By Luke Whitworth

The ability to lead courageous conversations is a skill in which all coaches and practitioners can excel, but it requires revisiting from time to time.

That was the premise for this recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute were invited by our friends at Management Futures to explore:

• How to create the conditions for courageous or difficult conversations
• How to navigate these conversations effectively

There are two key principles:

1. It is not enough for you to have the courage to say what it is that you want to say – people must feel safe enough to hear it. In psychologically safe environments, people are more receptive to difficult conversations; and leaders can find more frequent opportunities to explore tricky topics.
2. We are striving for actionable insight. The point of having important conversations is that something changes in the aftermath. It’s not just an opportunity to download or speak your truth.

What is ‘skilled candour’?

When we have explored this topic in the past, we referenced the term of ‘radical candour’, which coined by executive coach Kim Scott, who argues in her 2017 book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing your Humanity that leaders have a ‘moral imperative’ to step into difficult conversations and challenge with skill. This requires courage because it is simply easier to avoid such conversations.

Scott’s idea has influenced Management Futures, who fashioned their own concept: ‘skilled candour’, which underlines the skill behind the action.

On that note, psychological safety is essential so that people know that you are coming from a well-intended place. If there isn’t a belief that there is trust or positive intention, it may well trigger the ‘inner chimp’ (the primitive, emotional part of our brains, which is there to protect you but, in certain circumstances, can arouse feelings of defensiveness).

When the chimp has been triggered it’s unlikely that you will have a productive conversation.

The aim must be to create a sense of safety so we can be honest and speak directly:

Image: Management Futures

Ruinous empathy: this is where we say what needs to be said in a clear and direct way. When you want to spare someone’s short-term feelings, you don’t tell them something that they need to know. You care personally but fail to challenge them directly, with ruinous consequences.

Insincerity: when you neither care personally nor challenge directly. You offer insincere praise to a person’s face and criticise them harshly behind their back.

Aggressive: when you challenge someone directly, but don’t show you care about them personally. It’s praise that feels insincere and feedback that isn’t delivered kindly.

We asked the practitioners and coaches in attendance where they thought they sat on the skilled candour graph. A straw poll delivered a striking insight:

Ruinous empathy: 45%

Insincerity: 3%

Aggression: 12%

Skilled candour: 39%

There are five key skills to enable your preparation, delivery and summary of a courageous conversation.

1. Check your assumptions: we make up a lot of stuff about people. We imagine what’s going on in people’s lives, what they think about us, what their motives are. We imagine what they’re going to say in that conversation and how they’re going to react. And then we work our responses around that where we can tie ourselves up in knots, and we’re having a conversation in our heads rather than what’s truly happening. So strip out your assumptions.
2. Have a clear outcome: declutter the nonsense. What is the outcome that you want to have and what is a good outcome for this conversation? This will help you get an actionable insight.
3. Manage your body language and tone: so many of us are so busy that we just leak out impatient, stressed and busy signals. Non-verbally, we’re sending out some different signs, so it is important to be present, be composed and give high quality attention. What we don’t want to be doing is to be half in a conversation and half out as people pick up on it. Giving someone your full attention is a gift, and they will feel it, and they will trust you.
4. Maintain a two-way dialogue: difficult conversations should be two-way. What are your thoughts? This is how I feel. How do you feel? This is what I would like to happen in the future. What are you going to do? What help do you want? Make sure you’re really using your active, listening and really great, powerful, open questions as well.
5. Agree specific next steps: what are you going to do differently? How are you going to make sure it happens? What support do you need and make sure that it’s specific? Get right down into detail with the actionable insights.

The SBI feedback model

The Center for Creative Leadership’s SBI feedback model is a useful tool for both positive and constructive feedback. ‘SBI’ stands for ‘situation/standard’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘impact’.

Below is a simple example of what this could look like – the key is what we want to get straight to the point:

Situation/standard: To begin, we should guide the person to recall the exact time and place where the action we’re discussing occurred. The more specific we are, the better, as it will help them visualise their surroundings and actions at that moment. This provides the context for the feedback.

Example: ‘It’s really important in team meetings that everybody gets the chance to share their opinions and feels heard’.

Behaviour: Outline the specific actions or behaviours that prompted the feedback. As with the previous part, it’s must be as detailed as possible. We’ll achieve this by providing two key pieces of information:

1. What was the behaviour?
2. What did they do specifically that causes you to think that this was the behaviour they were demonstrating?

Example: ‘I’ve noticed in the last couple of meetings that when people have come up with an idea you’ve immediately said something negative about it’.

Impact: We should highlight what we believe the impact of their actions was. This impact could pertain to you, the team or other individuals. As with the previous section, it needs to be detailed and is divided into two parts:

1. Who did it impact on and how?
2. Why do you think this was the impact?

 Example: ‘You’ve talked about why it’s not possible and the impact of that is that it’s draining the energy out of the room and stopping people speak up’.

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Psychological Services at the FC Bayern Campus: ‘We Always Worked Together, but Now our Efforts Are Integrated’

By John Portch

When Chris Fagan’s Brisbane Lions won the AFL in 2024 it completed their transformation under his stewardship.

Their premiership success was not a bolt from the blue – they had reached the Grand Final a year earlier – but it was a far cry from the 18^th place finish the Lions managed in 2017, which was Fagan’s first campaign at the helm.

He appeared at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London – just weeks after Brisbane narrowly lost the Grand Final to Collingwood.

There were no guarantees that they would make the decider again in 2024 but Fagan, who had his doubters in Australia, transmitted confidence from the Oval stage. “Last year [2022], we lost the preliminary final by 71 points. A lot of people said we wouldn’t recover from that,” he said. “This year, we made a Grand Final and lost it by four points. I said to the players, ‘we’re getting better, we’re getting closer. We’ve been the most successful team over the last few years. Be proud of that. The team we played in the Grand Final is older and more experienced, so that’ll be good for us.”

So it was to prove. But the focus here is those early years, when Fagan worked to turnaround a faltering team. It was only in year three, when the team jumped from 15^th to 2^nd in the AFL ladder, that his methods were vindicated by points and victories.

There were three factors that underpinned Fagan’s approach.

1. He sought partners in the process

In 2017, Fagan arrived with his vision for a high performance culture. In outline it bore some familiar features:

But in order to deliver this through a strategic plan, Fagan needed everyone onside. It wouldn’t be easy in what had become a “poor bugger, me” environment. “I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there,” he said.

Over the course of four weeks he solicited the views of every player and member of staff. “I wanted to send a message to everyone at the club that they would be listened to, that it wasn’t just me coming in and telling them what was going to happen,” he added. “I wanted to find out what they thought the club needed to do to become better because they needed to be partners with me in the process. I think they appreciated that because they hadn’t had a process for a long time. They’d just been told what to do.”

This brought him trust and credibility during those first two seasons when there was barely a flicker of improvement in scoreboard terms.

2. The team became ‘the happiest bunch of losers’

Fagan is a big believer in high challenge, high support for players in pursuit of their goals. The challenges were plain to see in 2017, and the first measure of support came from Fagan himself. “I see myself as the chief energy and psychological safety officer,” he said onstage. “I want to build an environment where the players and staff feel trusted and motivated, because that certainly wasn’t the case when I turned up.”

Even as the poor results endured, the team’s morale did not falter. “You’d have said we were the happiest bunch of losers during the early years,” says Damien Austin, the club’s High Performance Manager. “We celebrated everything because we were such a young team.” That included winning quarters of games, strength gains or running PBs in training. “We were always striving for progression,” he continues. “And if there wasn’t progression there’s a reason why, and I think like any young kids today, you’ve got to take them on a journey.”

It chimes with Fagan’s emphasis on growth mindsets and, as a former teacher himself, the importance of learning day in day out. As ever in a Fagan team it comes with a human face. His list has a WhatsApp group chat called ‘Moments of greatness’ where players celebrate examples of their teammates setting new standards.

3. Fagan worked to increase his team’s ‘leadership density’

AFL veteran Luke Hodge joined the Lions’ journey for Fagan’s first two years. The new coach’s first big recruitment decision was to bring in the man he regarded as “the greatest captain to ever play the game” from Hawthorn, the club from which Fagan himself had joined Brisbane.

“He was well and truly at the end of his career,” said Fagan of the four-time premiership player. “But I just wanted somebody to come in and role model great leadership to a young group of players.”

Additionally, Fagan worked with leadership consultant Simon Fletcher to devise a leadership development programme for senior and emerging leaders. “The first thing he did was establish a trademark, which was a reference point for leadership.”

To this day the Lions’ trademark is built around the concepts of ‘brotherhood’, ‘heart’ and ‘selflessness’:

But Fagan knows as well as anyone that these are just words on a wall without the behaviours that drive and sustain these ideas. “The players come up with those and we drive it,” said Fagan of the Lions coaching staff.

“After a game, the players have to send me a text the day after and one of the things they need to rate is their compliance to the trademark for that game.” Usually, the better the result and performance, the higher the rate of compliance. It can go the other way when the team loses. In any case, “we have a vision of it being done well and we also show a vision of when it’s not so good”. Additionally, the Lions hand out a ‘brother of the week’ award, where players are invited to vote via WhatsApp for the player who best demonstrated the trademark behaviours that week.

In summary…

Fagan understands that if your environment is highly demanding then it must also be highly supportive. He has clear ideas on what motivates people that go back to his days as a teacher:

He said: “To be motivated, you have to have a clear purpose, that feeling that you’re improving, which I think our guys hadn’t felt for a long, long time. There is a desire to be listened to and to be a participant in your own growth and development; and that connection with teammates, staff and community.

“I put that model up as areas we would spend a lot of time on over the next few years, trying to grow our culture and team into a better place.”

What to read next

Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By John Portch with Luke Whitworth

What are the hallmarks of a good working dynamic between a practitioner and their head coach?

The question came up time and again during March across a range of Virtual Roundtables, whether the primary theme was organisational alignment, sports science, psychology or data usage.

This month we reflect on those roundtables and bring you four practices that have served Leaders Performance Institute members well when working with their head coaches.

1. Spend time with coaches and athletes

It sounds obvious, but coaches need to know how to apply the insights you deliver as a practitioner. “By always giving information that is contextually useful for that time of the year or by understanding the training cycle, you get more engagement,” said Kenneth Graham, a member of the Australian Institute of Sport’s Research Review Committee, who was speaking at an Exercise & Sports Science Australia roundtable. “You do need that time to build up the credibility and the acceptance of the coach to take on information from you; and over time that becomes a faster process. It can be done over a cup of coffee, you may not need a formal presentation, but being part of the process, seeing the development of the training programmes, being at the training sessions, being at the competitions, looking for the gaps where the information you’re giving is seen as valuable.”

2. Make accountability the norm

A department should articulate its goals within the team’s wider vision. “We all have a vision of what each department is working towards and who’s going to be responsible for those elements,” said one attendee during a roundtable discussing organisational alignment. A team can also ask, “‘this is what this department is working on – is that getting us to where we want to go?’”

Where your values are on the wall, they can serve as a useful conversation-starter. Another attendee, who works as a director of performance, spoke of approaching a staff member “standing in front of our strategy and saying, ‘where’s the work you’re doing? Where does it fit in our strategy? The acid test is they say, ‘oh, yeah, I work on this, and I know I contribute to that’. If they can’t do it then that’s on me, because we haven’t made it really clear where their work fits.”

Where there’s progress, you can celebrate the wins. “People get the chance to be appreciated. ‘OK, this is what you’re working on, this is how it’s going’” said a participant from a club in the NWSL, “and we can celebrate the victories where we’ve started to move the needle towards that ultimate goal.”

3. Timing is critical

“Timing is everything with coaches,” said one member during a roundtable that focused on the use of data. “The timing of when you plant the seed or present something new to a coach is really the start of the success or failure of what you’re trying to do.” Another attendee suggested that a practitioner must consider “what is it that you’re going to provide? And what is it you’re going to hold back?” A third offered an example of this in practice: “We’ve introduced not just new technology, like tools and hardware, but also a large number of new datasets and data metrics for the coaches to understand.” An astute practitioner will foster a curious mindset and understand “when it’s OK to give the coach a little bit more to stretch them and when we will hold something back.”

4. Find ways to track, test and refine your work 

Some people in sport openly lament the perceived lack of metrics in fields such as psychology. This notion frustrates Rich Hampson, the Head of Psychology on the men’s side at the Football Association, as he told a virtual roundtable on the topic of psychological services. He said: “I see psych fall down because it’s not defined well enough early enough.” However, if you are clear at the beginning, “90 per cent of it can be tracked. The broader you are, the less defined you are, it’s harder to ask: ‘is this actually having impact?’”

Benchmarking tends to be an area where sport excels, but not when it comes to psychological services. Hampson said: “I think sports should be more confident in going ‘if we’re clear on what we’re doing, more often than not, we’ll be able to give you an indicator here, whether that has done what we want it to do’; and then, like any science experiment, if your first intervention doesn’t lead to the outcome that you want, it gives you a real good platform to go ‘OK, why did that not work? And what do we need to adapt and change?’

“I think that’s really hard to do in a really objective way when you’re not setting that in the first place.”

And if you missed it…

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Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By John Portch & Luke Whitworth

The performance director glanced at the complicated data on the head coach’s half-time board and later delivered a blunt assessment.

“I said to him: ‘I had you when you were a player – I know you wouldn’t understand any of this – so why are you telling this to our players?’”

The performance director in question shared this story at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable entitled ‘Effective Integration and Interpretation of Data in Coaching’.

It quickly dawned on the coach. “He went: ‘yeah, I’m sorry, I hold my hands up’. That was powerful because he could see it.”

Ideally, a coach would have both the working knowledge and the confidence to make targeted and effective data-influenced interventions that remove confusion or ambiguity.

Over the course of an hour, members of the Leaders Performance Institute, drawn from a mixture of analytics, sports science and coaching backgrounds, discussed the steps they are taking to improve the data literacy of coaches at their organisations. They homed in on four factors.

1. Educate coaches from the outset

Performance practitioners: engage the coach early in their tenure. Data can be another string in their bow. “You don’t want to burden them,” said one participant from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system, “but how can you elevate them and enhance them as a coach?” The key is to explain that data is there to support their intuition as a coach. Even AI should be no more than a ‘co-pilot’. Data analysis should support the work of the coach and “give them confidence in their decision making.”

Furthermore, as analytics career pathways evolve, more teams are establishing hybrid coaching and analytics roles. “Some of the best analysts are good interpreters and translators for coaches,” said one attendee working in English football, “and some of them have taken that on themselves to think ‘I can go and progress in this’ if they’ve got an interest in pushing on with the coaching area as well.”

2. Too little or too much? Timing is critical

“Timing is everything with coaches,” said one member, while making the distinction between ‘teaching and developing’ and the ‘telling and giving of answers’. “The timing of when you plant the seed or present something new to a coach is really the start of the success or failure of what you’re trying to do.” Another attendee suggested that a practitioner must consider “what is it that you’re going to provide? And what is it you’re going to hold back?” A third offered an example of this in practice: “We’ve introduced not just new technology, like tools and hardware, but also a large number of new datasets and data metrics for the coaches to understand.” An astute practitioner will foster a curious mindset and understand “when it’s OK to give the coach a little bit more to stretch them and when we will hold something back.”

3. Highlight the link between data and performance… selectively

When a curiosity-driven coach uses data to support their intuition, they can do their most effective work. “I always tend to try and attach myself quite closely with any analyst to marry up the science and the art,” said an age-group cricket coach in England. “It’s about getting the data and then allowing that coaching gut feel and observation to take place as well.”

From the analysis side, it requires someone able to move beyond their specialisms to communicate readily with the coaching staff and other colleagues. “The positions of technical directors or performance managers within this space are critical to make the decisions about what we translate and how we do that,” said a member. “My experiences of things when they’ve gone well would be with practitioners that have those professional skills to communicate and give what is needed rather than give too much.”

4. What’s the priority? A coach must decide

It’s on the coach to establish the need for their performance team. “The practitioners shouldn’t overwhelm the coach, but also the coach shouldn’t overwhelm the practitioners,” said a participant from the British Olympic and Paralympic system. “Do they truly have a priority? Do they truly know what it takes to win?” The coach needs to be clear on how the data is to be used, whether it’s to inform development, to pose exploratory questions, or to make a decision. “Coaches can fall into a trap. They want to know everything, but do they truly need to know everything? What are they actually prioritising?” From there the team can decide “what are they going to double down on and ask where the gaps are for exploration.”

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What Are the Risks when Monitoring Slips into Surveillance?

An article brought to you by

By John Portch & Luke Whitworth

Dr Robin Thorpe has instant reservations when performance departments describe themselves as ‘integrated’.

“It’s become a new trend or buzz term in high performance,” said the former Director of Performance at Red Bull. “I’d be really interested to see how many self-proclaimed integrated departments and processes actually are.”

In a truly integrated department, he argued, there has to be “positive and respectful challenge between staff and then between the disciplines” and he is unconvinced that this is always the case in many environments.

“Not to be controversial, but I would think that in some of the areas or places where true integration is preached, there might actually not be any collaboration whatsoever,” Thorpe added. “And so, without collaboration, there might not be any friction points or any challenge, so it might only be perceived as an integrated process.”

Thorpe was speaking at the first session of ‘The Future of Performance Sport’, a three-part Virtual Roundtable series brought to you by the Leaders Performance Institute and Exercise & Sports Science Australia. The first session explored the ‘future practitioner of high performance’.

He was joined on the virtual stage by Deakin University’s Dr Lyndell Bruce, who harbours similar reservations when it comes to integration.

She said: “So often we see with these integrated teams that an athlete has poor performance. So they throw everything that’s been working really well out the window to try and solve why we’re not winning – and that suggests that it’s really not an integrated team.”

The future practitioner will need to find the answers and, here, we detail four considerations, including better integration, that will help to stand them in good stead.

1. Combined technical knowledge and ‘soft’ skills

Both Bruce and Thorpe believe that the future practitioner will combine technical knowledge and softer skills

“People call them ‘soft’ skills – I like to call them transferable skills, complementary skills,” said Bruce. She also pondered how they might be taught. “It’s challenging because it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes resources. It’s too easy to say students will get that in their work, integrated learning, because we know it’s not the case. They don’t all go to the same environment and we can’t control those environments.”

There are questions to be answered on the technical side too, with Thorpe emphasising the importance of detailed and applied research. “We delve into research articles which might be relevant to what we do, but we also see how they associate with the work that we do,” he said.

Thorpe also believes that generalists will continue to have their place. “Although specialisation will offer a lot more opportunities for younger students and practitioners going forwards, I hope that we don’t lose the more generalist skills that I think are very, very effective currently.”

2. The impact of AI and technology

Thorpe sees AI as a potential time-saver, but with caveats. “I think we know that AI can certainly support us with is enhancing processing times when it comes to using and working with data that we have,” he said. “We’ve come into this era of plug-and-play technology, which means that our ability to cope with data has become stretched.”

However, he added, “I certainly don’t believe it’ll ever be the silver bullet to a lot of our performance problems or challenges or questions.” It is no surprise that he preaches caution. “I think we still probably need to think about some of the principles of why we’re collecting some of that data in the first place.”

At Deakin, Bruce and her colleagues have gotten used to students using AI to craft responses. She said: “The conversations are leaning towards how we teach students to use this in an advantageous way.”

And, as she observes, “many organisations are using those machine learning models to create outputs, look at different tactical and technical elements of match play, to understand the physiological data that they’re receiving, so I don’t think that’s unique; and I think there’s still a way to go in terms of how we use that and how we implement that more effectively.”

3. The growth of psychology and mental performance

Wellbeing – and psychology as part of wellbeing – continues to grow in prominence, with all staff members called upon to play their part.

“It’s not a once-off conversation because they flagged on the wellbeing this week and then two weeks later they’re back in their normal range – we continue that conversation and check-in,” said Bruce of her work Deakin. She also noted the growing specialisation in how psychology is used in sport. “We use psychology from a performance perspective and also a clinical perspective.”

Thorpe was responsible for mental performance in his most recent role. “It was very much a pivotal learning opportunity for me; to understand the continuum of how mental performance operates,” he said. This included performance under pressure, helping athletes to deal with increased mental loads in training and competition, and psychological profiling.

4. Integration

Integration is increasingly difficult in a world of growing specialisation with so many inputs to reconcile, but Thorpe and Bruce both offered some tips.

For his part, Thorpe emphasised objectivity, particularly given the different ‘languages’ that individuals in different fields will speak. He says: “How can we use objectivity as a common language? Good objectivity – not AI-based reams and reams of data – but really solid precision-based objectivity is our vehicle to integrating approaches.”

High performance teams need to understand the desired outcome, then, as he asked, “how do we then fit these experts and specialists to those outcomes rather than coming at it all individually?”

Bruce then argued for consistency. “[The high performance team] operates irrespective of performance, while you might need to innovate and make adjustments along the way,” she said. “But it doesn’t change because of poor performance.”

Further reading:

Sports Science Research: the Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities

By Luke Whitworth

The generational gap in sport applies to athletes and coaches, but the term just as readily applies to coaching and performance staffs.

It provokes a question that was explored in a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable: how can senior leaders work to create an environment where different generations can co-exist?

Beyond age, different generations have unique sets of beliefs, values and attitudes, which has implications for their work and the ways they work with others.

The challenge lies in finding the common ground. First, let’s take a look at the general characteristics of different generations:

• Baby Boomers (c. 1944-1960): This generation often faces challenges in bridging the beliefs, values and attitudes gap with younger generations. These differences can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.
• Gen X (c. 1961-1980): This generation shares some similarities with younger generations, such as a culture of immediacy (an expectation for quick responses and rapid results). However, they also value group solidarity, which can differ from the more individualistic approach of younger generations.
• Gen Y / Millennials (c. 1981-2000): Known for their respect for diversity and a desire to acquire new skills, this generation often has a low commitment to organisations. They seek to be valued and acknowledge.
• Gen Z (c. 2001-Present): Digital natives; this generation is collaborative, creative, and values honest feedback. They are often impatient and overstimulated, which requires a novel approach to engagement and communication.

By the same token, there are obvious similarities, as the table noted.

“We don’t want to put people into boxes,” said one participant. “We don’t want to make assumptions of groups of people that make you, as a leader, behave in a certain way that’s not appropriate for that person.”

• A desire for immediacy: younger generations share Generation X’s liking for quick responses and immediate results.
• Everyone values teamwork: the supposed Generation X trait of valuing teamwork is visible in today’s athletes, even if they lean towards more individual characteristics.
• Flexible work environments: many staff members, regardless of their generation, seek flexibility in their roles.
• A liking for feedback: both older and younger generations value feedback, especially when it is honest and transparent. The differences emerge in frequency and manner.

Five key considerations for leaders

Going back to the generational differences, and knowing what we know, the virtual table explored five leadership considerations:

1. Respect and dialogue: leaders should foster an environment of mutual respect, collaboration and open dialogue.
2. Understanding the world of work: Leaders need to understand the evolving rules of the world of work and learn from experience to identify and explore common interests.
3. Inclusive work environments: Creating inclusive work environments that perceive differences as a source of improvement is crucial. This involves leaning into diversity as a strength rather than a challenge.
4. Reconciling interests and expectations: Leaders should focus on reconciling the interests and expectations of different generations by finding commonalities and leveraging them to foster co-existence. They should encourage continuous learning and adaptation.
5. Distinct generational traits: Recognise that there has never been such a distinction in traits between generations as there is now, and use this understanding to inform your leadership strategies.

Practical strategies

In the quest for better collaboration and alignment, several participants spoke of practical strategies in their environments.

Try to understand people’s experiences and intentions

One environment, in preparation for the 2026 Commonwealth Games, is asking its athletes and coaches a series of questions as they seek to bridge the generational gaps.

“We’ve been getting athletes into a room and asking: ‘how are you experiencing this environment?’” said the attendee who shared the story. “We ask ‘do you feel like you’re developing?’ And ‘do you feel like you’re successful?’ along with ‘is your wellbeing looked after?’” They ask coaches: “’What is your intention in terms of the environment or the experience that you’re trying to create for athletes?’”

There have been some positive outcomes. “This insight has led to some activities that coaches and athletes can engage in to bridge that gap and make it more likely that people are collaborating efficiently and effectively on the path to get that goal.”

Invite people to share their story

One participant working in the British system spoke of their organisation’s ‘life stories’ project. “We get somebody to share their life story. The benefits are clear: “it highlights the different things that people have experienced, that have contributed to where they are in their life right now. It really helps people to see others’ journeys; and it really connects people because they understand somebody a little bit more.”

Launch a ‘cultural reboot’

It can be difficult to cultivate a unified culture when you are working in the service of ten sports, each with their own culture. One participant, who works for a British university renowned for its sporting heritage, spoke of the school’s efforts to develop that unified culture through an ongoing “cultural reboot”.

They are “asking the student-athletes, and even the academics who may not be involved in terms of sport delivery, but have regular communication and contact with a lot of our students, what they think the culture is of the sports programmes.”

Reverse mentoring

Implementing reverse mentoring and buddy systems can help bridge generational gaps. For example, younger employees can mentor senior staff on digital tools, while senior staff can share their experience and knowledge.

Establish ‘cells’ based on common interests

Some interests are cross-generational – a fact to which one Premier League club is leaning. This club, as your correspondent told the virtual table, identified common interests among their staff and encouraged them to form small groups (cells) to collaborate, share ideas, and learn from each other. These groups would meet regularly to discuss their interests and progress.

By Luke Whitworth

David Beckham was one of the first athletes in sport to be described as a ‘cultural architect’.

The label was used by sports psychologist Willi Railo, who worked as a consultant in the early 2000s for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England men’s national team Manager at the time.

“He has grown to become a cultural architect,” said Railo of then England captain Beckham in a BBC documentary titled The England Patient, which was broadcast ahead of the 2002 Fifa World Cup.

“[Beckham] has today a very great influence on the attitudes of the other players and he is thinking along the same lines as Sven-Göran Eriksson. So he’s a very good tool for Sven.”

According to Railo, cultural architects are “people that are able to change the mind-set of other people. They’re able to break barriers, they have visions, they are self-confident and they are able to transfer their own self-confidence to a group of people”.

Present day cultural architects include figures such as the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi, Australia men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins, and Chelsea Women captain Millie Bright. The list is endless when you dig down.

Your cultural architects can be coaches or staff members too. They can be anyone who pays enormous attention to culture. Critically, while they are not always the most senior leader, they do have to have the ear of those leading.

The idea that cultural architects can emanate from anywhere gave real impetus to a recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute explored various interventions and the value of adopting a strengths-based approach to building culture.

Current cultural goals

What established goals do you have in your organisations that relate to your wider organisational culture?

One of the trends we’re noticing when it comes to cultural leadership is a focus on one specific aspect of culture at a time. The participants in the session identified a series of culture-strengthening goals that, if achieved, would deliver a competitive advantage:

• Collaboration across functions
• Continuous improvement
• Innovation and creativity
• Belonging, identity and wellbeing
• Psychological safety
• Use of data to inform decisions

When you align behind a goal, progress can be swift.

The six levers needed to lead a cultural change

In the session, we revisited six key levers for leading cultural change.

1. Make the key principles ‘sticky’

A message needs to be heard at least six times for a person to take it in and, if the principles are ‘sticky’, they naturally become easier to remember. Consider your straplines or strategy: do they meet that level of ‘stickiness’? A good example from the Olympic world is the question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ Another is the All Blacks’ ‘leave the jersey in a better place’.

2. Role models

This is the classic example of ‘words on the wall’ versus living the values. If the leaders and cultural leaders really model those behaviours, it’s what people will experience and lead by. Research in the field of inclusive leadership shows that leaders can influence the people, the athletes, the organisation around them by up to 70 per cent with their behaviours.

3. Culture conversations

A team must constantly review their organisation and culture and reflect on their current status. Ask yourself: where are our gaps? Where are our strengths? How can we improve? You can use a system rating scale from 1-4 to guide some of these insights. These system rating scales create an opportunity for those culture conversations to emerge and they provide an insight into the health of the culture at a specific moment in time.

4. Develop skills and processes to support intent

Take psychological safety: it is important to enable people to speak up. If you provide such opportunities it supports the intent to make positive change.

5. Feedback

Feedback is critical, yet people do not always deliver skilful feedback. Too often it can feel personal, it provokes defensiveness and is ultimately counterproductive. It is better to create a feedback loop and a culture of ‘skilled candour’ (a twist on Kim Scott’s ‘radical candour’) so that people are able to deliver feedback in a skilful manner.

6. Get the right people on the bus

When engaging in culture change, do you have the right people in your environment? It may come to a time when you have to make a decision about who needs to be on the bus – and who doesn’t.

The power of AI (appreciative inquiry)

Appreciative inquiry is a social constructivist-informed model that seeks to engage people in self-determined change. The model, which was devised in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is inherently positive. It focuses on discovering and amplifying the best of what already exists (individually and collectively) within a system or organisation. It stands in contrast to most change models, which tend to identify problems and seek to fix them.

What are some of the benefits of appreciative inquiry?

The model:

• Leverages existing strengths, requiring less change and new learning.
• Creates positive energy, building confidence and pride.
• Taps the experience of those on the frontline and fosters ownership for performance.

How we do it:

• Identify and share examples where you have been at your best and forensically unpick those.
• Identify behaviours that stand out and challenge people to be specific.
• Maintain disciplined focus on positive examples.

Here are some reflective questions you can use within your environments when considering what aspects of your culture you want to develop:

• Think of at least one example of where you have seen this behaviour at its best in your culture. A subsequent coaching question could then be: ‘what stands out from these examples?’ The key is to be specific.
• Think of an individual who exemplifies this behaviour in your culture. Here’s an additional coaching question: what specifically do they do? Summarise key behaviours and standards from your discussion within a ‘we are at our best when we…’ framework.

By John Portch

Some say young athletes are not as single-minded and dedicated to their craft as earlier generations.

That is not necessarily true, but young athletes today do tend to have more autonomy and wider horizons.

If they decide they do not want to be on this pathway or that programme, others will welcome them with open arms. Even if an athlete does commit to your programme: are you providing the wellbeing, learning and social support they increasingly demand?

This generational shift – and the challenges it poses coaches and staff – set the terms for a virtual roundtable titled ‘What Are our Athletes Telling us?’ where we invited members of the Leaders Performance Institute from across the globe to answer four questions:

• What are we learning from conversations with athletes?
• Are there trends in the type of support they need?
• What topics interest young athletes?
• How are we adapting our environments to meet their needs?

Their responses pointed to four trends in the athlete-coach-team dynamic.

1. Athletes are increasingly expressing their desire for belonging and connection

Teams should consider the psychosocial elements of an athlete’s development. Emerging athletes wish for meaningful experiences and want a sense of belonging and connection. “It’s about where are they enjoying themselves the most and where they see the opportunities,” said one participant, who spoke of Australia’s women’s rugby sevens.

The programme takes teams of emerging athletes on tour to far flung places. Therein lies the opportunity for community-based activities where players will meet locals, in circumstances often far removed from their own and, in contributing to social and environmental causes, continue to develop a more rounded perspective of their own lives and development.

This builds on the fine work being done in Australia to develop the “whole athlete”, as one participant with knowledge of the environment explained. The Australian system, they said, has prioritised mental health support for Olympic and Paralympic athletes at the behest of the athletes themselves.

2. Athletes crave individual – and team – development

The desire of younger athletes for belonging and connection comes with a paradoxical demand for more personalised training and attention. This has implications for the time coaches spend on team dynamics in an era where the power has shifted to the athlete. “Staff and coaches are more vulnerable,” said one participant, who pondered where the balance needs to sit. “Give the athletes a voice and a choice, give them ownership, have the consultation, but there is a line too.”

Another participant with experience of coaching in European football, highlighted that individual work will mean different things to different people and can be dependent on team selection. They argued that there is room for better management of expectations and, more broadly, a consensus for coaches and athletes alike on what constitutes ‘individual’ training.

3. Athletes want a formal voice in decision-making

Athletes want to have a say in decisions that affect them. A participant working at the Premier League spoke of their members’ club captains being increasingly forthright in their views on league-sponsored initiatives.

They said there need to be clear systems and processes for engaging athletes and ensuring their feedback is considered, with the caveat that any outcomes may be unclear or unformed, depending on the complexity of the issue.

To this latter point, another participant spoke of the athlete advisory committee with whom they work. “We’re trying to provide agency and elevate that athlete voice, which in a lot of ways is really valuable and adds a lot of benefit,” they said. “But there’s risk associated with that. You are letting the ‘good’ in with the ‘bad’ to an extent depending on what topic it relates to, particularly in terms of managing expectations.”

4. Athletes want to explore opportunities beyond the sporting arena

One participant noted that athlete care roles have developed from being “concierge-style to far more hands-on”. That might include helping young overseas athletes settle in a new country with their close family or it might mean supporting leadership development, media skills training, or helping athletes to explore other professional opportunities beyond their sporting careers.

The Australian sports system, for example, is getting better at providing educational and career opportunities of the kind that enable athletes to be more “job-ready”.

However, it is not just those athletes in (typically) lower-income Olympic and Paralympic sports seeking wider professional development: LinkedIn has seen an exponential increase in major league athletes using its platform. As one participant noted, this interest in business and entrepreneurship is not a surprise given the levels of disposable income available to some athletes. It invites the question: how might teams and leagues support players in these endeavours?

By John Portch

Stuart Lancaster understood the scale of the challenge that awaited him at Racing 92 when he took the reins as Head Coach in July 2023.

Rebuilds take time and, for all his work behind the scenes, Lancaster’s Racing remain a mid-table team in France’s Top 14.

“When things don’t go well it’s very easy to turn around and say, ‘he’s an Anglo-Saxon, he doesn’t fit our culture’,” he told the audience at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

After signing a four-year contact in September 2022, he saw out his last nine months at Leinster; a winning environment he helped to build. Staying was probably an easier option.

“I’ve always had the desire to challenge myself as a coach,” he continued, “and there’s no bigger challenge than going to a French club as a head coach without being fluent in the language.” The Top 14, which is the wealthiest league in rugby, is known for its sink-or-swim nature for players and coaches alike, particularly those arriving from abroad.

A year and a half into his tenure, Lancaster regularly asks himself: “Where do I focus my attention between leadership, management and coaching?”

‘Tiptoe in or smash the door?’

Upon his arrival at the Paris La Défense Arena, Lancaster was mindful that his new boss was his predecessor as Head Coach, Laurent Travers, who had been promoted to President.

Lancaster asked himself: should he “tiptoe in or just smash the door down?” He alighted somewhere in between.

A quirk of the fixture list meant that Racing had played Lancaster’s Leinster twice in the European Champions Cup in the months after he signed his contract. Leinster won both matches, home and away, by a combined 58 points.

He argued that this was to his advantage when being introduced to Racing’s squad. “The players saw what that environment looked like because they had played against it,” he said. “I was pushing on an open door. They were ready for a change and a new working week.”

Out went the long lunches, in came a revamped playbook, but Lancaster has been careful not to separate the club from its roots. On his coaching staff, he inherited former Racing wing Joe Rokocoko (Skills Coach) and former captain and hooker Dimitri Szarzewski (Forwards Coach), both of whom won the league with the club in 2016. He also drafted in former France scrum-half Frédéric Michalak as his Backs Coach.

It was not about replacing Racing’s “DNA” with Leinster’s but laying foundations as the game shifts. “I had to show the players what good looks like and why it’s good.”

The coach’s search for ‘truth’

Lancaster cited Sarah Langslow’s book Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Harness the power of micro-interactions to transform your leadership. It details how one can connect with people and inspire them to perform. The types of ‘micro-interactions’ Langslow discusses are important to Lancaster given his lack of fluency in French (and the inability of some squad members to speak English).

“You can get a sense of the culture in your one to ones,” he said of his individual meetings with players, coaches, and staff. “You’ve got to dedicate time in your working week for one to ones.”

Lancaster revealed that he had made four phone calls to coaches and staff at Racing prior to his appearance onstage. “I was sense-checking the mood in the camp,” he said, adding that coaches and staff have access to information beyond “the manufactured truth that the head coach gets”.

Softening the performance conversation

Key to Lancaster’s approach has been his efforts to galvanise a squad containing French, English, Welsh, Australian, Argentinian, Fijian and Georgian players. Each week, a different player, coach or staff member will share a personal story in front of the group. Once a month, the players organise a themed dinner for the squad, coaches and staff.

Lancaster has also brought with him the psychological profiling tools he used at Leinster. He believes they can help players to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. To kick things off, he initially shared his own profile in a team meeting.

These efforts all help to soften the performance conversation. “You can be both systematic and authentic by using your meetings in a creative way and not just talking about the technical and the tactical. You can talk about life experiences and how you can learn from failure.”

It has been a quick win. “French rugby is an incredible success story but at the same time it’s behind in certain areas.”

Lancaster makes the point that Racing centre Gaël Fickou could win more than 90 caps for France “yet he’d never even thought about what emotional intelligence or leadership looks like.” Until now.

If Racing can raise their performance levels, they will do so while showing their human face; and that also goes for a coach who has been labelled a ‘robot’ in the French media.

“Often the simplest things are the most powerful: admitting your vulnerability, your mistakes, by showing that human face.”

By John Portch

Kansas City Chiefs Head Coach Andy Reid may be the best in the business, but he is not a one-man coaching ticket.

Reid’s celebrated right-hand men, including Offensive Coordinator Matt Nagy and Defensive Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, are in demand for newly vacant head coaching roles elsewhere now that the NFL regular season has concluded.

Time will tell whether Nagy or Spagnuolo can assemble winning rosters of the kind that delivered the Chiefs back-to-back Super Bowls (with a third still on the cards), but they will have a better chance of ticking all the right boxes if they can surround themselves with the right people.

On that note, the question of team dynamics sits at the heart of The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar. The trio has spent decades observing the worlds of academia, business, and government as they look to better understand the workings of high-performing teams.

“We wrote this book because we were fascinated with the question: what is it that makes a group of people more than the sum of their parts?” said Camilleri when addressing the audience at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“In our world, the unit of identification is most often the individual – if you think about how we hire, how we promote,” she continued. “Very rarely is the focus the team.”

Camilleri and her co-authors redress that balance in The Social Brain and here we explore how leaders can amplify the collective in the pursuit of better decision making.

‘The rocket fuel for performance impact and innovation’

The Social Brain applies theories of evolutionary biology to groups of high performers.

“We’ve been interested in what doesn’t change,” said Camilleri of this lens of enquiry. “When humans are part of small groups they can take advantage of their collective intelligence as well as a sense of safety, reciprocity and shared obligation.”

Camilleri, Rockey and Dunbar devised their ‘Thrive Model’, which sets out six foundational conditions for high-performing teams that consider social health (in addition to physical and mental health) as a prerequisite of wellbeing.

Onstage, Rockey defined these conditions as “the rocket fuel for performance impact and innovation.”

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

What do the numbers in the circle mean?

As Rockey explained, it is important for leaders to know where to focus their energy most effectively.

“All of us have the same amount of time in a day and we use it differently, but what doesn’t change for each individual in this room is how many relationships that we can have at any given time,” she said. Our brains are only so big, “so we can’t have endless relationships”.

She used Dunbar’s number, which was devised by her co-author in the 1990s, to illustrate her point:

Dunbar’s number has long been influential across several fields, from government and administration to business and academia.

Five, 15 or 150 people? Performance improves when you match team density, size, and space to the task at hand

For decisions made at speed, you’ll count on five people.

Five is the number of intimate relationships a person can have. Rockey said: “These are the relationships that protect us, make us thrive, and ensure that we go through life in a joyful way. They protect us from ill-health and from some of the psychological challenges that we might have from feeling insecure.” They, of course, occur in intimate spaces.

For more complex decisions, you’ll count on 15 people (including your original five).

The ‘pain’ comes when you look to insert new thinking into complex decision making in a group space. “We spend about 60 per cent of our social time with just 15 people,” said Rockey. “With the 15 in the workplace, they would have built long-term relationships and loyalty to you over time – that’s how we work as humans – so breaking up those people to bring in new thinking is painful.”

According to Dunbar, the upper limit on the number of social relationships we can enjoy is 150

Dunbar suggests that people can have no more than 150 social relationships at any one time. “It’s a very stable number across all societies and cultures,” said Rockey.

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

Camilleri and Rockey wrapped up their presentation by offering nine ‘social hacks’ for building relationships swiftly:

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

Rockey then homed in on five…

Synchrony: “Sport has done this brilliantly. The perception of pain is reduced when we’re doing something together. When you’re running with a partner it feels less painful.”

Laughing together: “A fantastic way of finding a group”.

Engaging with strangers: “When we have conversations with people we don’t know, it has a positive effect on us – I encourage you to meet people that you don’t know today.”

Giving and receiving kindness: “A New York-based study saw that when young people were able to engage with strangers and be helpful to them, they saw an uptick in their mental health.”

Eating together: “There’s something very magical about breaking bread together. You have about 30 minutes when you’re having food together in which you have a sense of wellbeing and positive vibes towards your dining partners. So if you want to do something difficult, eat with your group first and then go to the difficult meeting.”

The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar is available now from Penguin.