By John Portch

“We had this strategy that was just sort of floating around.”

Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, relayed the story of the luxury retailer’s failed 2020 DEI strategy at March’s Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy.

The trouble for Selfridges was that despite some well-meaning intentions, “there was not a single Black person in the room” of C-suite executives to advocate for a strategy focusing on Black representation. As John explained, “it would get shown at a couple of team meetings” but senior leaders were talking about a strategy to which, John said, they had “no connection”, “no passion” and “no conviction”.

Nor had anyone connected the strategy clearly enough to Selfridges’ commercial performance. It died a death in that guise.

A strategy cannot simply ‘float around’ if its aim is to unite people behind a common purpose. John joined Selfridges in July 2021 and set about developing a more effective approach that became Open to the World, a co-created framework that gave employees a stake in the plan and leaders a clearer basis from which to explain it.

Sharlene John in coversation with Management Futures’ Shona Crooks at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Robert Obreja

This is the story of how John and her colleagues did it.

They listened across the organisation before putting pen to paper

John consulted people across Selfridges’ organisational levels and locations “before we put pen to paper”. It was critical that ‘inclusion’ did not remain an abstract concept. She asked people: “What does it mean from your experience coming to work? What does it mean for the customers that you’re serving? What does it mean for trade?” Only then could John define Selfridges’ DEI problems and shape the response. The process also created a collective sense of ownership lacking in the 2020 plan. “Every single person in our organisation feels connected to it because in some way they’ve had a voice and had a part in putting that strategy together.”

They did not let hierarchy become an impediment

Consider: what knowledge does your strategy require and are the relevant people involved early enough? John encountered resistance to the notion of involving employees below executive level. “‘That person’s not an exec – they can’t come in and possibly contribute to this’,” she was told before she pushed back. “They absolutely can and they’re going to.”

Where there were “missing voices” in the room she “went down a layer” to find colleagues with relevant knowledge or experiences unavailable to decision-makers.

Different groups require different entry points

John could not rely on a single presentation doing the legwork. “What I discuss with my C-suite is very different from what I discuss with our shop floor,” she said. “It is really important to get everybody on the same page and find the anchor piece that connects your vision, your strategy, to the audience.” For executives, that meant better understanding the relationship between a healthy culture and commercial outcomes; for shop floor employees, that meant understanding how Open to the World affected their experience, opportunities and sense of belonging.

Leaders need to be able to take a central message and make it relevant to their teams. When the translation has worked, every group should be able to answer:

1. Why does this matter?
2. What does it mean in our context?
3. What does it require from us?
4. How will we recognise progress?

Win hearts, move heels, make headlines

“Underpinning our strategy is winning hearts, moving heels, making headlines. Very Selfridges,” said John with a smile. “You’ve got to link the three.”

• Winning hearts: Why should people care?
• Moving heels: What does it mean for them and how have they helped shape it?
• Making headlines: What measurable or observable result should follow?

Check for understanding

Selfridges drew on a cultural assessment containing approximately 70 questions and selected ten for deeper investigation. John and her colleagues asked employees what their answers meant in practice. “When you say you can’t show up as your best self, what does that mean? Talk to me about this. Help me understand.”

Selfridges now uses opinion surveys, quarterly pulse checks and annual reviews to assess whether Open to the World has translated into employees’ everyday experience. “We use that data to understand if it’s translated and it’s working,” said John.

Questions for leaders to consider:

• Can people explain your strategy in their own words?
• Were the people closest to implementing your strategy involved in shaping it?
• Which perspectives or sources of knowledge were absent from the room?
• What should you observe if the strategy is working?
• How will you test whether communication has produced shared understanding?

What to read next

5 Ways in Which Alignment Shows Up in the Work of High-Performing Teams

By John Portch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Are your people connected, aligned and integrated?

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

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

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

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

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

What to read next

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

By Paul Downes PhD

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

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

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

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

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

What is Leadership Climate and why does it matter?

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

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

Unpacking climate further

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

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

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

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

Defining and contextualising Followership

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

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

Figure 1. Kelley’s Followership Model (1988)

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

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

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

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

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

An example of system logic is provided in Figure 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding remarks

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

References

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

By John Portch

Iván Gil-Ortega, a former principal dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet, remembers his ballet teacher smoking in class.

“She used to ask us to hold her cigarette while she was lifting your leg and then putting you in the right position,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in February.

“The pianist was smoking too,” he added, “and we were called names.”

Gil-Ortega, who is approaching two years as the Artistic Director of the Queensland Ballet, was responding to a question from moderator Keith Sharpe, the Head of Coaching & Leadership Development at British Cycling, on the cultural shifts that have occurred in education since Gil-Ortega himself was a student.

Though neither an advocate of smoking in class nor bullying children, he nevertheless believes that the teacher-student relationship has shifted “a little too much”.

His views are of interest because Gil-Ortega oversees an academy of more than 200 students who are aged anywhere between seven and 18 (the company also has a pre-professional programme currently made up of 16 students).

“I think we went from one extreme to the other and what I try to do is find that middle way.” Though his criticisms are never personal (“everything I do is to get the best outcome for them”) there can be a tension between Gil-Ortega and his students. He attributes this to expectation management. “They want to get there immediately and, when you do something like this, there is no way of avoiding the actual path you need to go down to get there.”

To Sharpe, it speaks of kindness. He said: “I’m a big believer that the next competitive advantage is kindness; and kindness wins. So the courage to trust, the willingness to listen, the openness to just succeed and learn together is really important. Kindness isn’t nice, is it? It’s not about just being nice. It’s being honest.”

Gil-Ortega concurred. “Something that I found when I got here is they kept on saying to me: ‘you’re very direct’ and I said, ‘no, there is no “very direct”. There is “direct” or “not direct”. I try to avoid the bullshit. I try to be honest with them so that they know what is expected; and the more honesty you can have with your dancers, with your team, in the long term, that’s the best outcome for them.”

The Queensland Ballet is, he believes, a good environment, “but it doesn’t mean that we’re all hugging and we love each other because we don’t. Let’s not forget: it’s a cutthroat job.”

You may not wish a fellow dancer harm, but the simple fact of the matter is that you are vying for their job. “So that’s your competition; you’re competing within your team.”

Nevertheless, “we have to have an environment where everybody can work and have opportunities.” It begins with honesty, which is rooted in care rather than cruelty. “I try to be honest because the more honest you can be then there is no false expectation.”

Over the course of 30 minutes, Gil-Ortega explained his efforts to help students navigate the cutthroat environment of a ballet academy.

Below, we pick out four factors that define his approach.

1. He tries to balance individual ambition with collective learning

“Every single dancer is thinking of themselves. They’re not thinking of the person next to them,” said Gil-Ortega. Yet ballet is still a collective endeavour and individual flair must serve the company. The principals rely upon the soloists, corps de ballet and junior dancers etc.

“Even if I have the best Romeo and the best Juliet, unless everyone else plays their part, you won’t see the performance,” he continued. “We’ve had great dancers where the company wasn’t really into the whole process. So it didn’t really matter how great they were because the show didn’t come up to that next level.”

Therefore, “if you’re giving feedback to someone, the person beside them needs to listen; it is not just personal feedback, it’s for everybody.” Nevertheless, this can be a difficult experience for students, which is why Gil-Ortega must be careful to balance challenge and support.

2. Psychological safety doesn’t mean lowering standards

Gil-Ortega asserts that ballet is “not a job and it’s not a hobby – it becomes a lifestyle”. He said: “The dancers are dancers from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed; and even in our sleep we’re dancers because you’re twitching, because your body is.” He tailed off while trying to find the right words to end his sentence. “I mean, it’s horrible.” And to top it off, ballet is a short career; and not the kind that can set you up for life through lucrative contracts or brand endorsements. “You come to a certain age towards the end of your 30s where you’re considered an old person and you just started.”

This is a world in which Gil-Ortega admits he risks offending some students. “But getting offended doesn’t mean that you’re right,” he said. His tone was strident, but the simple fact is that uncomfortable feedback is sometimes necessary to ensure progress.

As for finding that balance, his feedback is “never personal”. He seeks that aforementioned “middle way” that inspires development but does not bully or belittle. Self-directed learning is critical in this regard.

3. He encourages self-directed learning

“I’m always open to being proved wrong,” said Gil-Ortega, who stressed that dance students have the space to change perceptions through their own hard work and development. “I think they have a lot of ownership.”

The steps will always be the steps in ballet, but the dancer can bring a unique artistry to their performance, which is where the space for development exists.

He continued: “I think it’s important when people come to me and say ‘I’d like to do that role and I haven’t been tested’. That’s entirely up to you if you want to be in the room; there is always another skill or another way of movement that you can learn on your own. That’s why I give them the freedom to see if there is something you see that you want to do, you want to learn. I’m always up for it.”

The choreographer may hold a different view, but Gil-Ortega will “try to empower them by saying ‘okay, they might not see you there, but you can prove them wrong’.” As he sees it, the worst thing would be that they meekly do what they are told. “Yes, you have to conform because the creative way is like that; the choreographer has the choreography in their head, they use a certain dancer; but then make sure that when the next one comes you’ve gained some more knowledge, so maybe you’ll be chosen then.”

Furthermore, to reach the point where talent and musicality meet the requisite luck (“you have to be in the right place at the right time”) requires hours and hours of repetition. “It’s all about doing it over and over and over and over.” Oftentimes it also means moving on.

4. He also provides exit routes

“There are people in our academy, in our school, that I know they’ll never make it to the company,” said Gil-Ortega, “but they will be good for other companies. So on that path, I try to tell them before it’s too late.”

It does not mean they lack talent; some may be better suited to other dance forms. Gil-Ortega tries to do right by them by suggesting a new focus in a manner that preserves their confidence and opportunity.

“Last year, we had a dancer that really wanted to stay with us; and I said, ‘I do appreciate the energy and everything, but I think it would be better for you and your career due to your physicality of the way you move and the way you dance to go elsewhere’.”

He actively supports dancers making such transitions. “I have contacted other directors when I say, ‘I have these people here, I think they would work very well for you, for the kind of work you do’. I think it’s just making that path accessible.”

What to read next

How to Work with Younger Generations (and by that we Mean Athletes, Coaches and Staff Members)

By John Portch

Back-to-Back Masters winner Rory McIlroy shared his preparation strategy in the aftermath of his second triumph at Augusta National.

“I joked last week that this place feels like my home course,” he said. “I haven’t played anywhere else in the last two or three weeks really. I felt prepared in that way. I felt prepared that wherever I hit it on the golf course, I sort of know what to do. I know where to miss. I’m pretty comfortable with all the shots around the greens.”

McIlroy, a six-time major winner, disregarded other PGA Tour events and even chose to ignore a back injury that had been hampering his performance. At one point he even carded a score of 29 on the front nine at Augusta.

“It’s a good blueprint,” he continued. “I’m not going to take three weeks off before every major, but to get to the major venues early, do your preparation, play. And not just play and look at things, but actually play. Go out there with one ball, shoot a score and try to do it that way.”

McIlroy’s successful strategy came not long after our Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy event at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where a range of guests, including Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and Lawn Tennis Association Performance Director Michael Bourne discussed how to build, stress-test and execute an effective performance strategy.

We know McIlroy wasn’t there because he was in Georgia, but he, much like yourselves, can check out the chief insights here.

And now on to other happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.

Quote of the month:

Personally, I don’t believe in skills coaches.

These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.

A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.

“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”

Read the full story here.

We also addressed some of the common tensions, challenges and opportunities in skill acquisition here.

Insight of the month:

British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information at hand.

As Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, they are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:

It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.

Reay-Kemp was one of six guests who brought the day’s proceedings to life.

Shock of the month:

We often hear informally of ‘bad’ environments, but we don’t necessarily expect them to be amongst those considered the very best.

Yet that was the experience of Alexander Campbell, the former principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet when he attended the Royal Ballet School in the early 2000s.

“I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.

He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.

“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.

When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”

His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’

Campbell, now the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, shared his full story here.

Good to know:

What’s the difference between a ‘change’ and a ‘transition’?

A ‘change’ is simply that, but a ‘transition’ refers to the human adaptation required in the face of change.

That is according to John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, who posed this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’

In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.

“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”

To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:

Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:

The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.

Finally…

Four common causes of tension between business and performance… and four opportunities for increased collaboration.

Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

In November 2024, Dr Brett Robinson became the first southern hemisphere Chair of World Rugby, the international governing body of rugby union.

Robinson, a former Wallabies international-turned-sports scientist and C-suite executive, beat France’s Abdelatif Benazzi by 27 votes to 25 in the second round of the election held by World Rugby’s Executive Council.

His narrow majority meant he succeeded Sir Bill Beaumont without a honeymoon period. Yet his achievements thus far, chiefly the implementation of World Rugby’s Impact Beyond 25 programme and building consensus around new laws of the game, have been commendable.

“I’m really proud of where we’ve got to as a game because, when I came into the role, we were fractured and divided,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in Brisbane in February.

There were factions within the World Rugby Council that could be divided into England and the Celtic nations on one side with the French and Latin nations on the other. Robinson, as an Australian, said he was “coming into a gunfight between the Celts, the English and the French.”

For all that, in September 2025, the 17th World Rugby General Assembly had endorsed Impact Beyond 25, its five-to-seven-year strategy for developing and promoting the world game heading into the men’s Rugby World Cup in 2027 and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2029 (both to be hosted in Australia) with the 2028 Olympic Games in LA sandwiched in between.

So what changed? Below, we explore Robinson’s approach to calming rugby’s internal strife.

Brett Robinson (centre) onstage at Leaders Meet: Australia with Rugby Australia’s Director of High Performance Peter Horne and Leaders’ Managing Director Laura McQueen. (Photo: Albert Perez / The Leaders Performance Institute.)

Firstly, he didn’t shy away from the problem

As Robinson explained, “some countries were incredibly frustrated; they wanted to revolt and blow everything up.” Others were about “organisationally working with the change and not being too destructive”.

Almost half of the 52 members of the World Rugby Council voted for Benazzi as Chair. Robinson, who will serve a four-year term, did not shy away from that fact. “We’ve got differences of opinion, we’ve got some challenges, and there’ll be some people that were disappointed after the election,” he said in the aftermath.

In December 2025, he expanded on his thoughts as a guest on the Rugby Unity Podcast. “The system upon which World Rugby is built has been in place for 30 years,” he said. “We have systems that simply don’t work and prevent us from reacting with the necessary speed.” It is worth remembering that he made those observations after Impact Beyond 25 had been launched.

Onstage in Brisbane, he further outlined an enduring sticking point: that France and England account for approximately 70% of the revenue generated in rugby union. This had led to political as well as economic tensions across the different factions; and the question was how World Rugby could engage and incentivise the other unions to align in pursuit of a more equitable distribution.

He ensured World Rugby’s new strategy was a collective endeavour

The Impact Beyond 25 strategy was unanimously ratified just days before the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final, which saw a crowd of 82,957 watch England beat Canada 33-13 at Twickenham.

The timing could not have been better. England 2025 was the most well-attended Women’s World Cup ever. World Rugby’s unions gave their blessing to a global impact plan that, in the international governing body’s own words, ‘is built around three core themes of profile and participation, careers and gender equity, and capability and expertise with the mission of inspiring more women and girls to get into rugby on and off the field of play.’

Most importantly, it bore the fingerprints of all those involved in its creation.

“It’s really important that, in my role, I bring the game together and we agree on what shared success looks like and we pursue it together,” Robinson told Rugby Unity.

He expanded on those comments in Brisbane. “We’ve built a collective plan where we’re all engaged, we’re all incentivised, and we’re all a part of that journey,” he said, adding that the plan includes taking All Blacks and Wallabies Test matches to the United States. Such moves “will help build the fandom that ultimately will drive the commercial outcomes and [increase rugby union’s] market share”.

He accounted for local complexity

“We are not going to do everything from Dublin,” he told the Brisbane audience, name-checking World Rugby’s base and then pointing to the man sat beside him onstage, his former World Rugby colleague Peter Horne, who now serves as Director of High Performance at Rugby Australia.

“What we do is only as good as what he [Horne] can deliver and vice versa.”

In some places, such as Australia and England, Robinson said, “we have an Anglo-Saxon way of governing; we’ve got strong boundaries around the role of the chair, the board, the CEO, the executive. In other parts of the world, they have very different ideas of the president or the chair being an executive authority.”

He cited the example of Argentine Gus Pichot, the former Vice-Chair of World Rugby. “He’s not the chair and he’s not on the board of the Argentine Rugby Union, but he is making every decision coming out of it; and so I have to work with that, acknowledging that I need to keep his chair informed and his CEO informed; but if Gus doesn’t agree with it, it doesn’t happen. And I could say, ‘well, that’s just a crazy way of governing’, but I can’t change it, so I have to work with it. The French are the same; Florian Grill is their president. He’s not the CEO, but he operates as an executive chair.”

On that last note, Robinson said: “I spent a lot of time before Christmas with the French in Paris. I’m going back there in a couple of weeks’ time.” These meetings have proven invaluable. “You have to work really hard to genuinely display that you’re listening and supporting, and they don’t necessarily say ‘yes, yes, yes’, but actually they can see the ‘why’.”

World Rugby is now reaping the rewards of his efforts. “Having the French and the Argentinians now with us, and rebuilding the relationship with the Celts and the English, was probably the biggest challenge that I faced; and now we’re there, we need to push on and deliver.”

He won’t rest on his laurels

“You’ve got to be systematic; from my experience, if you go randomly into anything like this, you are more likely to fail than not,” said Robinson. “You have to set up a proper process.”

He listed the necessary personal qualities of a chairperson: trustworthiness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. He balanced these against an ability to act and make tough decisions. All are essential in a world where alignment is predicated on retaining the trust of the individuals involved in the process.

Robinson then explained that the executive board of World Rugby had just undergone a review. He said: “I’ve been running a process over Christmas where we have a 360 on our behaviours; I’m getting a 360 on me. We’re having a discussion about board effectiveness; how that relates to the implementation of our strategy. We have some blind spots and weaknesses on our board, and we have succession plans that are coming. So those things are really important because it all rots from the head.”

What to read next

Why Change Only Sticks when you Lead your People Through the Transition

Main Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

By John Portch

“I tend to think of a strategy as a bridge between where you are and where you’re dreaming of getting to,” said Michael Bourne.

“In order to build the right bridge, you need to understand those two things.”

Bourne, the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA], was the first to speak at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, which took place at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London in late March.

Members of the Leaders Performance Institute travelled from far and wide for a day that challenged assumptions and provoked some of the sharpest minds in the sports industry to rethink how strategies emerge in high-performance environments.

Bourne was joined on the bill by Milano Cortina mixed skeleton gold medallist, Tabby Stoecker, and speakers from organisations including the Football Association, luxury retailer Selfridges, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Together, they explored how strategies are built, stress-tested and executed by the best in the business.

Below is a snapshot of the day’s proceedings; five fresh insights to help strengthen your own planning and execution.

1. A strategy starts with a brutally honest discussion

Bourne joined the LTA in 2018, when they were two years into their ten-year performance strategy designed to tackle the lack of players coming through the British tennis system.

Yes, Andy Murray had won three majors in recent memory, but the sense was that this was “despite the system, not because of it”.

“In essence, between 2016 and 2017, the organisation undertook a diagnosis of the situation,” said Bourne, “and they came up with a number of different issues”.

This diagnosis, which included a lack of coherent pathways, limited programmes for talent ID, and resources spread too thinly, enabled the LTA to have a long, hard look at itself without pointing fingers at individuals. It lowered stakeholder defensiveness and provided the foundations for what they needed to do next.

Bourne was not present for the diagnosis, but he was recruited shortly after to ensure the LTA adopted the right approach and a coordinated set of actions. But they could not jump ahead. As he said:

I believe that you have to have that first element of the diagnosis and your guiding policy right first.

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

2. Your strategy must be co-created

At luxury retailer Selfridges, Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding, Sharlene John, faced the challenge of trying to tie her work to commercial outcomes while challenging the idea that DEI is “fluffy” and irrelevant.

The result was Selfridges’ award-winning DEI and culture strategy Open to the World. On John’s watch (she joined Selfridges in 2021), female leadership within the organisation has grown from 32% to almost 70%; Selfridges is also an industry leader in ethnic representation.

Open to the World flourished because of John’s efforts to ensure it was a co-created initiative from the start. She said:

Before we even put pen to paper, it was going out and speaking to my teams, but also my leaders, to understand what does DEI or culture mean to you? And where there was that missing voice, it was bringing people into the room. So not just relying on those senior leaders where we don’t have representation, it was ‘OK, we’ll go down a layer’… I was talking to people across our business with a headcount of around three and a half thousand… We’ve got stores in Manchester, Birmingham, a tech suite in Leicester, and then the flagship in London. I went to every site speaking to people from grade 2, which is our junior role, up to our grade 7, which is exec positions, to understand what Open to the World actually means to them.

Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, describes her organisation’s award-winning Open to the World inclusion programme, which was built by a plurality of stakeholders. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

3. Evaluation (and re-evaluation) is continuous

“If you don’t get it right when you’re there in the moment, doing a review process at the end is worthless.”

So said Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association [BOA] who recently joined English Championship side Norwich City as Performance Director. He spoke alongside Tabby Stoecker, the mixed team skeleton gold medallist at the Milano Cortina Games alongside her teammate Matt Weston.

When it comes to in-the-moment tweaks, Ford has a point. The BOA must work with national governing bodies, coaches and athletes continuously throughout a four-year cycle. “It’s making sure that we are doing it hand in hand with our sports as frequently as possible,” Ford added.

A macro ‘plan-do-review’ alone is not adequate. Of competition time itself, he said:

It’s on a daily cycle during delivery mode at a Games. [We ask] what are you planning for this day? What are we doing this day? How has this day gone? Because if you don’t make the most of that experience in the moment, it’s not going to happen for another four years.

Stoecker benefited from this approach, as demonstrated by her success. She said:

There wasn’t just the review of that specific race, but also ‘what are you taking from this that you’re going to change or carry forward for three years’ time, two years’ time, six months’ time?’… you can get quite swept up in what you’re doing and you have these extreme highs and lows. So I think staying focused, and when you’re then doing that and being so process-driven, the results just come.

British Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker is deep in conversation with Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association, as they discuss Team GB’s strategic approach to Olympic cycles and, more specifically, Stoecker’s path to gold in the mixed skeleton at the Milano Cortina Games. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

4. Be ready to act on incomplete information

You and your team may enjoy clarity and alignment of purpose, but optimal operating conditions are likely to be elusive whatever your efforts.

With this in mind, Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience how British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information. They are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:

It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.

Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence (centre), in conversation with moderator Iain Brunnschweiler (left) and Football Association Head of Strategic Development & Operations, Paul Cleal (right) as she explained what it takes for military personnel to act with incomplete information. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

5. What are you ready to discard?

New initiatives, new processes and new ways of thinking are great, but what are you prepared to discard?

“One of the things about strategy is making choices,” says Paul Cleal, who spoke alongside Reay-Kemp in his capacity as Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association. “If you’re trying to change something, it almost always involves stopping doing something else.”

However, as he has experienced, this is often easier said than done. “If things involve stopping doing something for the new thing you need, a lot of organisations struggle with that.”

Evidence, he explained, is critical in making those choices:

When I walked in three years ago, my job was not to throw things in the bin and do them differently. It was to ask: is what we’re doing now meeting the strategic aims and to what extent do we need to get closer to our strategic aims and what is it we can change?

Paul Cleal, the Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association, explains why it’s important to discard programmes and processes when they no longer serve the collective. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

See you at the Sport Performance Summit in New York?

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

“What does good change leadership look like?”

John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, poses this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’

To set up the conversation, he looked at the twin elements that enable sustained change (people taking ownership of the change and the idea of change itself as a habit) before identifying some of the common sources of resistance.

“There are times where we will resist change, we’ll engage less quickly in it, even when we have to; or we waste energy in how we’re responding to change,” said Bull. “But we also have to understand resistance from others and what that requires of us as leaders.”

People, he explained, resist change for two primary reasons: loss (what they perceive they are losing) and uncertainty or ambiguity. It is not enough for a leader to merely sell the change.

He continued: “If we’re just pushing change and we haven’t understood what people perceive they’re losing, then we run the danger of increasing the resistance rather than decreasing it. By understanding where the resistance is coming from and being able to address that, we’re in a much better position to be able to lead it.”

A ‘change’ or a ‘transition’?

In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.

He illustrated this distinction between ‘change’ and ‘transition’ with a slide:

“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”

To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:

These are an adaptation of the ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ model of German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin, who drew attention to the emotional and behavioural elements of change. Modern scholars, including William Bridges (whom Bull also namechecks), place an emphasis on the personal dynamic.

Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:

The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.

With the behavioural elements of transition established, Bull then set out what neuroscience tell us about human resistance to change, with reference to the SCARF model.

This framework, devised by neuroscientist David Rock, sets out five domains that influence human social behaviour and motivation. ‘SCARF’ stands for ‘Status-Certainty-Autonomy-Relatedness (Relationships)-Fairness’. Bull explained each in turn:

Depending on their circumstances, people can either feel threatened or rewarded in each of these domains.

“I’m not constantly thinking about the SCARF model,” said Bull. “I use it when I get a response from a client that surprises me; then I’ll go back to the SCARF model and go ‘what might I be missing?’ But it’s also a really good model when you’re thinking about how to frame and communicate the change. Because each of these can give a negative hit, but you can also think about ‘how do I promote this change? How do I sell this change in a way that it highlights how it might increase status? How might it increase autonomy?’

He then returned to the three phases of transition and set out the possible traps to be avoided for both individuals and leaders:

Bull emphasised that these traps reflect predictable human responses when transition is not adroitly led rather than poor intent or capability; and, if anything, leaders often respond with the wrong behaviour at the wrong stage.

He then pivoted towards organisational psychology, specifically the idea of change-curves.

People can respond both positively and negatively to change and these reactions can be plotted on a ‘change curve’. First, he showed the virtual table an example of a negative response to change:

Bull explained the line of trajectory through his own negative experience of discovering that a restaurant in Bath had stopped serving his favourite pizza.

• Initial disbelief/minimising: “My first response was I thought the waiter was wrong. I genuinely just thought the waiter was new and didn’t know.”
• Frustration once the reality hit: “At some point, it dawns on me that the waiter is not wrong and I’m wrong. I do not feel anger but I do have some frustration.”
• Getting mentally stuck on what’s been lost: “What my mind keeps going back to is what I want.”
• Gradual adjustment and acceptance: “I grow up a little bit. I try something on the menu and it’s good.”

He added: “I just want to make the point: you don’t move linearly through each stage. I think of it more as water sloshing through a container. You will be partly in stage one, partly in stage two. So even though I’m intellectually trying to figure out what am I going to have on the menu, I’m still partly in frustration.”

Bull then shares an example of a positive change curve:

He noted that positive change:

• Still involves transition: he gives examples of a promotion, getting married or having children.
• Still includes disillusionment: a new job may come with unexpected pressure, increased responsibility or moments of self-doubt.
• Is usually quicker and shallower: the emotional low point is less deep and people regain confidence and stability more quickly than with negative change.

Next, Bull summarised what people need from their leaders at each phase of transition:

To wrap up his presentation, Bull suggested the ‘Four Ps’ model as a communications tool for members to use in their teams when leading change. It can help hold the process together and ease the psychological demands of transition:

He said: “This isn’t new content, but it’s a new way of presenting it; it tends to be one of the things people remember six months, 12 months later.”

What to read next

Rec Revolution: Does Transformational Leadership Theory Explain Bath Rugby’s Resurgence?

By John Portch

“Your culture is defined by the worst behaviour you tolerate,” said psychologist and former NBA star John Amaechi.

Amaechi’s words are shared by Jeff Pagliano, a consultant with Management Futures, who in our latest Leadership Skill Series session, introduced members to tools that will enable them to help shape their team’s culture.

How do cultures develop?

Pagliano began his presentation with a definition:

Management Futures uses the analogy of tables at a wedding reception to explain how cultures develop.

“You’ve seen how at a wedding each table develops its own personality,” said Pagliano. “It’s interesting that even in those interactions where some people know each other or some people don’t, a culture begins to form around that table. You can have the rowdy table, the quiet table; some are eager to get up to dance and some are not.”

What we see, what we say, what we believe

Pagliano then shared his ‘cultural iceberg’ model, which has been inspired by Swiss-American psychologist Edgar Schein and his pioneering work on organisational culture:

What we see

“This is literally what we see. So behaviours, systems, and processes,” said Pagliano. This could be how people interact, how leaders comport themselves, what actions are common or repeated. It also includes the physical environment (e.g., office layout or the visibility of team members).

What we say

“These are our goals, values and aspirations.” In other words, the official narrative.

What we believe

“These are the underlying assumptions we have about the organisation.”

The risk of emerging ‘shadow’ values

Underlying assumptions can lead to the emergence of what Pagliano calls ‘shadow’ values – unspoken, unofficial rules.

“Employees are acutely aware of what is rewarded or encouraged in everyday activities,” he said.

Pagliano quoted the British government’s sports funding agency, UK Sport, in making his point.

One of the biggest risks facing organisations in terms of culture is a lack of alignment between the culture that is formally articulated by its leader and the culture that is experienced in reality.

Therefore, it is important to be able to ‘map’ your team’s cultural influences to better help you understand who shapes your culture and in what ways.

Mapping cultural influences

For this part of the session, Pagliano called upon Dr Edd Vahid’s Cultural Hypothesis, in which he spoke of the importance of ‘sponsors’, ‘architects’, and ‘guardians’ in shaping a culture through a combination of leadership and influence.

Pagliano added two further categories: ‘shareholders’ (“I would argue that everybody who works in an organisation is a shareholder”) and ‘countercultural influences’ (“countercultural influences are negative role models that can be operating at all levels”) and presented the following slide:

He then shared a hypothetical example of a cultural map that pulls on these five types. The result is a complex diagram:

“Your sponsor is at the top,” said Pagliano. “That can be the owner of an organisation, maybe a GM, maybe a coach, but it’s somebody who has the ability to decide whether resources are allocated for building culture.

“Then you have the architect: the one who thinks about ‘see’, ‘say’, and ‘believe’. This is the person who has the ability to influence processes and has decision-making power.

They may or may not be the leader of the organisation, but they certainly have the ear of the leader.

“Then below is where the web gets a little complicated. This is where you can see how certain policies, procedures and aspects of culture can intertwine and be influenced.”

Pagliano concluded this section with a summary:

He concluded his presentation with six cornerstones of cultural leadership.

“These are the six levers that any culture leader, whether it’s your sponsor or your architect, can pull to make sure that vision of culture is consistent across your organisation.”

He then gave a real-life example for five of the six.

Communicate key principles – Netflix

“Netflix’s key principle is ‘act in Netflix’s best interests.’ And so their culture of ‘Freedom & Responsibility’ can be captured in these five words,” said Pagliano. “Anytime there’s a decision being made, you can always ask your team, ‘are we acting in Netflix’s best interests?’”

Role modelling – Collingwood FC

Pagliano explained that Collingwood’s Senior Coach, Craig McRae, asks himself daily, “‘to what extent are my day‑to‑day actions equal to our ambition?’” The Melbourne-based club were AFL premiers in 2023.

Continuous reviews – Pixar

“They had this concept of appreciative inquiry,” said Pagliano of Pixar. “It’s all about setting examples of excellence to create a blueprint for future performance.” In testing Toy Story, for example, the relationship between Buzz and Woody wasn’t working. So they went back to the drawing board over the course of six days and created those characters that we know and love today. Further down the line, they would go back and ask, ‘what were we doing right during those six days when we pulled together?’”

Skills and processes – the UK Sports Institute

This example is specifically about their approach to developing their staff members’ “teaming skills”. “This can come down to something as simple as ‘speak up, listen up’ and then a shared responsibility for performance,” said Pagliano. The UKSI wanted to teach “teaming skills across the different groups so that when groups from different parts of the organisation interact with each other, they have a shared language.”

Feedback – Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières

“Their motto is ‘we are intolerant of, but empathetic, when people don’t initially meet our high standards’,” said Pagliano, who explained that employees are given “three strikes”. “Feedback as a continual part of the process is really important to maintaining their culture.”

Recruitment – get the right people on the bus

Pagliano does not give an example for recruitment. Instead, he poses a question: “When you’re looking to hire folks, who do you think is going to buy into your shared cultural values and who is going to be a guardian or an architect of that?”

If you have any further questions around how to understand, shape and protect their cultures, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]

What to read next

‘We Actually Hit the Cultural Sweet Spot’

By John Portch

In January, Indiana became college football’s first first-time national champion in 29 years.

It was a lesson to all sleeping giants. Here was a team with the most losses in the sport’s history and, over the course of their 16-0 season, had compiled more wins than between 2020 and 2023 in total.

Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti spoke of a “paradigm shift” in the aftermath of the Hoosiers’ 27-21 defeat of Miami.

“People can cling to an old way of thinking, categorising teams as this or that or conferences as this or that or they can adjust to the new world, the shift in the power dynamic in college football today,” he said.

Cignetti was brought in ahead of the 2024 season and transformed the mindset of a team that had been treading water for decades.

“There’s got to be a lot of like-minded individuals who come together for a common purpose, and sometimes that belief has to be a little bit irrational,” said Indiana centre Pat Coogan.

“Especially in a place that hasn’t had success like Indiana. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the way this place has been characterised, and when Coach Cig got here, he believed, and he got people to believe. Sometimes people laughed at him and thought he was crazy, but that’s irrational belief. You’ve got to get people to buy-in and believe in the mission.”

With a host of senior players set to graduate, success may not be replicable in the short term, but Cignetti is ready for whatever comes next.

“Perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis,” he said. “But we’ll continue to take it one day at a time, one meeting at a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process and showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field, and see where it takes us.”

It was a powerful message to kick off the year in sports performance and one that underlined the importance of the fundamentals while refusing to stand still.

Which brings us nicely to the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute these past four weeks.

Insight of the month

‘What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.’

In a guest column, James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, spoke about facilities being a secondary concern until the leaders had created the right environment to enable athletes, whether they’re the Olympic champions with whom he has worked or Premier League and Champions League-winning footballers, being paramount.

Read more about why high performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.

Britain’s Anthony Joshua on his way to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics. (Scott Heavey/Getty Images)

Surprising insight of the month

Did you know that Team GB built its own hub within the London Olympic Village in 2012. This was very much a “host nation benefit” as Paul Ford MBE called it in another popular guest column last month.

The Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association wrote:

When we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.

Read more about their approach here.

Team GB flag bearers Helen Glover and Tom Daley pose for a selfie outside the residence of the British Ambassador to France ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Best advice

Leaders Performance Institute members across the globe strive to encourage learning throughout their teams and while it will always be an important feature of any successful team, you should not waste your time on the wrong people.

As performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler explained at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable:

“There’s definitely some people who, you can try as hard as you like to get them to learn and I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy as someone who’s seeking to help. It’s a bit like athletes, isn’t it? If you’re up for it, I’ll give you 150% of my energy. If you’re not, after a period of time, I’ll just go, ‘look, you crack on’. So I think we have to be accepting of that.”

Over the course of an hour, Brunnschweiler and a band of LPI members noted ten strategies for more effective learning.

One you might have missed

Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab made the case for evidence-informed as opposed to evidence-based practice.

He enlisted the help of students from DCU’s online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

One such student is Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.

As she told Taylor, you can’t simply drop research on top of a sports programme. It must be used critically, in conjunction with a coach’s own research, and applied in an informed manner.

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” she said. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.”

The key for Ward in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

Read more about DCU’s programmes here.

Quote of the month

“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”

These are the attention-grabbing words of a performance director working in India who spelled out the challenges in talent identification and development.

He and a host of LPI members listed five of the most common trends (and five opportunities) in that space.

Good to know

Organisational values should be your carrot, not your stick.

That’s according to Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.

In her appearance at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, she spoke about how the RAF’s values, all contained within the prosaically titled Air Publication One document, had been used to browbeat good people.

“Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Again, the focus was learning strategies in an inspiring presentation.

The RAF’s Emma Keith onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. (Leaders)

What’s coming up for members

Virtual Learning