Speakers:

Lorraine Brown, Head of Performance, GB Climbing

Rob Pountney, Chief Operating Officer, Breaking GB

Moderator: 

Edd Vahid, Head of Academy Football Operations, The Premier League

At the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we heard from Lorraine and Rob who have been at the forefront of two new sports, and how they preparing for Olympics whilst staying true to the culture of their sports.

• We have had a cultural shift in climbing from participation to performance.
• We have to make sure the pathway is really clear, and look at ways to identify how to add value on a daily basis.
• You have to stay true to your own sport, it is easy to think you have to be like the other sports who have been well established. Keep the roots and culture of the sport whilst making the transition to Olympic sport and the increasing demands it brings.
• What does talent look like? Once we have talent, how do we help them progress? How do we create the experiences to help them fulfil their potential?
• Lots of athletes coming from other sports, migrate to climbing for its culture. How can we still be an outlet for other athletes who want to try something different?
• Breaking is about pushing the individual boundaries of your own creation which makes the training environment very challenging.
• The idea of making sure it is fun has to be top of the pile. We don’t have the fear of change right now, we are trying to find the way the sport should look based on the culture of the sport. We have the freedom to make bold decisions.
• Every day we have to accept the different behaviours from our athletes, they are more independent and have more control over their schedules. Coaches and team managers have to work with the athletes whilst embracing the individuality and creativity of the athletes.
• How do we maintain that cultural element but also raise the standard and expectation and develop the right environments for athletes and coaches to thrive in.

Speakers:

Andrea Furst, Sport Psychologist, England Rugby and Surrey County Cricket Club

Helen Richardson-Walsh, Performance & Culture Coach, Tottenham Hotspur FC

At the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we had a peer-to-peer interview between Andrea Furst and Helen Richardson-Walsh, who worked together as psychologist and athlete to win Rio 2016 Olympic Hockey Gold for Great Britain. The pair talked us through how they were able to create a winning team environment and the importance of the role psychology can play in performance.

• Fostering trust between the psychologist and athlete is key. The athlete trusting that they are having a confidential conversation has such a positive impact.
• Allowing the players to sit down and set the culture helped to get player buy-in straight away, and it was credit to the head coach to allow that to be the starting point.
• When your vision is ‘winning’ it can leave you with a very empty feeling or feel very disappointed even if you’re on the podium. There is something more than just winning.
• The biggest thing a head coach can do with regards to culture work is give it time. To have the whole staff and players group involved and integrate it into every day behaviours.
• ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ It is about what can you do on the hockey pitch, but also who can you be off it. To be role models for women in sport, to stand up for what you believe and use your voice for good.

GB Women’s Hockey Vision:

• Be the Difference; Create History; Inspire the Future.
• The vision, values and behaviours make you accountable. The language was everything everyone had bought into and would use regularly. You knew what was expected of yourself and of one another.

Individual mindset: Knowing your ‘A Game’

• It is so important for every individual to understand their performance mindset before they go out to play and take responsibility for this.
• Knowing this allows you to understand how to be consistent.
• This is a skill and it can be learned.
• You then share your A game with the rest of the team, and the team understand you better plus they know how they can help you to stay on your A game. It is for a team work on; and it normalises it.
• If it matters to the head coach, it matters to the athletes. The head coach sets the tone, if they disregard psychology or integrate it, it filters through to the players and makes a huge difference.

A session brought to you by our Partners

Speakers:

Joel Shinofield, Managing Director, Sport Development, USA Swimming

Jatin Patel, Head of Inclusion & Diversity, Rugby Football Union

Moderator:

Shona Crooks, Head of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Management Futures

We kicked off the second day of the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium with Joel Shinofield and Jatin Patel delving into how they are able to weave Inclusion & Diversity work into the fabric of their organisations.

Inclusion:

• Be inclusive first, and be really intentional with it. You want to foster an environment where people can be themselves and contribute.
• You need to ensure that when you bring in diverse talent, you have to provide them with the support to ensure they thrive.
• If you understand inclusion better, it will make engaging with diverse groups much easier.

What are you doing to make your organisations inclusive?

• Bystander training – how do we get teams to have more effective conversations and have the confidence to speak up? How do you ask better questions of each other?
• You have to invest in it. USA Swimming have a grant programme for clubs to move into new facilities. If you are able to access to the sport in your community, you are much more likely to be involved in the sport.
• Water has been an incredibly divisive tool in American history – pools were off limits to black families, so we have to acknowledge that first and intentionally increase greater access. We have to look at the ways in which we have excluded people to then help us find ways to include them.
• Rugby United – primarily aimed at black and Asian communities. England Rugby first looked at insights from these communities, their engagement, positive and negative experiences and tailor the approach to the specific communities. Ultimately it is about how we bring that cultural awareness into the broader game of rugby.
• Education is key, how to take responsibility of how to be more inclusive.
• On each of our teams there is someone who has DEI training. It is therefore woven into our coach development programmes. You have to make it part of your fabric.
• It is a strategic imperative as well as an outcome and output. ‘Drip drip’ it, don’t just have milestone big events, have it woven into every day and make sure it is pushed on the agenda constantly.
• Cognitive diversity starts with inclusion – how are you welcoming people in with new ways of thinking into your organisation?
  • Weekly department meetings, anyone can put something on the agenda, no matter your role.
  • How we approach specific groups where we know we haven’t done enough with in the past – there is a big gap in female coaching at the moment. Therefore we need a better pathway for young female coaches.
  • Data is crucial to understand how you haven’t served communities in the past so you can change it.
• Talk about it! Make it part of your everyday thoughts and conversations.

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood FC

Moderator: Roger Kneebone, Director of Surgical Education, Imperial College London

The third session of the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium saw Roger pick Craig’s brain around his approach to coaching, how he works with his athletes, and the importance of coach wellbeing.

• Sport is often about survival, and you move from survival mode to living mode, then back to survival mode towards the end of your career.
• We often learn winning behaviours through losing. There is a formula to losing just as there is a formula to winning.
• When you experience something, you then build a level of comfort. So the more you can experience an environment the more you are comfortable in the pressure. Life is about experiences and putting yourself in positions to learn and grow.
• “I don’t actually like the term ‘mastery’ as it alludes to being full and I feel far from full. I’m always learning and wanting to grow,” explained McRae. “I never want to put a ceiling onto what I want to achieve, I learn things from different opportunities, and life takes you in different directions.”
• Craig explained the importance of planting seeds for future careers whilst he was still competing. When it came time to retire, it was then obvious where his passions lay and because of this preparation, it was obvious to him that it was in coaching.
• How do you go from being a master in playing to transitioning to being more of a novice in coaching?

“Having a mentor is key. I would video every session, so I could watch it back and reflect, and constantly look to get better. As coaches we review the game a lot but we very rarely review ourselves and the processes behind the programme.”

• Handling pressure is about the ability to be just present and be at ease with the moment. The inexperienced vs the experienced player is all about managing the moment. Execute and repeat the behaviour so that when you are under pressure, you don’t actually have to think about it, muscle memory takes over and you are able to execute.
• Our ability to stay in the moment and execute the next moment is critical. It’s like a windscreen wiper, you will make mistakes in games and then you have to be present to execute the next moment, wash away the mistakes and fix it for the next one.
• “We have a winners’ mentality – on a Monday morning you won’t know whether we have won or lost, we repeat the same processes over and over and stick to these, not changing things because we have won or lost. If you repeat those behaviours long enough they will be there when you need them.”
• “I don’t like players lying down at the end of the game, you have to do the same processes and go again. We lost but we’re not losers, we get up shake their hands, and get ready for the next game.”
• There are two kinds of pressure to consider: the impact of a mistake, and the impact that the mistake can have on you.
• You can be a winner even if you lose. You can learn from the experience and improve. It is perilously easy to lose that sense of who you are, and having a mentor and the support you need is crucially important.
• McRae highlighted that it’s so important to play in a grateful state. It’s so important to keep that fun element of play and gratitude towards performing.

Speakers:

James King, Author of Accelerating Excellence: The Principles that Drive Elite Performance

Greg Newman, Chief Executive, ONYX Capital Group

For this session at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium, we heard from James King about his lessons from the world of trading and how they apply to high performance.

Ambition, talent and effort dictate success in every field. Performance is never a coincidence, and it always aligns with a specific set of principles.

There are four mechanisms, each of which contain principles to help our rate of progress. No one can predict success, but if you align yourself with more of these principles you stack the odds in your favour.

1. Perform from your sweet spot. To excel you need to pursue goals that align with your strengths, interests and values.

Three questions you have to ask yourself:

1. What are your strengths?
2. What are your interests?
3. What are your values?

We need move away from ‘you can be anything you want to be’, towards, ‘you can be more of who you really are’.

2. Acquiring Skill. Instead of the time spent training, it’s the time spent training under specific conditions:

1. Focus on the foundations
2. Learning by doing
3. It’s on you
4. You need challenge to change
5. Training must be specific
6. Create uncertainty
7. Variability

3. Emotional Control. To perform when it counts is the measure of elite performance. Luckily this is a skill, and like any skill with the right training you can optimise it.

4. Innovate to stay ahead of the rest. Danger is becoming a one-hit-wonder, how do you keep improving?

James then welcomed Greg Newman on stage to discuss how he was able to utilise these principles in practice.

• Negative feedback is crucial, and you have to be told when you need to do something better.
• This culture is described as Radical Transparency. Within this, accountability is huge. Everything is being said to make you and therefore the team better.
• It’s not ego, you have to have belief. It takes the ego to believe, but it takes deep humility to understand that everything is about learning.
• We have a formulaic approach to goal-setting, being objective about the obstacles you are going to face and how you are going to overcome them.
• North Star approach – you have to set a North Star and have it seemingly unachievable. Every time someone has a break through, it shifts the expectations of everyone else. The perception of potential then shifts.

A podcast brought to you by our Partners Elite Performance Partners

“The most important thing when stepping up from being an individual contributor to being responsible in a management position is that it’s not about you any more,” Max Lankheit, the San Jose Earthquakes’ Director of High Performance, tells EPP’s Founding Partner Dave Slemen.

The duo are discussing the traits needed when stepping into a leadership position for the first time.

“The important thing that people need to understand, in my opinion, is that you can only hunt one rabbit at a time,” adds Lankheit.

“So either you can work on your skills or help others work on their skills.”

Max, a former youth athlete and acting student, talks to Dave at EPP about his non-linear journey to the top of elite sport amongst other topics.

EPP are a performance consultancy and search firm highly regarded across sport and, for this episode, Dave poses the questions that cover:

• The non-sporting elements of Max’s background [2:30];
• Why the stigma around ‘manipulation’ is undeserved [10:00];
• The importance of the environment in helping people to thrive and reach their potential [25:00];
• The difference between purpose and values, vision and objectives [35:20].

Dave Slemen Twitter | LinkedIn

Max Lankheit Twitter | LinkedIn

By Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

What is Clean Language?

Summit Session: The Captain Class

The words that help us understand the world

Framing the topic

Metaphors are everywhere with people on average using metaphor four times per minute. It One definition of metaphor is: ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.’ Within this edition of the Leadership Skills Series, we look at how our members can utilise the power of metaphor to help galvanise their teams and build deeper relationships with individuals in order to further enhance performance.

“All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances” – William Shakespeare, As you Like it.

Session aims:

1. Shine a light on metaphor.
2. Raise awareness of its prevalence, and its power.

Metaphor operates at every level:

• Intrapersonal
  • Beware of the internal monologue we have.
  • What metaphors are we using about ourselves and our experience at any given time? How might they be helping or hindering us?
  • Every conversation provides a blueprint for the future – as true for ourselves internally as externally.
• Interpersonal
  • Between people.
  • If we are present and really listening, we can show we care, build genuine trust with others by picking up on the metaphors they use and by being curious about those metaphors.
• Groups – Team or Organisation
  • Utilising metaphor as a motivation for the group on a daily basis.
  • Practical example: in 2017, when pursuing their first Super Rugby title in almost a decade, the Crusaders harnessed the story of Muhammad Ali reclaiming the world heavyweight championship following his eighth round stoppage of George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaïre [the modern day DR Congo].
  • In 1974, Ali had not been champion for seven years, and had lost a previous attempt at reclaiming the world title in 1971. People were saying he was passed it.
  • When Scott Robertson took over as coach at the Canterbury-based Crusaders in 2017, the New Zealanders had gone nine years without winning the Super Rugby title and had lost two finals in recent history. The team were being written off.
  • Robertson embraced these parallels in story and built on it throughout the season. He said: “As soon as you see a picture, you get a connection in your head which connects to feelings. You want people to feel and to become emotive and invest their interest in that common goal. We changed up our defence more around knocking people out and more inventive and aggressive words. We used a lot of boxing themes.” That season they won, and they won the final in South Africa – the same continent where Ali reclaimed his world title for the first time.

Four organisational metaphors:

1. Family

Belonging, caring, home, matriarch, father figure, rifts.

2. Political System

Influencing stakeholders, get buy-in, alignment, witch hunt.

3. Machine

Well-oiled, reliable, in need of a service, switch off.

4. Army

Take no prisoners, win-at-all-costs, in the trenches, uphill battle, hold fire, front line workers, well-drilled.

Discussion points:

• What are the dominant metaphors in your organisation?
• What impact do these have?
• Where have you seen a metaphor employed really well?

Member feedback:

• Make things ‘sticky’ in order to be effective.
• Simplicity is often most effective when trying to resonate with everyone and get them to rally around.
• Clearly using language to take something which can be really complex and distill it down to unite everyone in a way that meets your team dynamic.
• It facilitates a better conversation about culture than just asking people to describe your culture.
• Utilising music as well as words.
• The flip side of this is that sometimes metaphors are overused, or used more so in a negative capacity.
• Often metaphors are socially constructed or socially learnt. Busy related metaphors are often the dominant metaphors which often isn’t the most helpful.
• How do we make these things tangible in our groups? How do we get buy-in and who takes it on?
• If you’ve already introduced metaphor to the group, can you allow the group to take ownership and choose the next metaphor that resonates with them?

“Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and embed it in the memory” – James Russell Lowell I

“If you’re not also in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback” – Brene Brown

By Sarah Evans

• A hero must write their own story

• We transform through making mistakes

• It is about the team, not about you

A hero must be active not reactive

“We all subconsciously believe that the world happens to us rather than we shape our world”, Meg LeFauve, co-writer of Pixar’s Inside Out, explained at our Sport Performance Summit in LA back in 2016. She built on this to say that the hero must write their own story. Heroes that we truly connect with, LeFauve stated, “have to want something deeply, they have to have a spark of something – determination, courage or grit which drives them on.” However, she also explained that they always have a flaw and a mask. The flaw is not always a negative, but actually through the story the hero comes to understand their flaw and transforms it into a strength. We all have multiple sides to our identities and our mask is what we present to the world, however, underneath that is our vulnerability, and through storytelling we can uncover this mask and be comfortable with our vulnerabilities.

Obstacles are a way of cracking open a belief system

LeFauve highlighted that as children we all create our own belief systems about how we think the world works and who we think we are within that world. These belief systems are designed to keep us safe. However, “often the very belief system that saves you as a child, will kill you as an adult”. LeFauve added that we often out grow these belief systems or they no longer service us. This is where obstacles come in. “We use obstacles to crack open a belief system” LeFauve said, and explained that they’re used to check-in where you are, what you know or don’t know and what you are good at or not good at. “We transform by making mistakes and by failing”. The brain learns and changes by experience and that is why it is so important to be open to failing. As LeFauve said so eloquently, “failure is the tool of transformation.”

You have to become comfortable with vulnerability if you want deep change

Within storytelling, LeFauve explained that “the antagonist is someone who helps the protagonist to transform.” Within sport, this could manifest as an injury, a setback or a coach challenging the athlete, to help them overcome obstacles and “push through the vulnerability to get through it and grow,” she said. It often occurs when the hero is at their lowest point, stripped back, and it is a death moment. “If you want deep change, there has to be a death moment, it is the death of their old belief, their old self, who they thought they were,” she continued. It is all about thinking that this experience is here for a reason, and understanding what it is helping you to learn. LeFauve talks about shifting the context to you being at the centre, you are choosing to be here and to turn up every day. Any day you can choose not to be here, so what are you here for?

Create an environment where there is no judgement when you fail

LeFauve explained that within storytelling, there is no judgement when they give negative feedback or mistakes are made, they always think “what did that give us? What did you discover in doing that?” This then takes the judgement out and most importantly the pressure of identity out of it. It is not a reflection on your intelligence or creativity, it is not about you. “It is about the movie and giving to the process because everyone is invested in the movie” she said. This is so important within high performance sport too, and ultimately you want everyone to be fighting for the team, not for themselves. It is about the team, not about you as an individual, and everyone doing their best for the team will inevitably be the best route towards success.

By John Portch

• Data supplements intuition, it does not replace gut feeling.

• Provide training and education for all the relevant stakeholders.

• Anomalies are all the more reason to undertake a ‘test and learn’ approach.

Use data to check your intuition

Analysts, whether in sport or banking, come up against the same challenge: people’s intuition. “The biggest challenge is that people don’t want to break the bottles that they have – their gut intuition,” Ameet Shetty, who was serving as the Chief Data & Analytics Officer of the Atlanta-based SunTrust Bank when he spoke to the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2019. In the right hands, however, data can be used to check your intuition. Shetty added: “I heard this when I was talking to the Chief Marketing Officer at McDonald’s [Silvia Lagnado] and she said: ‘I use data and analytics to check my intuition; I still check my intuition but I use it as one more information point’ and you can usually convince most leaders. Most leaders are logical and sound in their thought process – they want to challenge themselves and give you that open door.”

Helping people to learn and reinvent their approach

A blend of data and intuition can be an aspiration but staff members need help to reach a happy equilibrium. Shetty, who is now the Chief Data Officer at travel centre operator Pilot Flying J, spoke of the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning across analytics in numerous industries but that few, even in banking, know how it is applied. “Even those that have it in their organisation, a lot of them have been doing it a certain way for 20 years. The hardest thing is how you get someone to take 20 years’ experience in their industry, that knows that space, that hears everything moving; they won’t really want to change the way they are,” he said. “Then you’ve got young talent coming out of college – how do you blend them together?” This has been a key focus for Shetty who wanted veteran bankers to keep reinventing themselves. “We make sure we have programmes and expected training that they go through and we make sure our leadership understands the impact they have on those teammates and how they see the company.” During Shetty’s 17 years at SunTrust, his initiatives have helped the analytics department grow from a modest 15 to a figure closer to 600 in 2019.

Be prepared for two-way conversations with athletes and coaches

SunTrust, as Shetty explained, needed to promote two-way conversations with its clients, who are analogous with coaches or athletes in a high performance context. “We spend a lot of time on education with our business partners; telling them what we can do, but we also need a bit more,” he said. “They need to give us a little bit of insight into what they think is going to drive incremental growth for them or what it is they are trying to risk-avoid or what it is they think from an efficiency standpoint.” He described how prospecting with commercial lenders leads to “canned options and opportunities” but that “we would never have figured out how to build the right models to help them figure out what are the best prospects to go after had we not gone and spent time in the front office.”

Deal with anomalies through a ‘test and learn’ process

Session moderator Steve Gera asked about inevitable anomalies, those moments when decisions are made in the face of the data. How did Shetty approach such scenarios? “Test and learn,” was his swift response, although he admitted that at SunTrust he benefited from the trust of his employers and his clients. That may be harder to come by in sport but, “you’ve got to take a little bit of trust but verify; you’ve got to give it a chance to see if it works.”

By John Portch

• Learn to understand your biases when weighing up information.

• There is no perfect machine learning model.

• An effective model generates feedback for users.

Understanding ‘bounded rationality’

Sports practitioners are measuring more than ever but it is still not a complete picture. “There’s a number of different reasons we don’t measure something we know is important,” Sam Robertson, a sports researcher, told the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. It could be a question of finance, access or time. Whatever the reason, he continued, “this is a problem in sport because we start to see a disproportionate focus on information that’s available.” This leads to what political scientist Herbert A Simon termed ‘bounded rationality’. Robertson, who has worked with organisations including the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, Fifa and the AFL’s Western Bulldogs, produced a slide containing a quote from Christian Lebiere and John R. Anderson that built on Simon’s point. It read: ‘The rationality of a decision should be considered in the context of the environmental and cognitive constraints acting upon the decision-maker’. Therefore, as Robertson said: “having a basic understanding of how bounded rationality is applied in this environment allows us to transform the way we display empathy and communicate with our staff and athletes”.

The perfect model is not out there

When evaluating information, Robertson argued that the law of diminishing returns, so visible in economic theory, applies to both humans and machines in performance settings. “Humans and machines do this in very similar ways, which is sometimes lost in the ‘humans versus machines’ debate,” he said. He made the point that humans cannot process large amounts of information concurrently, whether as a consequence of ecological adaptation or cognitive limitation (the jury is still out). Similarly, he explained that machine models are designed to be generalisable to new situations, that they are designed to express concepts as accurately and with as few variables as possible. As mentioned above, there are things we can and cannot measure. Robertson introduced a third layer. “There is information that we were never going to consider – we don’t know what we don’t know,” he added. “What information matters right now to the evaluation of a player that we’ve not even thought about?” It is important to be able to call on different machine learning algorithms in an applied environment. “We want [the model] that works well, but uptake can be based on a number of factors.”

Choosing the right model

What are some of those factors? “When we evaluate something like this, the decision of the human or the machine or the recommendation, it’s really important [to consider] how that recommendation performs,” said Robertson. He cited accuracy, how the model improves existing practice and by how much. Human factors are important too. It needs to be feasible in your environment, be cheap to run and be understood quickly if it is to generate usable insight. “The term I use to describe this area is ‘operational compatibility’. Is the way we’ve developed the recommendation or the visual report compatible with the way that we make decisions in our particular organisation?” It must also be able to highlight uncertainty and facilitate feedback that enables a choice to be made. “Can we look at the same problem in four different ways? Having that basic understanding of machine learning, even without being an expert in it, can help us look at the problem differently.”