s Area.

To keep this section punchy, a section of our discussion focused on some top line considerations for what constitutes a great debrief. Are you doing these well in your environments?

1. Psychological safety and the notion of creating a calm, positive and supportive space. As part of this consideration, set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Finally, do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
2. Get good at questioning. Use open, non-judgmental questions and a lot of follow up questions. Focus on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
3. Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. A reminder: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works.
4. Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals.

The pathway to better collaboration and multidisciplinary working

Finally, we wanted to highlight some interesting insights and perspectives from our topic-led roundtable on functioning more effectively as multidisciplinary teams, which is often a very popular topic of interest across the Institute when speaking to many of you.

Do check out the complete summary. Below are a handful of ideas from members on the call that they feel are currently missing or need to be given more attention in the quest to do this well:

1. How are you supporting new leaders in your teams? Often we see those in technical expertise of ‘tactician’ roles move up to leadership position but lack the requisite skills to lead effectively. The role inevitably changes, so what are you or we doing to help them ‘lead’ their teams and embed true collaboration?
2. Be intentional with feedback. It was shared that an opportunity is a robust and thoughtful feedback mechanism that have variations in their approach. The idea of thinking about detailed feedback is to support learning on a consistent and ongoing basis within your teams. It always seems to us that high quality feedback seems challenging for our teams, so this may well be an opportunity to explore.
3. Are your standard operating procedures clear? If not, they need to be to support this quest for high levels of collaboration.
4. Psychological safety and empowerment. How do we  empower people more effectively to take targeted risks within their roles, whilst still feeling safe and secure? What we are really getting at here is psychological safety in teams and a shared understanding of what that means and looks like.

By John Portch

It’s difficult to imagine Dan Carter looking awkward or out of place in an All Blacks environment so we’ll have to take his word for it.

The former first five-eighth (fly-half), who won back to back Rugby World Cups with New Zealand in 2011 and 2015, was one of a “legacy group” of former players invited in August 2023 to observe the team’s preparations and answer any questions the younger players might have ahead of their World Cup campaign.

“It’s a new bunch and you guys know pretty well that when you finish playing, you get invited back into the changing rooms or the team room and it’s quite awkward,” Carter told former England internationals James Haskell and Mike Tindall on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby podcast.

It was a changing room Carter had shared with a number of that All Blacks squad. “I don’t know if you guys feel it but going back into that environment, you kind of feel like a spare wheel.”

At no point was this the perception of the players, coaches or the All Blacks’ high performance team. In fact, two months later Carter, Keven Mealamu, Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, and Liam Messam were invited to return at the Rugby World Cup in France, which took place in October and November.

“Talking to our team’s leaders, they got the most from the legacy group because the players are the ones who are having to drive along with that in the environment and the playing group would look up to them,” said Mike Anthony, New Zealand’s Head of High Performance, at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

Here were some of the most-esteemed guardians of the All Blacks culture coming back to reinforce the connection between all those who have worn the jersey.

Anthony continued: “That group had been through adversity. They’d lost World Cups and won World Cups. They knew what it took. The legacy piece for us is important.”

Legacy – a word long-associated with the All Blacks – is crucial in bringing to life the ambitions across the ‘teams in black’ i.e. the All Blacks, the Black Ferns (current women’s world champions) and both programmes’ sevens teams.

Their three core ambitions are:

1. To be the most dominant team in history.
2. To leave Mana in their wake.
3. To include the players in shaping the team’s vision.

These ambitions help to plot the path towards a performance culture described by Anthony as “unwavering at it’s core, it’s inspiring, it’s empowering, it’s inquisitive, and it’s responsive to change.”

The last point is critical. “How do you bring it to life day to day and how do you refresh it so that’s it’s relevant to your current group?” asked Anthony. “I’ve observed teams being successful and then they continue to run with what worked before as the group changes. It comes down to induction: how do you make sure your vision is relevant for your current group?”

Here, we unpack how the ambitions of the teams in black are brought to life through their behaviours and habits.

The building of a legacy: the All Blacks have won three World Cups; the Black Ferns have won six of the last seven Women’s World Cups. This enduring excellence burnishes their legacy year on year. “We talk of leaving the jersey in a better place,” said Anthony. “You’re the guardian for a short time, so when you leave it to the next person, you hope to add value.”

A team-first attitude: this is a challenge for New Zealand Rugby as a whole, with the growth of individual brands and the often more lucrative opportunities on offer abroad. Yet New Zealand’s best players invariably remain at home during their peak years to pull on the black jersey. The allure runs deep and it requires selflessness. “You’ve got to be selfless,” said Anthony. “You’re an All Black or Black Fern 24/7 and it’s in the little things you do when no one’s watching. You’ve all heard the analogy ‘sweep the sheds’ – it is genuinely something that our guys do. It’s not the job of somebody who’s paid to clean up after us and we take pride in how we do that.”

A player-driven environment: Anthony explains that buy-in is at “100 percent” amongst the players and that some players “never want to leave” New Zealand. This is in part because the team is intentional in its efforts to encourage players to speak up and contribute to the culture (“you have to create something pretty special to keep players here”) but it is also due to the increasingly creative ways that players are incentivised. “We give guys sabbaticals to go away because we know the money’s good; then we bring them back and that’s worked really well,” said Anthony.

Alignment: it is obvious that no two people are alike but that does not necessarily prevent them sharing a common vision. Said Anthony: “For me, ‘alignment’ is when people understand and are deeply connected to your vision.”

It is also a consequence of effective leadership, which he distilled into several traits while adding the caveat that you have to, above all else, play well. “I think we sometimes burden our leaders and they feel cluttered,” he said. “We want the spine of the team playing well first because, generally, they’re your best players. You have to get the balance right there.”

In New Zealand rugby, leaders embody…

Humility. As Anthony said, “you’ve got to be humble and vulnerable because that’ll encourage others to step into that space and contribute.”

Inclusivity. Anthony felt that although teams want everyone to have a voice, there is too little focus on schooling people in how to give and receive feedback. “If we want our players to challenge their peers, we’ve got to give them the tools”.

A growth mindset. There is always a performance gap; always a challenge. “It’s never about ‘we’ve arrived’,” said Anthony. “That gap creates that discomfort and itch that you want in a high performance environment.”

Ownership. Being an All Black or Black Fern is a 24/7 commitment. Anthony described Richie McCaw as the embodiment of that view. “It’s doing the unseen things,” he said. “It’s easy to sweat, but when you go home, what you’re eating, your sleep, how you present around your family – those are key.”

Finally… he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata

Anthony wrapped up his presentation with a whakataukī (Māori proverb):

He aha te mea nui? Māku e kii atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.

What is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.

“The price of entry is technical knowledge,” said Anthony, “but get the people right and hopefully you can build the right environment for a performance culture that supports the athletes.”

By John Portch

Jen Overbeck painted a scene for Leaders Performance Institute members.

“Here’s the situation,” she said. “You have an idea born out of your expertise; a lightbulb moment. Maybe it’s something that’s developed over time and you bring it to somebody you think is going to benefit, whether that’s an athlete, someone in your organisation or somebody who works with you.

She continued: “You’re explaining it with all your passion and they say ‘yeah, nah, I’m not excited about that at all. I don’t think I want to do that.’ Has that ever happened?”

A few individuals tentatively raised their hands in the audience at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

“OK, good, because otherwise you should be up here teaching instead of me!”

Overbeck, a Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, was speaking at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Over the course of half an hour she explored the social and psychological elements that affect how people react to requests to change and why, as a leader, that reaction can depend on your power and influence.

Power v influence

Overbeck used the example of Phil Jackson as someone sports coaches and practitioners might aspire to emulate. She lifted a passage from his 2013 book Eleven Rings where he wrote about ‘benching the ego’:

‘After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team’s vision.’

Jackson came to recognise that power and influence sit on a spectrum. As such, the NBA’s most-decorated coach, provided the perfect case study for Overbeck to define those terms.

“‘Power’ is your ability to get somebody to do something that they don’t want to do,” she said.

This is set in contrast to ‘influence’. “You could also call it ‘persuasion’,” she added. “This is all about how much credibility and persuasiveness you have to influence people to go where you want them to and they’re going there willingly.”

There are few coaches in the high performance community that would prefer to increase their power at the expense of their influence and Overbeck stressed that you are free to make your choice.

“When you understand the differences and what drives them, you can make those choices deliberately – and that’s generally better for ourselves, our athletes and our organisations.”

How to elicit change

Overbeck explained that there are three types of behavioural strategy:

1. Dominating

She says: “That’s when you’re using a great deal of power; you’re not using a great deal of influence. You’re basically trying to make the person change.”

2. Negotiating

This emerges in a space where a leader has more moderate power and influence. “We’re giving people some choice, but we’re not giving up on our power altogether.”

3. Supplicating

“This is a very big word,” said Overbeck, “because it means you’re completely leaving it in the other person’s  hands; you’re exerting no power whatsoever.”

The best scenario for a leader, as Jackson understood, is to be negotiating. Overbeck posed a series of questions that leaders can ask themselves when moving away from either dominating or supplicating:

• Do you typically believe that you have the skills and ability to bring people into alignment with yourself?
• Is it more your experience that you end up fighting them?
• Do you tend to lean more on power? Or do you lean more on your persuasion and your credibility? And what informs your response? Do you know why you’re doing that?
• Which of these three behavioural strategies is your go-to?

The tactics available to a leader

Overbeck ran through some of the tactics available to ‘negotiators’ and asked the audience to raise their hand if they’d employed any of the following:

• Sharing information about the background and context of change. Nothing unusual here and when she asked the audience at the Glasshouse most admitted they had tried this approach.
• Explaining the benefits of the change to the person. “We all here are supposed to do this,” said Overbeck and indeed the room indicated that it was a common tactic.
• Promoting your own expertise. “Letting people know why they should listen to you because of what you know.” Overbeck noted that in comparison to the first two, this approach was less common.
• Dare them, challenge them. “A bit more contentious,” said Overbeck. “‘I don’t know if you can do this one – prove me wrong’.” Again, a few hands went up.
• Make them feel like a loser if they don’t make the change. It may have been a favoured tactic of former college basketball coach Bob Knight, who Overbeck referenced for his draconian approach, but no hands went up in the room. “Nobody will admit it,” she said, with a smile.

The six types of capital available to leaders

None of the tactics described above are particularly unusual. “We know a lot about the tactics we’ve been told will be helpful for pursuing change,” said Overbeck, adding, “we don’t know what kind of power and influence we need to have ready and available with us in order for these tactics to succeed.”

She returned to the example of Jackson, who managed to elicit the very best from Michael Jordan during their time together at the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s.

“Phil Jackson may not have led with power but it was in what he did,” she said. “He was using what was available to him.”

He was, in essence, aware of his ‘capital’, as Overbeck put it. “Power comes from the resources that you control.” There are six kinds of resources, or ‘capital’. The first three are easily explained:

1. Financial – money, essentially.
2. Human – people, specifically their talent, strength and energy (in sporting context)
3. Material – facilities and equipment.

The final three must be used carefully because they can be sourced into power:

4. Psychological – your ability to affect other people’s mental and emotional states. “If you can inspire people and rev them up and get them excited about something then that builds your credibility; it helps to persuade them.” This can, of course, tip into the dark side of manipulation in unscrupulous hands.
5. Social – networks and relationships can be a source of credibility. “That could be encouraging team members to lean on a person or getting your coaches together to influence upwards”, said Overbeck. “That could be social capital as long as you’re controlling that relationship as opposed to abusing it.”
6. Intellectual – your expertise (separate from human capital). “If you hoard it and you only give it out when you get what you want that’s power, otherwise it can be a source of credibility.”

Social and intellectual capital

Overbeck homed in on social and intellectual capital because while leaders in sport may want to have power in the background, you probably will not want to lead with that power.

Instead, you’ll want to dial up your influence and credibility, which can come from various sources, such as trust and belief in your abilities as a coach due to your track record and reputation; that your place is not a result of political chicanery or nepotism.

“I’m going to talk about it as ‘tribal membership’,” said Overbeck. “When people are deciding whether to accept your influence, the No 1 thing they are assessing is: are you with me? Are you part of my team?” She makes it clear that ‘team’ may not be the literal team but your alignment with an individual’s personal values. Without that, they may reject you out of hand. “The first thing we have to do is make sure that we’re telegraphing to the other person that ‘even if we have those differences in terms of those things that you most cherish and value, I honour those things, and I’m not going to get in the way of them. I’m going to work with them, not against them’.”

Once you loosely establish yourself in the same tribe, you then need to demonstrate how your expertise can be of value – that’s your intellectual capital.

Overbeck said: “When we’re trying to build credibility, it’s our job to build that bridge and make sure that the other person understands.”

She likens it to a credit account. “The higher your credit limit, the more you’re able to go out and spend.” However, it must be kept topped up. “Once we’re good, we always have to be thinking: ‘am I getting over my limit?’” You have to continuously demonstrate your credibility or you will lose people.

Final questions to ask yourself:

• How much power and influence do we have in the relationship with the person or people we’re trying to influence?
• Which behavioural style – dominating, negotiating and supplicating – do you lean towards? Or is it a combination? What are the likely outcomes going to be of employing this style?
• Is it doing what we need or do you need to make adjustments?
• To the extent that either our power or our credibility are lacking, are you engaging with some of these behaviours and using some of these resources to boost them up?

An article brought to you by our Event Partners

By the Leaders Performance Institute team

John F Kennedy’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech remains a masterclass in political rhetoric.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said the US President at Rice University on 12 September 1962.

Those words, undiminished by six decades of distance, might have become a monument to presidential hubris had NASA’s Apollo program failed to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Instead, Kennedy’s vision galvanised his nation and, allied to federal resource, gave the program the impetus it needed.

NASA’s ‘moonshot’ has since become a byword for ingenious and audacious projects that showcase adaptive growth. That is: being adaptable in the face of change and challenges, continuously striving for growth and improvement, learning from your experiences and making strategic decisions that drive progress and innovation.

Moonshots were a theme of the recent Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica, with Jennifer Allum, who is part of the leadership team at Alphabet’s X, The Moonshot Factory, taking to the stage to discuss an environment where audacity is a prerequisite.

It was a marvellous start to proceedings on the morning of day one but, in truth, other themes discussed across both days, from talent and creativity to strategic thinking and resilience, just as readily point to adaptive growth.

Here, inspired by the worlds of sport, the arts and academia, we touch upon seven factors that can help to fuel your own moonshot, whether you’re taking your first small step, sustaining your early momentum, or looking to make a giant leap.

1. Fearlessness in the face of failure

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed that large, established organisations do not always take advantage of potentially disruptive technologies and trends, while newer and less-established organisations often do. In his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, he explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations.

Allum discussed the concept onstage in front of an audience where ‘failure’ is a common bedfellow. She understands that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. So while X, The Moonshot Factory performs an instrumental role in delivering ‘moonshot technologies that make the world a radically better place’, there are myriad failures that pile high on their factory floor – and Alphabet wouldn’t have it any other way because they perceive failure as a learning opportunity rather than a threat.

Allum’s top tips for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma:

• Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
• Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
• Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
• Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

“We reward project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty.”

Jennifer Allum, leadership team, X, The Moonshot Factory

2. Swerve common pitfalls

Long-established teams can all do better, but what of those just starting out, particularly in women’s sport? How can a beginner’s zeal be channelled into establishing a stable, long-term concern? Those are two of the questions currently facing NSWL expansion team Bay FC and their WNBA counterparts the Golden State Valkyries.

It is an exciting time for women’s sport but there are pitfalls to be avoided:

• It’s important to understand and appreciate the differences between men’s and women’s sport – don’t look to replicate the approach. Bay have, for example, intentionally fashioned a culture that is people-first, player-centric and focused on player health.
• What skills are required in expansion environments? An entrepreneurial mindset, for one. Embrace the unknown and have empathy.
• There will be critical moments in the early days, but this is where you can shape the culture. Find moments to demonstrate what is both acceptable and unacceptable.

“Our culture and values are aligned to the name of our team. We want people to be Brave, Accountable and You; underpinned by the idea of bringing your authentic self everyday.”

Lucy Rushton, General Manager, Bay FC

“I am a believer in asking people how they are feeling in terms of a particular climate: are you sunny, happy or cloudy? It’s a simple way to help measure your culture.”

Ohemaa Nyanin, General Manager, Golden State Valkyries

3. Conditions where creativity can thrive

Is yours a creative learning environment? Either way, you’d do well to listen to the Westside School of Ballet (LA’s most successful public ballet school) and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music – what can such schools teach the world of sport about the creation of learning environments that encourage improvisation, experimentation and intrinsic motivation?

It begins with a love for the art form and a welcoming ecosystem that allows the freedom to explore:

• Open yourself to the notion of ‘winning’ in other ways; you need to allow failure to happen and experimentation to take place so that young people can find different moments in their work.
• How can you shift your environment to create more challenge and failure, but communicate it in a way, that nurtures solution-minded individuals who can respond to what’s thrown at them in the context of competition?
• Can you say you understand your young athletes’ intrinsic motivations? If you don’t, it can leave a lot of creative potential on the table.
• At UCLA, they do not speak about ‘working’ music – they talk about ‘play’.

“We want to foster a love of the art form rather than fear.”

Adrian Blake Mitchell, Associate Executive Director, Westside School of Ballet

“We work on improvisation to get to more fundamental questions – what am I trying to convey? What story is being told?”

Eileen Strempel, Dean, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

4. Leaders skilled at optimising their energy

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage in Santa Monica. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.”

How to show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.
• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.
• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?
• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

“Are the habits that you’re leading with still serving you, your career, role and impact?”

Holly Ransom, author, The Leading Edge

5. Collective resilience

No matter your level of success or the smoothness of your systems, high performance can exact a large toll if your stakeholders are not resilient. As Red Bull US CEO Chris Hunt explained, a leader’s first job is to engender trust amongst their team. There’s no instant solution – you have to advocate for people and stand up for your values time and again.

How can people in high performance develop their resilience?

• Celebrate examples of resilience within the team.
• You have to manage your personal and collective fear of tactical failure; allowing for the ability to test and learn from the failings and, simultaneously, build resilience. Look for dynamic interruption and get better at absorbing it.
• Leadership is not changing, but the context is. What has traditionally grounded teams in the past will still help them now.

“Marginal gains come from resilience, and victory comes from marginal gains time and again.”

Chris Hunt, CEO Red Bull US, Red Bull

6. Clutch performers

As a big wave surfer, Red Bull’s Ian Walsh is well-placed to discuss performance under pressure. He took to the stage to discuss the strategies that serve him well out on the surf.

Pressure points:

• Understand how your body reacts when under duress both in sport and beyond. From there you can maintain control.
• When your work requires you to continually return to moments of risk and pressure you have to ensure that your ambitions, drive, hunger and desire outweigh your fear of failure or injury.
• At Red Bull, Walsh and his teammates catalogue their good and bad experiences in the moments of pressure and risk – these help to create a lifetime of understanding that can be used the next time they encounter both.

“Pressure is a valuable condition for performing at your highest level.”

Ian Walsh, big wave surfer, Red Bull

7. The role of tech in decision making

Technology at its best can inform your decision making and, as Fabio Serpiello, a professor at the University of Central Queensland, told the audience at Red Bull, there are steps you can take to ensure you’re using the right technology and datasets.

Ensure you’re staying on top of tech innovations:

• Is the technology helping us to make better decisions or requiring us to make more decisions? It can be overwhelming so be sure your tech is in service of the former.
• The future lies in the ability to read and interpret context; personalise recommendations and make decisions easier.
• Consider using the Cynefin Framework.  This is a conceptual tool used in the field of leadership and decision-making. It was created by management consultant Dave Snowden in 1999 during his tenure at IBM Global Services. The word ‘cynefin’ comes from Welsh and means ‘habitat’ or ‘haunt’.

“Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean impact. We often forget about impact because of the overwhelming amount of consumer tech.”

Fabio Serpiello, Director, Sports Strategy, University of Central Queensland

By Rachel Woodland

For this month’s Women’s High Performance Community call we turned our attention to how we’re approaching our self-development and any nuances that might emerge for women.

We spoke about self, or personal, development, as well as career development, and the place for each before turning our attention towards difficult conversations and allyship.

There is no doubting that those who joined the call are committed to their development. However, no one felt like they have a well-structured development plan that they simply were not following.

Currently, there’s a general sense that a lot of effort is driven by the individual – reflecting upon this, it’s potentially what those guiding us are told to do.

However, there is a request for more structure, confidence, time and opportunity from above to elevate the impact of our development.

It also came across from the call that many have big obvious blocks of learning, through courses or further education, but struggle to have a clear plan if those aren’t in place or if they are between courses. There are also those, who are doing a lot of learning simply by doing their job each day, which is where reflective tools and support from above can be powerful.

The Women’s Community suggested these five ideas as ways to make development as impactful as possible: 

1. Protecting dedicated time for self-development.
2. Support from above – this might be in sense-checking plans, ways of bringing plans to life, sharing career options, identifying experience gaps and creating opportunities to address them.
3. A way to be kept accountable.
4. Collaboration – both in development alongside others as well as in sharing learnings.
5. Using a mentor.

Other examples that we’ve seen work too: 

Visits to different organisations – and having others visit you. This helps avoid echo chambers and benchmarks our practices against others. This becomes increasingly important if our only working experiences are in a single organisation.

Whole team development on specific skills. Having a whole team approach can help avoid siloed learning and contribute to learnings sticking.

It’s always good to remember that we need to leave space for stretch and being in uncomfortable positions. Again, these moments become more impactful if we can reflect on them and shape our development plans as a consequence. Finally, remember: some people’s development is focusing on saying no.

The Community once again spoke about the importance of our networks and brands to career development and shared the following reflections:

• Networks include both internal and external relationships.
• If your brand is a reflection of your authentic self, we need to know who we want to be and take time to reflect on that.
• If you know your personal brand it breeds the confidence to express ourselves and our thoughts as we meet new people and expand our networks.
• If you can better manage your own thoughts and how you think about yourself, it could help those that suffer from impostor syndrome. It could help quieten negative thoughts and be reflected in our behaviour.

The Community then shared advice for when having difficult conversations:

Difficult conversations can take several forms – they do not necessary involved conflicts or saying no. There’s a range: it could be talking to a new person or even when you are taking steps to change the dynamics and the way things have always been done.

There are stories of female coaches in an otherwise male coaching team stepping out of their comfort zones because their approach to coaching is different. In one particular case, the female coach boosted her confidence by reminding herself that she’s adding to the discourse, providing different inputs and possibilities, and a platform for conversation.

We know that women are different, and that in sport women are often in a minority; so it would be easy to understand why we might doubt ourselves in these moments. However, we can retrain ourselves to not think in this way.

One additional approach that can help us is to have the conversation as part of a regular update session, so it’s not ‘singled out’ as having the need for a difficult conversation.

So what would we want an ally to support us with to enable us to be our most confident selves going into these conversations? These were some of the group’s suggestions: 

• An ally would get you to reflect on the makeup of your environment. Is it a genuinely safe space and environment to have honest and difficult conversations?
• If there is a deficiency in being able to have challenging conversations, an ally would recommend dedicated training and skill development to enable you to have courageous conversations. Similarly, scenario planning and training can bring these to life. An ally can be someone to practise these with and provide feedback.
• We’ve talked about the makeup of the environment. An ally would suggest that open and genuine space for women to talk will be impactful. Do these exist in your environments?
• In being able to enact positive change and have challenging conversations, being able to understand your stakeholders can be worthwhile, particularly in understanding the behaviours of those you wish to have conversations with.
• If you are an ally, we value vulnerability but also honest feedback, so there is no risk of overprotection.

By John Portch

Real Madrid’s comeback victory over Bayern Munich last week means they will head to Wembley next month in pursuit of a record-extending 15^th Champions League title.

The team’s Head Coach, Carlo Ancelotti, who recently signed a contract extension until 2026, has his own record to pursue: a victory over Borussia Dortmund in north-west London would see him claim his fifth Champions League title as a coach.

Last week Ancelotti also eclipsed Sir Alex Ferguson’s record when he coached a Champions League match for a record 203^rd time. It comes after a weekend when he won a second La Liga title with Real.

The club paraded that trophy on an open-top bus through the streets of Madrid at the weekend, with Ancelotti living up to his ‘Don Carlo’ nickname by putting on his sunglasses and clenching a cigar between his teeth – a look he first rolled out during similar celebrations after winning the Champions League and La Liga double in 2022.

“I have a dream… to dance with Eduardo Camavinga,” he told the crowd on Sunday (12 May).

Ancelotti is the ultimate establishment figure, yet his relaxed, consensus-based approach to coaching is at odds with many of his contemporaries and marks him out as counter-cultural at the highest level.

What makes Ancelotti so successful? It’s certainly rooted in his zest for life; his love of people, good wine and fine food serve to break down barriers and forge connections. It speaks to his longevity too.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute explores four of his finest traits.

1. A preference for consensus decision-making

It is hard to imagine too many of the world’s best football coaches bringing players in at the planning stage. While the final decision lies with Ancelotti, he will often ask the players for their opinion on the match strategy. He knows they will have a better understanding  and feel a sense of accountability and buy-in if they’ve been involved in the decision-making process.

“Our biggest strength is that he finds a way to let a lot of the boys play with freedom, that we’re so kind of off the cuff.” Real’s Jude Bellingham told TNT last month. “As a man as well, he fills you with calmness and confidence.” Real have not always been a club noted for their calmness, nor has Madrid as a sporting market, but progress has been serene during his latest tenure.

“There are two types of managers: those that do nothing and those that do a lot of damage,” he said last week. “The game belongs to the players.”

2. A cultural chameleon

This is a term we’ve used before to describe Ancelotti. It is impossible to pin a style on the only coach to have won national championships in five countries with five different clubs: Milan, Chelsea, Paris St-Germain, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid (across two spells). He has also worked with varying degrees of success at Reggiana, Parma, Juventus, Napoli and Everton.

Some of those spells are remembered more fondly in some quarters than others, but he has always stressed the importance of getting to know the characteristics of players, the culture, and traditions of a club.

Even if something has made him very successful at one club, he won’t just come in and impose that style on another. Ancelotti understands that there are many cultural differences from club to club and within different countries, and he has to adapt his style to get the best out of the players and team.

His time at Chelsea between 2009 and 2011 is a fine example. He discarded the 4-2-3-1 formation that served him so well at Milan for a 4-3-3 that propelled the Blues to the Premier League and FA Cup double in 2010.

“What I really loved about Carlo is his man-management, the way he adapted as well – because he had a way of coaching that probably didn’t suit English football,” John Terry, Ancelotti’s captain at Chelsea, told The Coaches’ Voice in 2020. “But he adapted very quickly when speaking to me, Frank [Lampard], Didier [Drogba].”

3. Humility

There are few coaches for whom it is so hard to find a bad word about them, but Ancelotti is popular with some of the sport’s biggest names.

“He had fun with us,” Cristiano Ronaldo told ESPN in 2015. The duo had won the Champions League together at Real a year earlier. “Mr Ancelotti was an unbelievable surprise. In the beginning, I thought he was more a tough person, more kind of arrogant, and it was the opposite.”

He protects his team from the stressors of elite football by masking the pressure he’s under. Ancelotti takes the situation – but not himself – seriously, and can often be found telling jokes in the changing room before a big game to help diffuse the tension.

Bellingham described a moment prior to the first leg of Real’s Champions League quarter-final with Manchester City. “Before the game, I caught him yawning and asked him ‘Boss, are you tired?’” Bellingham told TNT post-match. “He said ‘you need to go out and excite me’ – that’s the calmness and confidence he brings.”

4. A refreshing sense of perspective

Few coaches in European football are as equanimous as Ancelotti. He has enjoyed unprecedented success but has also been unceremoniously sacked on more than one occasion. Memorably, he was not Real’s first choice when he returned to Madrid in 2021.

‘[He] understands, probably better than anybody working in the most cut-throat businesses, the transient nature of employment in any talent-dependent industry,’ wrote Chris Brady, in Quiet Leadership, the 2016 book he co-authored with Ancelotti.

He is well aware of the concept of ‘energisers’ and ‘sappers’ too. ‘It is the energisers who are the reference points for everybody, including me,’ Ancelotti wrote in Quiet Leadership.

Ultimately, beyond the white noise, Ancelotti understands that football is not life and death, a point he made at the 2015 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York.

“Football is the most important of the less important things in the world.”

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

What is the best way to test for athlete resilience?

Their mindset is a good starting point, says Dr David Fletcher. “If you can train the psychological aspect and manipulate the environment, the way to check that you’re getting it right is that you’ve got athletes walking into training and competition situations with a challenge mindset,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“In other words, they perceive the demands as an opportunity to perform, an opportunity for growth, an opportunity for learning, as opposed to a threat to their ambitions where they end up in a panic-stricken state,” he continues. “That’s your acid test of whether your resilience training is working.”

Fletcher, who is the Professor of Human Performance & Health and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Sport, Health and Well-Being, at Loughborough University, has little time for toxic positivity – the pressure to display positive emotions to the suppression of all else – “we’re not robots or machines,” he says. “What we’re looking for is the majority of the time they’re stepping into arenas where they’re up for the challenge and they see it as an opportunity.”

There is an element of metacognition in the way that the best athletes harness challenging circumstances to their advantage. “I don’t want to go into too much jargon, but resilient athletes enter a higher level of functioning,” says Fletcher. “Hopefully your initial emotions are ones of excitement, you’re up for it, but if you are a little bit more anxious and uncertain, there’s another stage of cognitive processing where you evaluate that emotion and the best athletes can give themselves a safety net. You’re not sure on the initial context and you’ve got a bit of anxiety running through you, but you’re still able to interpret this negative emotion in a positive way. This is a skill that we’ve seen in some of the world’s best athletes. They’re able to say ‘well, actually I’ve been anxious before, the anxiety is going to help me drive through pain’ or ‘the anxiety is actually going to help me focus more on what I need to focus on’. Whereas a lesser athlete, when they have some of those negative emotions come in, they will then spiral into an unhelpful thought pattern.”

Fletcher has been talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at how psychological resilience can be developed, the influence of the environment, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.

In the fourth and final part of our interview, Fletcher discusses the reframing of unhelpful thought patterns with a view to developing athlete resilience in an environment that successfully balances challenge and support.

What types of thinking patterns prevent the development of resilience?

David Fletcher: There’s a host of different things athletes can tell themselves. For example, ‘if I mess this up this is going to be the end of my career’ or trying to second guess what the crowd is thinking. ‘What are people in the crowd thinking of me? or ‘what will my parents think?’ or ‘what are my teammates thinking?’ There’s all sorts of traps and distractions from optimal thinking patterns that will get in the way of being resilient in the moment

What steps can athletes take to prevent these unhelpful thought patterns hindering their performance?

DF: People need to stay in the present. That’s the first thing. So don’t think about the previous point if it’s a tennis match; or if you think ‘what if I win this competition? How much money will I earn?’ You need to stay relatively positive, focusing on what you need to do versus what you need to avoid doing. What are some of the key tactics I need to focus on staying relatively positive? As soon as you get distracted from those things then some of these more unhelpful thinking patterns can creep in. We do a lot of work around developing habits of behaviour in order to reengage at different times. Again, take a tennis player, for example, the idea of resetting between each point. The obvious one is when you hit the ball into the net and you’re dwelling upon that, but even if you hit great shots you have still got to reset for the next point. It helps to go through a physical behavioural pattern where you might turn your back on the opponent, you may look down at your racket and straighten some of the strings, using that as a cue to restraighten some of the thoughts in your mind and refocus on the next point as opposed to dwelling on the previous point, which would be something that could compromise your resilience.

How can athletes build the correct habits?

DF: A lot of it is around putting together everything that we’ve discussed. So starting with basic fundamental psychological skills training about learning how to better set goals, not just focusing on outcome goals but also incorporating into the process performance goals and, most importantly, getting the balance right between those factors and practising imagery techniques and developing those. Then bringing these into training contexts and situations where we optimise that challenge and support over time. You’re merging the two together to try and harness that psychological development and then you’re trying to bring that all together under a challenge mindset over time.

Does that go beyond competitive situations?

DF: This is an important point to emphasise when we’re talking about the development of resilience. It’s not just about that moment in competition. It’s about handling everything else that goes with elite level sport. There’s a broader consideration around training camps and lifestyle. For example, you’ve got a holding camp then you go into the Olympic environment. So how do you train for all of those types of things? I’ve attended meetings about the distractions present at the Olympics. Coaches discussed how we can train our athletes not to be distracted by some of those things and we’re also doing what’s called ‘what-if’ scenario planning. So what are some of the challenges and stressors that our athletes have encountered previously within the Olympic Village? One example is an athlete getting on a bus that took him to the wrong venue. Social media has also become an issue for a lot of top level athletes. So again, it adds some novel dimension to this idea of resilience.

As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts?

DF: There’s a lot being written and said about resilience, with plenty of research available, but it’s another thing to develop on the ground. It is fundamentally reliant on relationships. The first thing you should do is hire a skilled psychologist and ensure they have the support of coaches, performance directors and the broader leadership and management within your organisation. Otherwise there is only so much they can achieve in teaching psychological skills and strategies. Perhaps the environment is wrong, say there’s too much challenge and not enough support, where the psychologist cannot input effectively. Or the other way around. There’s too much support and not enough challenge and the environment’s too comfortable. Then you’re never going to create and coach truly resilient athletes when it comes to the moment of competition. You need buy-in. It’s going to be a collective effort of working together to help craft that environment to help the athletes perform together. Some of the other considerations are around trying to monitor the environment and really understand the players and the support staff on an individual level because you do want to be able to assess and monitor whether you’re having an impact and, if you’re not, what you need to do accordingly. If you’re not monitoring things effectively then that can be a challenge too.

Read our interview in full:

Part I – Is an Athlete Resilient or Merely Coping? Why it Is Important to Understand the Role of Psychological Resilience in Sustained Success

Part II – Psychological Resilience: Everyone Has a Trainability Bandwidth

Part III – How the Training Environment Can Influence an Athlete’s Resilience

By Bobby L Scales II

The following scenario has historically played out with regularity across baseball in the United States.

A club signs a 16 or 17-year-old player from the Dominican Republic and they matriculate their way through the minor leagues of Florida or Arizona.

Inevitably, the player makes a poor play in a game or practice and their coach, typically an American, will need to correct the mistake.

The coach finds that the player will not look them in the eye and feels disrespected because, in American culture, you are taught from a young age to look a senior person in the eye and you say ‘yes sir’, ‘yes ma’am’, ‘no sir’, ‘no ma’am’.

By contrast, in Latin culture, you do not look your elders in the eye when they are correcting you.

There is a mutual misunderstanding that does little for team unity and does nothing to further the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Teams are increasingly aware of this. When I worked at the Los Angeles Angels, we considered it important to take American coaches to the Dominican Republic, to let them immerse themselves in the culture at the academy and work with the players. We wanted them to understand what life looks like in the Dominican; to better understand how these young men grow up.

Equally, Latin American players need to be afforded the grace to learn the social norms of the United States.

This mutual understanding is the key to weaving the fabric of team unity and success.

So how can we better embrace diversity, equity and inclusion? Here are four thoughts.

1. Don’t be afraid of the conversation

No team is perfect and we could all be doing more to further the cause. But are you ready to have the conversation? It may sound obvious but people are often too afraid of the conversation for fear of saying something wrong or fear of being canceled. The benefits of diverse teams are clear in the world of business and sports has started to take note. But would you be comfortable or promoting, say, a female coach in a male-dominated environment? Is it within your gift to go against the grain and make what may be a counterintuitive appointment? To reach that point, a leader must construct an environment where people understand that players, coaches and practitioners are here because they are the best possible person to be in their position. I would rather lose with players that have a growth mindset – and I don’t think you’re going to win with players that have a fixed mindset anyway. There’s not a player on earth worth their salt who does not want to get better. They will listen to an individual if they have cultivated a relationship. For a complete culture, you need to have coaches and staff members that are aware of this, who feel supported.

2. Don’t get bogged down in the obvious differences

I am a 46-year-old black man and I could be sitting in a front office next another 46-year-old black man, but we could have grown up in different circumstances and, as such, we will bring different experiences to the table. As important as ethnic, religious and gender diversity are, they may not necessarily lead to diversity of thought – cognitive diversity. Someone in your team may have grown up on a council estate in a tough part of London and another may have grown up in Beverley Hills, California, and had people who worked in their house and they’ve never made their bed. Perfect: LEAN INTO IT! People from different walks of life, socio-economic backgrounds, and different cultures will come to a problem on the table in a different way. Perspectives – different perspectives – are exactly what I, as a leader, want. This allows for constructive dissent, which is where the best outcomes lie. When you have people who are willing to disagree with each other you will have a richer conversation. It’s then up to the leader to pull those opinions together, form a consensus, and move forward with an outcome or a solution that is beneficial to the team.

3. Identify the individuals in your team who are underserved

You have to cultivate relationships – they are way more important than the X’s and O’s, tactics or data. As well-known American football coach Herman Edwards once said: YYP – Know Your Personnel. A leader must know how to access them even if it isn’t the leader directly. Maybe it’s an assistant coach or a practitioner on your staff who has built a trusting relationship with the player. Again, lean into that. There is a certain truth to the idea that the physio knows everything that’s going on. I’m a big believer in authenticity and people will reveal themselves to you if your environment is one of support, warmth and truth.

4. Find opportunities to learn… then teach people!

Do you celebrate cultural milestones and holidays? You should, because they represent an opportunity to teach people from other cultures about that culture. For example, if there is a Muslim player in your mostly non-Muslim team, and you’re playing during Ramadan, there is an opportunity to educate your other players and coaching staff on what that means for that player and their faith. A crucial point to make: before even reaching that point of cultural exchange you yourself as a coach or executive are going to need to get stuck in and commit to proper research for yourself – you cannot teach that which you yourself do not know. Manage this process well – within an environment of support, warmth and truth – and you’ve brought your team closer together.

By Luke Whitworth

In our final virtual roundtable of 2023, we looked ahead to 2024 and began to identify some of the key focuses for our members across the high performance space and some trends we can expect to hear more about over the course of the next 12 months.

Are there any industry trends that may impact you this year? If you reflect on the themes that are coming through strongly, what are you seeing in your environment and how do we best prepare for these possible eventualities?

There were some excellent points made around the importance of being proactive with the topics and trends below. It’s clear we know that these trends are on the horizon as we are indeed talking about them, so what can we be doing now so we aren’t as reactive when they inevitably do arise?

Before we delve into some of the big themes to consider for next year, below are a handful that came to the fore in the same roundtable format from this time last year:

• The impact of the current cost of living crisis. There is also a desire to show impact, whilst meeting budget pressures.
• Professionalisation in women’s sport.
• Interdisciplinary working. Everyone is still searching for the magic bullet to enable them to thrive in that space.
• Coach and performance staff wellbeing. What is the deliberate action you are taking to help your performance team stay healthy?
• The shift in personal development has evolved again. We’re back to more ‘normal’ programmes and personal development has been moved to the back burner again.

In summarising all of the responses and suggestions from the group for expectant themes in 2024, it became clear from the input that there were five areas that came through particularly strongly. Here, we reflect on each in turn.

1. Athlete life skills and development needs

The first theme of conversation centred around life skills and developing performance behaviours for this generation of athletes. Reflections from the conversation stated there is a continued need for young athletes in their teenage years specifically to gain more support and develop specific tools to deal with the pressures of life but also the experience of developing and competing in elite sport. Some environments are discussing how to invest in their performance support teams, focusing more resource towards wellbeing and psychology to set athletes up well with the skillsets to cope better through their athletic journey.

As the conversations developed, a big point of discussion was around athlete readiness and in some instances, being more disciplined in not rushing them through the pathway. As the high performance spectrum, we can be premature in the assumption that athletes meeting performance benchmarks are automatically ready to move but in many examples we see struggles in coping with this transition. To this end, there is often a lack of clarity for the athletes of who turn to or how to handle challenging moments. In the modern athlete, the group believed that life skills are more limited than generations before, so a shift to a more bespoke model of support is being employed to increase the quality and control the speed of the transition.

One of the organisations, as part of the group discussions, shared some insights they gained from a brain scientist speaking to their staff and the knowledge that brain development isn’t concluded until the age of 25, so we must continue to consider skill development and coping mechanisms beyond teenage years. The final reflection on this point is that young people in this day and age are generally more values-driven and have access to information and schools of thought much earlier in their lives – there is less acceptance to just follow orders and demands, therefore how we consider shaping athlete support should be collaborative to generate optimal buy-in.

2. The use and influence of artificial intelligence

When thinking about the potential of artificial intelligence, where do we start and stop? This was a question suggested in the conversations around how to critically think about the possibilities artificial intelligence can provide – we need to ensure there are clear boundaries. There is a nervousness around how quickly the technology is moving. Although we agreed that artificial intelligence and machine learning can improve efficiency and help identify blind spots, there is a cautiousness not to de-humanise performance programmes and to keep using a human touch.

A number of organisations on the call have begun using artificial intelligence for opposition analysis, leveraging matching statistics to predict winning performance indicators. If we are to fully utilise the ability the technology gives us, getting the basis of your data infrastructure right is critical before leveraging these sources and innovations to get the best output.

In predicting ahead and assuming a large amount of sporting organisations will utilise artificial intelligence, we briefly discussed the skillset of the analyst in the future. If artificial intelligence can speed up some of the traditional processes overseen by analysts, is there a shift more towards the communication and presentation of the data as opposed to the data collation phase of the process?

3. The growth of women’s sport

A trend that many of you won’t be surprised to see was the exciting developments around women’s sport. Although these developments are hugely positive, there is some nervousness around the trajectory and speed of the growth, in particular the challenges these can pose. It was shared that there is some uncertainty around wages, transfer fees if relevant in that sport, facilities and player support services and what ‘good’ or the ‘right’ approach looks like.

There was an extended conversation around support services for players and in particular what are the optimal performance frameworks for women athletes. To this point, a lot of thinking and structuring has mirrored the men’s game, despite there being clear differences in the profile of the athletes.

In reflecting on some women’s sport in Australia, one participant explained there is still a large number of teams sharing staff between women’s and men’s programmes. There isn’t enough staff on the ground with the relevant expertise for the setup to be conducive to a real high performance environment. The sports haven’t kept up from a staff and expertise point of view, versus the demand of women athletes making the sport and professional career.

Finally, we discussed the paucity of women coaches across elite sport. There is a lack of mentorship for women athletes, especially within the pathway and we are still in a position where there is a higher percentage of men coaching women athletes. There is also an apparent education gap which also needs addressing to better understand the experiences and requirements of women athletes.

4. Storytelling around athletes and staff

A really fascinating thread of discussion covered the theme of storytelling and how content creation which can often be witnessed more so on the business operations side of an organisation is beginning to align closer to ongoings across performance operations. There is an increasing appetite for athlete content and sport is seen as an untapped genre for this. With a thirst for learning more about the ongoings of modern athletes, this naturally brings in stories from the lenses of those supporting the athletes – coaches and performance staff as an example. Staff are stepping more into the limelight because of this trend.

What are some of the potential implications of this? From the athlete lens, there will be queries around whether they should engage in it or not. The impact on performance staff will naturally increase and more people will be aware of the team behind the team. There could be the opportunity for those digesting the content to understand the pressures that come with supporting athletes, but also from the positive viewpoint, provide a connection opportunity to show the pathway for working in high performance sport. If there are more eyes on our athletes, what could that mean for us?

5. Upskilling coaches in the use of data

We are experiencing a wave of younger coaches transitioning into our environments who are digital natives or technology-savvy individuals. There is a gap with some coaches who are less certain around the use and experience of technology and performance metrics. The real trend of discussion here centred around thinking more explicitly around data visualisation to help coaches resonate with the right points to inform their coaching. Many environments are working on using less data but more impactful visuals to support decision-making, which is all a part of bringing coaches and other performance disciplines on the journey where it is only a very small percentage of their worlds.

We’ve highlighted those that generated most conversation within the group discussions, but there were other trends shared at the outset of the call which can be seen below:

• The continued impact of social media.
• Budget pressures and the impacts of the cost of living. Where do we invest to get the best bang for our buck? What is the cost-of-living crisis impact on the athletes?
• A continued exploration around effective interdisciplinary working.
• A change of approach and emphasis in recruitment strategies for this generation of athlete and staff.

By John Portch

What do athletes need – both male and female – to be in the right place to perform?

Danny Kerry, the Head Coach of the Canada women’s field hockey team, answered the question at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance.

He cites renowned coach developer Nigel Redman in his response. “Nigel uses this phrase: men have to battle in order to bond, so we have to have gone to battle first. ‘You’re a tough nut so I’ll be around your nonsense’ – sorry – you can see my biases playing out there. Whereas [as Redman says] women have to bond first before they battle.”

Kerry, who led Great Britain’s women to field hockey gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, is at pains to tell the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium that this yardstick should only be used in general terms and may even be an oversimplification. It is, however, illustrative of the dynamics of which a coach must be aware.

He continued: “If you spend time and energy to understand the dynamics that are playing out within high-performing female teams, if you spend the time and energy to talk to those things, spend the time and energy to build the relationships between those players so you can understand what particular perspectives individual athletes carry, why they think as they do, what their life experiences are, that level of trust in the relationship goes up significantly and then they will literally run through brick walls for you. If you don’t do that, as soon as the challenge and threat comes they can be [slow] to it.”

He then reflects on the transition he made from coaching Great Britain’s women to the men’s programme in 2018. “I tried that approach, if I’m blunt, with the men and it was effective to a degree, but if I had my time again I would probably put them into some form of battle or get them to understand each other in that environment along with some of this other work.”

Kerry, who was joined onstage by Emma Trott, the former Women’s Junior Endurance Coach at British Cycling, spoke at length about his personal development as a coach three decades into his career and the evolving demands of his players.

Here, we highlight four factors that shaped the coach that took the reins at Hockey Canada in March 2023.

1. His self-reflection in the heat of the moment

“I was the classic coach. All about hockey and very hard-nosed. Very cycle and task-oriented, Xs and Os,” said Kerry. However, as he said, when it came to people’s feelings and relationships, “I received some pretty blunt feedback then tried – and failed – to adjust”. He quickly realised he was doing himself a disservice. “I say I failed but it’s still not my sweet spot. So my big learning, whether it was male or female, was around how relationships develop as an entirety and with individual athletes.”

It led him to adapt his behaviour and the most notable example was his pitch-side presence during the penalty shootout that followed the draw in Great Britain’s gold medal match with the Netherlands in Rio. “I always positioned myself high; the reason for that was, one, I was task-focused and, two, athletes pick up on your anxiety as a coach and, being pitch side, that’s not a great thing. You don’t want to add to their anxiety as a coach, so actually being up high helps with that,” he continued. This time, however, he reflected and changed his custom. “I remember just thinking literally ‘what does this group need from me now as a coach and what doesn’t it need?’ And so at that point in time, my ability to ask myself that question at that most pressurised moment, probably of my career, was to self-regulate. All they need now is a ‘we’ve done this, we’ve rehearsed this, our processes, all good?’ Everyone nodded and off they went. I wouldn’t have been able to do that previously. It’s still a struggle, but that was a good example of being able to regulate yourself to then help the athlete be in the right place they need to be to perform.”

2. His ability to grasp the balance of team and individual needs

As a male coach in a female environment, Kerry is aware of the need to afford athletes personal space when it comes to issues such as the impact of the menstrual cycle on training history, volume and conditioning, particularly as there is still “some debate and ambiguity about what the science is saying”. While working with Great Britain’s women, he would defer to the team doctor in such matters. “It was led by our doctor, a person seen to be on the ‘outside’. We didn’t want athletes to think we were encroaching on something so personal to them. That needs to be handled with incredible skill.” He discussed it in terms of “managing the bell curve and deviations from the group”. “It’s not a science, it is a sense, it’s a craft. What is optimum for this group of athletes as a whole can mean that some people adapt ahead of the bell curve, others struggle because that’s not what they wish for themselves, but that’s an optimum for the entire group,” he said. “All facets of coaching, whether that’s sitting in a meeting discussing the players, whether that’s discussing how we push collectively as a team, whether that’s what we’re going after and how we’re going after it. It’s understanding that you’re trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping those people below the bell curve find their value in that, finding what works for them. That is the craft of coaching and, in my experience, that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”

3. He works to understand the psycho-social dynamics of a group

Kerry was initially taken aback by the Canada women’s often literal interpretation of his instructions. “There’s a lot you can unpack there,” he said. “You can unpack it from the angle of gender, you can unpack it from the angle of your understanding of what’s going on. How are they feeling? Is there literal interpretation because they don’t want to get it wrong? Are they doing it because of the way they’ve been coached all of their life? Are they taking it literally because of the dynamic playing out within that female group? [They could ask themselves] Am I trying to do that because I’ve got a 200-cap athlete next to me?

“There’s a whole raft of psycho-social dynamics playing out there. So based on the experience I’d had, just talking to that very quickly; almost trying to create environments where [I’m asking] does it require me to talk to them? Does it require me to remove myself from that room and get them to sort it out themselves? Does it require me to use data, which involves the assistant coach of the programme leading that? Making these decisions as a head coach requires identifying some of these dynamics that are going on.”

Kerry warmed to the topic and added: “Quite often when people talk about performance, they’re talking about a very objective domain, whereas I think it’s more about these aspects. What is the greatest burden of that environment? What environment are you creating to ensure the most optimum versus the learning curve? What’s your impact on that? How can you create an environment between your athletes that allows them that peer to peer conversation that Emma was talking about? How quickly do you set those things up because they are, in my experience, the single greatest inhibitor to the team and the acquisition of skill?”

There have been occasions in the past where he wishes he could have coached female players differently. “If I had my time again, I would definitely approach it in a different way, but at the time, I didn’t have that experience having been in hyper-masculine environments.”

4. He embraces the coach’s role in developing leaders

Kerry believes that leadership skills are fundamental to performance. “You want people to lead even without the title,” he said. “[With Great Britain’s women] we had a discussion about that very early on talking about everyone has the capacity to lead in their own way that’s congruent to them. So if I were to summarise, normalising leadership as one of the fundamentals of performance is one of the key aspects of your job [as coach], so talking to that, raising awareness of what that is and how it can be done, part of that is raising self-awareness in the athletes, how they can influence others, is absolutely fundamental. It’s right up there with are you fit enough? In terms of female role models, I’d like to think the women’s hockey programme has some incredible female role models, someone like Kate [Richardson-Walsh] and others and now stepping into different domains whether that’s big business or sports. I’m very proud of that.”

He continued: “We have some stereotypical views of what it takes to lead, actually. Breaking that down and allowing these athletes to lead congruently to who they are is one of the things I’m most proud about. So Kate leads in a way that’s congruent to her, Alex [Danson] is a very different leader but still effective, and I’m now trying to do the same with field hockey Canada.

“There’s a moral dimension to having a team that’s well-led, there’s also a huge performance dimension to having a team that’s well-led and a depth and granularity to what leadership is. By the same token, whether we’re leading or following, we talk about that responsibility and what it means to follow well. The difference in my experience with male teams and female teams is the female teams seem to implicitly understand the importance and significance of that and really buy-in quite quickly”.