John Bull of Management Futures outlines what it takes to deliver coordinated efforts within a team.
“When you get everyone in a system pushing in the same direction, it can have a multiplier effect. The momentum of each person’s efforts building on each other,” said John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures.
“It is,” as he adds, “a key area of performance at which we can all get better.”
In his online presentation for members of the Leaders Performance Institute, Bull outlined the common obstacles as well as steps all teams can take to get better at coordinating their efforts.
How alignment affects performance
Alignment – the coordinated efforts of a team – takes several forms. Each has different implications for performance outcomes.
Bull illustrated some of those differences using mathematical symbols (and idea lifted directly from Ineos’s Sir Dave Brailsford).
In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others in this fashion:
“One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says Bull. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”
He used the analogy of a group of people pushing a car up a hill. “It’s also about timing. Are we pushing at exactly the right time, which is really what the multiplication symbol is because you get this amplifier effect.”
Additions are more commonly found, but it’s not true alignment:
“What I would mean by a plus is that two parts of the organisation are still moving in the same direction, still aiming at the same goal, but it’s not joined up. It’s independent activity,” said Bull. “They’re still adding their talent, so it’s still a positive contribution, but you’re not getting that momentum multiplier effect. And we all know what that feels like.”
The risk is that subtractions or divisions rear their ugly head:
“If you’ve got two parts of the organisation with very different interpretations of the strategy, you have it taking away from each other,” said Bull of the subtraction.
As for the division symbol, “that would be where, politically, you’re starting to get factions, briefing to the media, or people actively recruiting allies against another part of the organisation. Or sometimes where you have a board or owner deliberately undermining the coach.”
If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:
1. Who?
Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.
2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?
Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.
3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’
The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.
4. Ways of working
Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.
5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions
While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus, horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.
Bull then highlighted some common tensions:
He said: “The reason I want to share these is to highlight where you might go for opportunities for improvement. Where do you see the opportunities for improvement in your environment and what’s your role in that? Where can you make a difference?”
The same goes for tests of alignment:
Each type of test presents opportunities to strengthen systems through reflection, planning and proactive leadership if you’re minded to look.
What actually works?
Bull suggested several methods for Leaders Performance Institute members to mull over:
What to read next
Do you Feel your Team Has Plenty of Clarity But Still Suffers from Misalignment?
In July the art of listening, coach and staff wellbeing, and the postpartum return of athletes were top of the conversational agenda.
Nestled in between the myriad elements that contributed to their success was the team’s sense of being “proper English”.
The trope was first aired in February following England’s 1-0 defeat of Spain (who were also their opponents in the Euro 2025 final), with defenders Millie Bright and captain Leah Williamson hailing a “properly English” performance.
Winger Chloe Kelly repeated it during the Euros, and several players were asked to define what it meant as the tournament went on. No-one gave exactly the same answer.
“It’s that we give everything, we run ourselves into the ground,” said midfielder Keira Walsh. For forward Alessia Russo it means “we’ll stick together”. For defender Lucy Bronze it means “if push comes to shove, we can win in any means possible”.
For England’s Dutch Head Coach, Sarina Wiegman, it means “passing with purpose”.
Perhaps it doesn’t really matter one way or another. Much like words on the wall of your changing room, it is more about the feelings they generate than the actual words used.
That is certainly the opinion of Dan Jackson, the General Manager of Player Development and Leadership at the AFL’s Adelaide Crows. He has spent his post-playing career working with teams on their culture. The words on the wall are often a focus.
“I probably spend the least amount of time worrying about whatever words they’ve got,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in an article that appeared last month.
“Often, I don’t even bother changing them because if you want ‘connection’ or ‘unity’ or ‘team first’ or ‘family’, it doesn’t really matter. What I want to know is the behaviours you’re going to commit to, your system of accountability, and how you drive those behaviours.”
It was one of several nuggets of insight on offer, member to member, across the Leaders Performance Institute in July.
Are you a soldier or a scout?
“Some of the skills of adaptive leadership are more obvious, but that doesn’t make them easier to learn,” said John Bull.
The Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures hosted the third and final session of our Virtual Roundtable series entitled ‘Leading in Complexity’.
Bull wanted to encourage Leaders Performance Institute members to reflect on their own role as an adaptive leader and pinpoint some areas for self-development.
He introduced the table to the work of philosopher Julia Galef, who has outlined what she calls ‘scout’ and ‘soldier’ mindsets:
A scout mindset, such as when a scout might draw a map, is essential when learning and adapting. “It’s about acknowledging we might know some elements of the map, but large parts of the map are still undrawn,” added Bull. “It’s not ignoring that we have expertise, but it’s looking for what’s missing.”
On the other hand, a soldier mindset is counterproductive because, as Bull said, “most of our energy is going to influencing other people to see things our way as opposed to learning from what we’re missing.” It can also help, as Shona Crooks, a colleague of Bull’s from Management Futures says, to ‘put your brain in neutral’.
What kind of listener are you?
It was a question posed by Management Futures’ Jeff Pagliano during July’s Leadership Skills Series session.
There are at least four different types of listener, as Pagliano pointed out, but anyone can become better at listening at depth.
He illustrated his rationale with this graphic:
“Usually when we’re trying to persuade someone, it’s all about sharing our perspective. We call that ‘advocacy’,” said Pagliano. Your advocacy will be made up of the facts known to you, things you see as important, and any assumptions you make about the other person.
That person will have facts, thoughts and assumptions of their own, which is why we must add ‘inquiry’ to help bring those to the fore. “And when you bring those two things together that’s where you get that shared pool of insight.”
Listening at depth has other benefits too:
Do you care enough about your coach and staff wellbeing?
“We’ve had athlete wellbeing and engagement in place for more than ten years. We still don’t have coach wellbeing and engagement in place at all.”
This observation, offered at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable on the topic, is by no means unique.
Members of the Leaders Performance Institute have seen the following approaches help:
Read a full account here.
The postpartum return of British athletes
This was a theme of last month’s Women’s High Performance Sport community call, which featured Esme Matthew, the Head of Physiology at the UKSI, and Dr Kate Hutchings, who works with the UKSI’s leading clinical services for all world-class-funded Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
Early and open communication helps athletes and their teams set expectations and create tailored return-to-performance plans, with support from performance lifestyle advisors.
These help to place the athlete at the centre of their own decision-making.
Pelvic floor education and support are essential for postpartum recovery.
Each athlete’s requires unique and flexible plans informed by health monitoring and any necessary practical adjustments. It is key to enable them to stay connected to their sport.
Mental health support is vital as athletes adjust to motherhood.
Informal peer networks, such as WhatsApp groups, offer valuable emotional and practical support, helping athletes share experiences and reduce isolation during pregnancy and postpartum.
Click here for a fuller insight.
Rakesh Patel is tasked with helping floundering NHS hospitals in England. He believes the answer lies in cultural transformation, empathetic teaching, and smarter feedback.
Having read that, you may think that just as readily applies to the world of sport.
“How can we transform underperforming environments into thriving ones?”
That is the question Rakesh Patel, a nephrological surgeon who works at Barts Hospital in London, asked the audience at last November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
His remit includes working on the NHS’s Recovery Support Programme [recently renamed the Provider Improvement Programme], which is designed to support underperforming hospitals and medical providers who have been placed in ‘special measures’.
Patel and his colleagues will work with these hospitals to help identify systemic issues that lead to habitual failures. They will implement evidence-based interventions and build local capacity to sustain improvements once they’ve left the building.
Away from clinical practice, Patel is a professor at Queen Mary University, where 2,300 medical students matriculate at any one time.
As such, he has given a lot of thought to learning and failure in the NHS, which is the ‘sacred cow’ of British society.
What does the Recovery Support Programme do?
Its aim is to mitigate crises and enable people to learn from their mistakes. For Patel, it has to start with rethinking underperformance, because jumping to conclusions helps no one.
“We only see the world as we see it, but not how others see it,” he says. “In a performance role, if we’re assessing someone, we often see the world as we think it should be and not actually how it is.”
Underperformance, whether in experienced clinicians or medical students, cannot always be attributed to a lack of skill or effort.
Just as distractions, pressure, poor communication or emotional stress are prevalent in sport, their presence is felt with greater consequence in medical settings.
Take this feedback from medical students when reflecting on video footage of their mistakes:
“The last one upset me most as a doctor,” says Patel, who later added that judgement can degenerate into reported cases of outright hostility. “I found it upsetting that these doctors were coming in to do work and we’re being nasty to them and that was why they were underperforming.”
At some level, as Patel explains, these errors point to the human limitations of working memory.
He cites The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, the highly regarded 1956 paper by psychologist George A Miller, who said that a person has a working memory capacity for five chunks of information, plus or minus two. That means placing the working memory under too much strain will lead to (often avoidable) errors.
Patel says: “Any threat to working memory will impair performance. If you need your brain and you need to think through things, it’s likely you’re going to have underperformance.”
It follows then that to enable better learning – and prevent avoidable errors – there needs to be less pressure on people’s working memory.
“If you add up all those bits contextual things – inattention, distraction – you can see why memory matters,” says Patel. “You can literally only remember three to seven things and, in that moment, when it hits your eyes and your ears, if you do not do something with it in the first half a second to three seconds, it’s gone. That’s why in high pressure situations when we’re under stress is when our memory gets hit. We can only focus on what we need to.”
That is why medicine values reps and evaluation as much as any team. “When things get complex, you don’t need to think about it.”
With this in mind, it is easier to choose the right form of feedback.
“We all talk about feedback and there’s probably more books on feedback than anything else,” says Patel. “There is an evidence base around how you give it and we wanted to give the best feedback, in the way that it needed to hit and cut through.”
This was tricky to navigate in hospitals placed under special measures. “They weren’t the easiest characters to work with,” he adds, “but it depends on what’s important. If there’s the greater good and we’re going to work together, then even the biggest ego you can get down to your level and work through.
“And we only went into hospitals if we had CEO buy-in and everyone was going to engage. So we taught them how to give feedback better.”
He highlighted four formats favoured in the NHS:
1. Facilitated self-reflection
“One of the most important interventions you can ever do is ask someone ‘how do you think that went?’ And if you do that before they start and you say ‘how well do you think you’re going to do before you start?’ You then get them to calibrate what they think with what you think.”
It was, as Patel says, “the lightbulb moment”. He also underlines the value of sitting with doctors as they watch themselves on video. “It’s not about telling them what they’ve done but asking them; ‘these are your notes, you wrote them, tell me what you were thinking at the table’. You don’t dictate, but get them to reflect.”
2. Revisit video assessments at periodic intervals
Patel and his colleagues test doctors and students from the outset and provide instant feedback. More critically, however, they will also revisit feedback at regular intervals over the following weeks.
“I’ve told you about working memory and fear – they’re going to forget it,” he says of that instant appraisal. “So we videoed everything and we drip fed the feedback over time. Why was that important? Because I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, but watching yourself make a mistake three or four weeks down the line when you know you’ve made that mistake, and being reminded of it, is really powerful.”
3. Peer to peer learning
Sometimes Patel takes himself out of the equation. “We often forget what it’s like to be a novice. That’s why peer-to-peer works really well. So if you’ve got someone new, get someone who’s of a similar age that can explain it better.”
4. Ask them to ‘teach it back’
“We do this when we teach clinical skills,” says Patel, alluding to evidence pointing to the efficacy of this approach to learning. “There’s something about having the confidence plus the competence to be able to explain a skill to someone else.”
The Recovery Support Programme approach is scalable too.
“I couldn’t go into all these hospitals, and this training model needed to be scaled,” says Patel, who explains that pharmacists were uniquely placed within hospitals to deliver the model in his stead. For one, a large proportion of the noted errors were prescription-based.
And it worked. Doctors trained by Patel’s team and those who have taken the training model make fewer mistakes. “We trained them to be resistant to all the trauma and all the nonsense around them, to still focus on the task.”
What to read next
Talent ID and Development: The Race to Deliver Formula 1’s First Female World Champion
In a recent Leadership Skills Series session, Management Futures’ Jeff Pagliano presented ways to prioritise ‘listening at depth’ in a fast-moving environment.
Jeff Pagliano, a consultant with leadership specialists Management Futures, posed this question at the outset of a recent online Leadership Skills Series session.
The Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance could select one of the following:
“This might be difficult because, as I said in our previous session on influencing skills, when we talk about communication, we really only think of it as how we express our ideas in a way that’s more persuasive,” Pagliano continued. “Do we stop and consider the important role that listening plays in that?”
He admitted that the description that fits him best is ‘I am easily distracted and my mind wanders’.
“I definitely feel my mind going in a couple of different directions when someone’s talking,” said one attendee. “I think I could have ticked all of those responses because sometimes the mind wanders to interrupting, waiting to answer.”
Pagliano empathised. “I think it is a product of the digital age,” he said. “My own thought is that we’re all easily distracted because we have so many stimuli constantly coming at us.”
Another member spoke of their tendency to be waiting to speak rather than listen fully.
He said: “Part of our roles is to try and be solutions-based and help our people with whatever they’re working their way through.” He reflected that it is a point of pride for people in his position. “Waiting to speak comes from the idea of being able to say ‘I think I have an answer or a suggestion that might be able to help you in this’. But I do think that at some point it detracts from the overall quality of the conversation and the connection piece that you then share with that person because you’re not fully present.”
Again, Pagliano highlighted the good intentions. “That tendency to come up with solutions comes from a very good place, but it’s about also trying to know when it’s appropriate.”
He added: “listening is what’s needed.”
The impact of listening at depth
Pagliano posed two further questions to help set the scene:
This provoked varied responses but the table agreed that people expect to be heard and leaders are expected to listen:
Pagliano also pointed out the importance of body language, eye contact and verbal cues.
The obstacles were just as recognisable:
Next, Pagliano explained why one of the benefits of listening at depth is what he calls a ‘shared pool of insight’. He illustrated his answer with this graphic:
“Usually when we’re trying to persuade someone, it’s all about sharing our perspective. We call that ‘advocacy’,” said Pagliano. Your advocacy will be made up of the facts known to you, things you see as important, and any assumptions you make about the other person.
That person will have facts, thoughts and assumptions of their own, which is why we must add ‘inquiry’ to help bring those to the fore. “And when you bring those two things together that’s where you get that shared pool of insight.”
Listening at depth has other benefits too:
“Erin Meyer”, as Pagliano explained, “has written a lot about collaborations across cultures and how sometimes when we’re listening if we’re missing something, it isn’t because we’re not working hard enough or we haven’t harnessed our listening skills, it’s because the cultural context that the other person is coming from is different than our own. And when I say ‘cultural context’, what I’m referring to is the education system, where they were raised and where they grew up.”
This led to a discussion of ‘low context’ and ‘high context’ cultures, which Pagliano outlined:
Real-life examples, he explained, could be a comparison of the United States and United Kingdom.
“The US would be considered a low context culture,” said Pagliano. “An American is going to tell you what they’re going to tell you, they’re going to tell you, and they’re going to tell you what they just told you. So they’re going to say it three times.
“The UK would be a high context culture. So if you’ve ever had a situation where you are listening, but you leave an interaction feeling as though you missed something, potentially, for myself as an American, it’s because I’m talking to someone from a high context culture.
“My listening hasn’t suffered, it’s not that I’m not putting as much effort into it, it’s that I don’t understand the context of the other person who’s communicating with me.
“I didn’t miss anything, but I wasn’t listening the right way.”
Five ways to show you are listening at depth
The virtual room included people working abroad and other environments where the coaches originate from a range of cultures.
This creates a spectrum of cultural norms around such elements as reporting lines, feedback and trust, which has implications for athletes and team dynamics. We can, however, demonstrate that we are listening at depth.
Pagliano has five tips:
He also suggests that people look out for the following:
Pagliano wrapped up the session with some final tips:
What to read next
When it comes to topics such as developing a performance culture, engendering trust and adroitly using tech, the former defender’s instincts as an athlete stand her in good stead.
A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners
“You feel it,” says the Director of Bayern’s women’s programme. “You already know when you look at their faces. You’re like ‘I think she doesn’t like it’, ‘yeah, she likes it’ and ‘she needs a bit of proof’. It’s like sometimes I see myself sitting on the other side.”
The ‘other side’, as Bianca tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders’ John Portch, refers to her transition from a Germany international and Frauen-Bundesliga regular to a senior leader of the German champions, whom she represented on the pitch for four years.
“It’s so much harder now when you sit on that side now,” she adds, reflecting on how she used to feel as a player. “I see myself sitting on the other side, like, ‘oh, maybe I have to talk to them again’.”
In this third and final episode of our special series with Teamworks, Bianca touched upon several of the major themes that emerged from our recent Special Report High Performance Unpacked: interconnected performance teams.
She spoke of her role in helping to transform the Bayern culture on and off the pitch [37:00]; keeping the athlete at the centre of the performance jigsaw [14:30]; the importance of sports psychology [31:00]; and the thoughtful integration of technology [21:00].
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
Episode One: Simon Rice, the Philadelphia 76ers
Episode Two: Miranda Menaspà, the Australian Institute of Sport
May shone a spotlight on ‘influencing skills’, leading in complex environments, coach development and finding the right ways to test tech solutions.
“We want to keep on building from this,” said Slegers after her side had defeated Barcelona Femení 1-0 in May’s Uefa Women’s Champions League final.
“We believe in who we are and what we do and we want to keep on building and keep on going next season.”
Slegers, who is less than a year into her first head coaching role, knows the risk of standing still, both as a team and as a head coach.
Throughout the fifth month, the Leaders Performance Institute was on hand to deliver a selection of sessions to help members further hone their leadership skills, from the art of influencing to introducing and managing more efficient processes for testing tech.
Here are some of the choicest cuts.
To influence, you need to listen
Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures hosted an ‘influencing skills’ session for Leaders Performance Institute members as part of our Leadership Skills Series.
He introduced the topic of ‘listening well’, which supports influencing in two specific ways.
“It helps the intimacy part of the trust equation and it gives you the context for a person’s point of view,” he said. “You’re more prepared when the time comes for you to share your knowledge and suggest a course of action.
“Active listening is when you’re not only tuned into what someone says but also what they feel and believe picking up on both their verbal and non-verbal communication is the foundation of intimacy and the antithesis of self-interest.”
He shared the following image to illustrate his point:
When you’re talking to someone you are hoping to influence it’s always useful to reflect on the goals of each conversation, both what you want and what the other person needs as a way to determine the best way to listen at the moment. And you may realise that a different mode or combinations of modes would be better.
Jeff Pagliano, Management Futures
Top tips for leading in complexity
In May, we also launched a Learning Series that explored adaptability in the complex world of high performance. In the first session, Tim Cox of Management Futures offered a series of seven tips, including: prioritise time for analysing what is changing.
Here’s what that entails:
Read all seven tips here.
Are you able to thoroughly assess tech solutions?
At the beginning of May, we published our Trend Report entitled ‘The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport’.
The report delves into the barriers that prevent organisations adopting new technologies and is informed by more than 200 individuals from nearly 40 sports. While cost was predictably high on the list, three other challenges emerged as equally, if not more, critical.
It was the perfect opportunity to run a virtual roundtable discussing the systems and processes that members have in place at their teams. The table identified a number of critical success factors.
While much of the conversation focused on systems and structures, several participants emphasised the importance of culture and communication as critical to the success of these processes. One high performance manager noted that their organisation is “risk-averse” when it comes to new tech, not because of a lack of interest, but because of a desire to protect core business functions. “If there’s anything we can use to get all the noise out of other people’s way so they can actually do the day-to-day job better, then we’re normally onboard with that.”
Another pointed out the generational divide in digital fluency. Younger staff are digital natives and eager to adopt new tools. Older staff, by contrast, may be more cautious or feel overwhelmed. Bridging this gap requires not just training, but empathy and thoughtful change management.
Additionally, performance sport may need to rethink its leadership structures. In other industries, CTOs and innovation directors play a critical role in aligning technology with strategy. In sport, these roles are rare but increasingly necessary.
Without someone to “own” the innovation agenda, organisations risk falling into reactive patterns and chasing shiny new tools without a clear sense of purpose. As one contributor put it, “We need someone who can sit above the noise and guide us forward.”
Coach development cannot be separated from athlete development
Another virtual roundtable looked at helping athletes to bridge the gap from the youth to senior ranks.
While discussing an array of approaches, the table underlined the importance of investing in coach development as a key influence on transition experiences for athletes. One element of this is ensuring coaches are equipped to recognise and understand different transitions as they occur in different contexts and, therefore, deal with them more effectively.
An environment within the Olympic system explained how their decentralised programme has witnessed new performance records at junior level due in part to their consistent approach to coach development. Their heightened emphasis on coach support and development extends not only to their current athletes but those next on the pathway.
Also, coach-to-coach exchanges enable individuals to discuss both common transitions and those lesser-considered transitions that are nevertheless challenging, such as injuries.
Additional reporting by Luke Whitworth.
Read the Trend Report now
