By David Clancy & Richard Pullan

“Your network is your net worth.”

Porter Gale, former VP of Marketing at Virgin America and a leading business and marketing advisor

In today’s fast-paced world, high-performing individuals and teams face increasingly complex cognitive demands. These challenges are not just about processing information but also about managing stress, navigating uncertainty, and maintaining clarity amid competing priorities. This is where the power of strategic and intentional network building comes into play.

There are several means available to help build this network. They include purposeful twinning with others, developing an ecosystem of critical friends and identifying a web of second-opinion teammates. Each of these connections provides leaders with the means to make more informed and rounded decisions, make perspective shifts as well as provide objective feedback.

Twinning

‘Twinning’ refers to the practice of forming reciprocal partnerships with other teams or organisations that share similar goals, challenges, or conundrums – perhaps they might even be competitors, if the context makes sense. This is a huge part of what the Leaders Performance Institute does, in fact, forging ‘partnerships’ with teams and individuals. This is how the Houston Texans of the NFL became professional friends with the Texas Rangers of MLB, as an example. This symbiotic relationship allows for mutual learning and growth, where both parties can share best practices, resources, and insights. A term we often hear is ‘collaboration over competition’ – we can all row the boat faster if we are willing to exchange protocols, philosophies and pain points.

Professional sports teams all face their unique set of struggles but, oftentimes, there are numerous similarities with these. Sharing best practices and ways to approach challenges is a significant benefit downstream of this pairing. By ‘linking’ with another team, leaders can expand their knowledge base, reduce the isolation often felt in high-pressure roles, and benefit from other viewpoints.

In terms of innovation, if teams are open to sharing what they do (to a degree), how they do it, etc, they can draw on the experience and solutions already implemented elsewhere. This save them time, effort, and energy. Food for thought.

Critical friends

Critical friends play a unique role in leadership, deliberation and decision-making. A critical friend is someone who offers candid, constructive feedback and is unafraid to challenge assumptions. This is ideally someone outside the team/ franchise. They are trusted individuals who can act as a sounding board for ideas, provide a second perspective, and offer checkpoints when needed.

Creating and nurturing these ‘friends’ requires energy and effort, but the payoff can be huge. As an example, if you are ideating a new return-to-play system and method, bouncing ideas off someone with exposure to this in another environment could help make your system better. A no-brainer if you ask us!

We have witnessed the benefit in relation to cognitive demand also, as critical friends offer a safe space to validate thinking and refine or rethink ideas. Critical friends help prevent blind spots, biases and assumptions by encouraging the leader to pause and reflect before executing a critical task. The best critical friends strike a balance between support and challenge. They are not afraid to disagree, but they do so with the intention of helping the leader grow.

Second-opinion teammates

Second-opinion teammates (teammates being a crucial word) serve a similar purpose, offering alternative viewpoints to ensure a more well-rounded decision-making process, such as another set of eyes on an MRI report and image for a hamstring injury.

Particularly in high-stakes environments, seeking a second opinion reduces cognitive stress by distributing the weight of responsibility and allowing leaders to feel more confident in their choices. Knowing that a trusted colleague has reviewed the same data or proposal with rigour and objectivity can provide a sense of reassurance and clarity.

Strive to stock a bullpen of second-opinion teammates. It’s a game-changer.

Mentorship

“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves”, said Steven Spielberg. To create themselves entails helping one to find their way. Consider giving a project to a more junior member of staff from a senior ‘mentor’, rather than the ‘easier’ option, of giving the project to a ‘middle manager’ who has done the type of project before. That’s an example of what this could look like.

Mentorship is a timeless strategy – one for managing both the emotional, physical and intellectual demands of leadership. This is typically someone with more experience who can offer guidance, advice, and lessons learned from mistakes, and successes. Great mentors provide leaders with the tools to think more effectively for themselves, enabling them, giving them their own toolkit; this helps them navigate complexity, prioritise, and mitigate stresses. They leave breadcrumbs behind.

Mentors can help leaders manage cognitive demands by offering perspective on what truly matters, helping to sift through the noise and focus on the signal i.e. what is essential. They also provide historical insight, showing leaders that many challenges they face are not new and can be tackled using time-tested methods. This reduces the sense of overwhelm that comes with thinking one must always reinvent the wheel. The issue you are facing has been faced and solved before.

Moreover, mentors are invaluable in helping leaders manage their wellbeing, as they can provide reassurance and encouragement when times get tough and they can acknowledge that these times come with the intense world of competitive sport.

Building a network

In high-pressure environments, leaders often find themselves juggling multiple competing priorities, balancing short-term, ‘urgent’ demands with long-term, ‘important’ goals.

Here are five reasons for nurturing a network to help with this:

1. Perspective: By offering alternative viewpoints, these individuals help leaders avoid tunnel vision, providing the clarity needed to make more informed decisions. As author John C. Maxwell said: “one of the greatest values of mentors is the ability to see ahead what others cannot see and to help them navigate a course to their destination”.
2. Stress relief: They provide a safe space to vent frustrations or discuss difficult situations, reducing the emotional and cognitive strain on the leader.
3. Cognitive load reduction: They help leaders prioritise by distinguishing urgent tasks from important ones, easing decision-making and reducing the burden of figuring everything out on their own.
4. Feedback loops: They offer real-time feedback, allowing leaders to course-correct early, reducing the mental load associated with second-guessing decisions.
5. Confidence: With someone experienced offering reassurance or advice, leaders can make decisions with greater confidence, reducing self-doubt, fracturing under duress and mental fatigue.

What makes a good mentor?

The best ones share several key traits that make them invaluable in helping leaders grow and meet the demands of high-performance sport.

Here are five traits we often see:

1. Trustworthiness: A good mentor must be someone the leader can trust implicitly. This relationship relies on openness and honesty and, without trust, it can’t function effectively. Trust hinges on credibility, reliability and that willingness to be vulnerable. Look up the Trust Equation for more on this.
2. Empathy with objectivity: They need to be empathetic to understand the leader’s challenges, but objective enough to provide clear, unbiased feedback. A mentor must challenge, but from a place of care, not criticism.
3. Experience and expertise: Particularly for mentors, having a depth of experience is critical. They need to offer insights that come from having walked the same path or navigated similar challenges.
4. Active listening skills: The ability to listen without immediately offering solutions is key. Great mentors and critical friends give space for the leader to articulate their thoughts fully before stepping in with advice or feedback. ‘Beware the advice monster’, as Michael Bungay Stanier wrote in The Advice Trap. And, as Stephen R Covey proclaimed in his book The Seven Habits of Effective People, ‘seek first to understand, then be understood’.
5. Encouragement to reflect: The best mentors help leaders reflect on their own experiences, pushing them toward self-discovery and growth, rather than always offering the answers themselves.

And let’s not forget that mentors need mentors. This could be your partner at home, as an example.

So, here’s our challenge for you reading this article today – take on a mentorship role in some capacity, to give back…to pass the ladder down, as it were.

Final thoughts

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape in high-performance sport, a leader’s success isn’t just defined by individual strength – but by the strength of their network. Jobs these days in sport are complicated and complex. It is now rarely possible for one individual to serve a function fully without seeking support from other disciplines, to deliver the final solution to a given problem.

By cultivating relationships through twinning, critical friends, second-opinion teammates, and mentorship, leaders create a support system that fosters psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous learning. These connections enable leaders to confidently navigate complexities, make incisive decisions, and lead afront with impact. After all, just as every great athlete stands on the shoulders of their team, no leader can truly flourish without a trusted network standing behind them.

David Clancy is a Learning and Development Consultant at the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group. He is also the Editor of Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: A Personal and Professional Development Framework, which is available now from Elsevier.

Richard Pullan is a Director at The Nxt Level Group, the Visionary Founder of The Altitude Centre, and leads the training of clients for flash ascents of Everest and other 8,000m peaks, while also preparing professional athletes and elite sports teams. He is formerly of Sporting Health Group.

If you would like to speak to David and Richard, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By David Clancy & Michael Davison

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”

Ken Blanchard, business consultant

A story of interdisciplinarity

Let’s start with Jack Draper.

Imagine Draper, who is the currently the No 1 British men’s tennis player (currently ranked 20th on the ATP Tour) seeking that extra edge to stay at the top. His success isn’t just the result of raw talent or relentless training. Behind the scenes, he has a backroom team seemingly working in support of him – a nutritionist optimising food intake and hydration, a sports psychologist fine-tuning performance under pressure, a physiotherapist managing recovery, and a strength coach – pushing physical limits. Each expert has mastery, but what sets this team apart is how they interact and click.

To reach this point, Draper’s coach, James Trotman, didn’t just talk tennis strategy. He collaborated with Draper’s physiotherapist to adapt his game around his body’s capabilities. The psychologist worked closely with the strength coach to ensure mental resilience matched Draper’s physical preparation. Let’s not forget that the player himself was at the centre of this interdisciplinary team, which like most sports is player-focused. Each discipline flowed into the other, creating a holistic approach that made Draper not just a better tennis player, but a stronger, more balanced athlete.

The secret to his rising dominance wasn’t just in individual expertise, it was in the ‘interdisciplinary’ synergy that allowed his team to anticipate challenges, innovate, and help him evolve in a way no single expert could have achieved alone. This ‘collective intelligence’, and high-level teamwork, propelled him to achieve even greater heights, proving that in today’s complex world, true success is a team effort built on the integration of diverse applied knowledge and experience.

So, what is interdisciplinarity and how is it different?

Interdisciplinarity is the fusion of knowledge from multiple fields to tackle complex problems that no single discipline can solve on its own. This differs to a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary model; the former is when experts from different disciplines work in parallel on a common problem, but each remains within their own disciplinary boundaries. The latter relates to the integration of academic disciplines by involving stakeholders outside of traditional academia (e.g., community members, policymakers) to co-create new knowledge and solutions.

All approaches seek to leverage multiple perspectives and areas of expertise to solve complex problems, but they differ in how deeply the knowledge is integrated and in the level of collaboration. Multidisciplinary maintains strict disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinary integrates them, while transdisciplinary dissolves these boundaries completely. Multidisciplinary focuses on parallel efforts, interdisciplinary on integrated collaboration among academic disciplines, and transdisciplinary on forming external stakeholder engagement. Multidisciplinary brings together separate expertise, interdisciplinary synthesises it, and transdisciplinary creates frameworks that include non-academic insights, in a nutshell.

Back to interdisciplinarity

In a world where challenges are increasingly multifaceted – spanning biology, psychology, sociology, technology and beyond – interdisciplinary approaches are critical to innovation, creativity and progress. Research shows that teams combining diverse expertise produce more inspired and robust solutions, with improved and more accurate group thinking (Rock & Grant, 2016), leveraging what’s known as collective intelligence. This approach fosters interactional expertise, where individuals, though not specialists in all fields, become adept at understanding and integrating knowledge across domains, enhancing the team’s ability to solve problems from multiple perspectives. This is cross-functional working at its best.

Studies in cognitive science and organisational behaviour confirm that interdisciplinary teams outperform homogeneous ones in problem-solving, originality, and adaptability. By blending insights from different scientific traditions, interdisciplinarity accelerates breakthroughs that shape our future in high performance sport.

The Expert Compass

Visualise a group of elite performers – whether it’s a special operations military unit or an executive leadership team at a multinational – coming together to tackle a complex challenge.

What sets these teams apart from the rest? It’s not just that they each possess individual expertise, it’s that they know how to navigate their combined expertise with precision and ownership. Enter the Expert Compass, a mental map that allows high-performing teams to leverage the unique knowledge of each member while orienting toward a shared, clearly aligned goal.

In an interdisciplinary team, the compass acts as a guide, ensuring that no single expertise is overvalued or sidelined. Instead, the team becomes adept at knowing not just what expertise is needed, but when and how to use it effectively. They know who to turn to for specific knowledge, and more importantly, they understand how to integrate that knowledge seamlessly into the problem-solving or decision-making process.

This is where the power of interdisciplinarity reveals itself. Instead of working in silos, where experts are isolated in their own domains, the team leverages their diverse knowledge bases to create solutions that are more progressive, rigorous, and resilient. It’s a fluid process, navigating complex terrain with the agility of a compass, constantly adjusting and recalibrating based on the input from different fields.

Interactional expertise

But it’s not enough to just assemble a group of experts and hope they collaborate. The secret sauce of interdisciplinary success is interactional expertise: the ability of team members to understand and communicate across disciplines, even if they aren’t trained specialists in those areas.

This form of expertise allows a neuroscientist to engage meaningfully with a software engineer, or a physiotherapist to collaborate with a performance analyst, even if they don’t have deep technical knowledge in each other’s fields. They’ve developed enough fluency in the language, messaging and logic of the other disciplines to ask the right questions, contribute valuable insights, and understand the broader implications of their colleagues’ expertise.

Interactional expertise is what prevents interdisciplinary teams from becoming chaotic, disjointed or fragmented. It creates the connective fascia that holds different domains together, that interwoven fabric of performance, and allows them to produce something greater than the sum of their parts.

Collective intelligence

When interactional expertise is present, a team taps into a powerful phenomenon – this is known as collective intelligence. This is the magic of interdisciplinarity done well. When the team becomes smarter than any individual could be on their own. They think, adapt, and solve problems with a kind of emergent intelligence that draws from the diverse perspectives and knowledge sets within the group.

Collective intelligence doesn’t happen automatically. It’s the product of deliberate design, creating environments where knowledge flows freely, trust and psychological safety is high (Reynolds & Lewis, 2017), and each expert is empowered to contribute. It thrives on a sharing environment and culture, but also articulated shared goals. It relies on individuals having the humility to know the limits of their own expertise, and the curiosity to learn from others by sharing and challenging one another with questions like ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘Is there a better way?’.

The secret to success (and why others fail)

So why do some teams excel at interdisciplinarity while other teams flounder? The secret lies in the ability to manage both ego and ego-less collaboration. High-performing interdisciplinary teams have members who are confident in their own expertise but are humble enough to acknowledge when they need input from others…that they do not have all the answers. They’ve mastered the balance of asserting their knowledge without overstepping their lane.

On the other hand, teams that fail at interdisciplinarity often do so because of misaligned priorities or a failure to establish clear lines of open communication. Experts can become territorial, clinging to their domain and shutting out contributions from others. Or, in the absence of interactional expertise, conversations become broken, with different disciplines speaking past each other instead of to each other.

The best teams recognise that interdisciplinarity isn’t just about bringing together experts. It’s about building bridges between those experts and creating a culture where learning from one another is just as important as showcasing your own knowledge.

Acquiring interactional expertise

Developing interactional expertise requires intentional effort and a willingness to engage.

Here are a few keys to acquiring it:

1. Curiosity over mastery: You don’t need to become an expert in every discipline, but you do need to cultivate a deep curiosity about other fields. Ask questions that help you understand the thought processes, principles, and constraints that guide your colleagues’ work.
2. Cognitive empathy: Try to see problems from the perspective of other disciplines. This requires cognitive empathy…the ability to imagine how a colleague might approach a situation based on their own expertise and experience.
3. Structured learning: Make it a priority to attend cross-functional training sessions, workshops, or informal discussions that expose you to the vocabulary and frameworks of other fields. Teams that succeed often set aside time for interdisciplinary learning, so that each member can expand their interactional knowledge.
4. Reflective practice: After interdisciplinary collaborations, take time to reflect on what you’ve learned about the other disciplines involved. What assumptions did you have going in? What surprised you? What connections did you see between fields that you hadn’t noticed before?

The role of leadership and processes

The leverage in interdisciplinary teams lies in both the individual leader and the processes they put in place. Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for collaboration, fostering psychological safety, and modelling interactional expertise. Great leaders make a point of being learners themselves. They actively engage with other disciplines and encourage their team members to do the same.

But leadership isn’t enough on its own. There must be systems and incentives in place to support interdisciplinarity. This includes structured opportunities for cross-functional work, regular knowledge-sharing sessions, and mechanisms to ensure that all voices are heard. High-performing teams often use formal frameworks like design thinking, agile methodology, or interdisciplinary reviews to ensure that expertise is integrated, not isolated in silos.

Leadership plays a pivotal role in fostering diverse perspectives that lead to innovative problem-solving and knowledge creation. However, the benefits of the diversity are maximised when coordination is effective, particularly in environments with low task uncertainty (Fang He., et al. 2021).

In short, leadership provides the vision, mission and the encouragement, while systems, processes and team behaviours ensure that the objective is realised in a sustainable and scalable way.

Actions

In the world of sports, athletes often have a team of private practitioners – physiotherapists, nutritionists, psychologists – who work closely with them. When these practitioners interact with a broader team, especially in high-performance settings, the principles of interdisciplinarity become even more important.

The key is to establish a collaborative ecosystem where information flows freely, and each practitioner is seen as an integral part of the athlete’s overall performance.

This requires…

1. Open lines of communication: Practitioners should regularly communicate with each other to ensure they are aligned on goals and treatments. It’s not enough to work in parallel; there needs to be an intentional sharing of knowledge, progress, and challenges.
2. Respect for expertise: Each practitioner brings a unique perspective to the table, and the best teams recognise the value of this diversity. Collaboration works best when each professional is trusted to contribute their expertise, without others overstepping into areas they are not qualified to address.
3. Holistic understanding of the athlete: Successful teams take a holistic view of the athlete, understanding that no single treatment or approach operates in isolation. Physical training affects mental performance, and nutrition impacts recovery. The practitioners must view their roles as part of an integrated system designed to optimise the athlete’s overall wellbeing and performance. Let’s also mention the power of the athlete’s voice in this respect, as they are the CEO in these affairs so it’s critical their points are heard.

Conclusion

Interdisciplinarity in high-performing teams is about more than just assembling experts; it’s about creating an environment where diverse knowledge can flow, interact, and coalesce into something far greater than the sum of its parts. By cultivating interactional expertise, leveraging collective intelligence, and fostering a culture of trust and humility, teams can unlock the true potential of their combined expertise.

And in fields like sports, where collaboration between the team behind the team and broader teams is critical, the principles of interdisciplinarity can be the difference between good performance and greatness. As Matthew Syed, author of ‘Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking’ said, ‘collective intelligence emerges not just from the knowledge of individuals, but also from the differences between them’. 

David Clancy is a Learning and Development Consultant at the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group. He is also the Editor of Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: A Personal and Professional Development Framework, which is available now from Elsevier.

Michael Davison is an International Sports Performance Consultant at the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group and Board Member of the Football Research Group.

If you would like to speak to David and Michael, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

References

Fang He, V., Krogh, G., and Siren, C. (2021). Expertise Diversity, Informal Leadership Hierarchy, and Team Knowledge Creation: A study of pharmaceutical research collaborations. Volume 43 (6). European Group for Organisational Studies.

Reynolds, A. & Lewis, D. (2017). Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse in Collaboration and Teams. Harvard Business Review.

Rock, D. & Grant, H. (2016). Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter in Diversity and Inclusion. Harvard Business Review.

Acknowledgements

Special kudos to Carl Gombrich of the London Interdisciplinary School, who spoke at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. One of the school’s courses, titled ‘Cross-Functional Leadership’, was very insightful. This article has been influenced by that programme, as well as research on the Expert Compass, requisite knowledge and expertise from Tim Davey and Amelia Peterson.

Gombrich also contributed a chapter to Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: A Personal and Professional Development Framework by Clancy, et al. (2024), about interdisciplinarity and soft skills.

By John Portch

Women’s football is not the right environment for some coaches and practitioners, particularly expansion franchises.

That is the view of Lucy Rushton, the former General Manager of NWSL expansion team Bay FC.

“Of the people I know working in male football, 95 per cent probably would never consider coming to the women’s game,” she told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica. “And, to be honest, they probably wouldn’t be right for the women’s game either. I’ll say that. I think the person that you’re looking for, especially in expansion, is someone who’s willing to challenge themselves, willing to go outside the box.”

Bay represented Rushton’s first role in women’s football. She built her reputation in the men’s game in a series of scouting and analysis roles at the Football Association, Watford and Reading. In 2016, she left her English homeland to join Atlanta United as Head of Technical Recruitment & Analysis. The team won the MLS Cup two years later. Between 2021 and 2022, she served as DC United’s first female GM.

Back at Bay, the team were finding their feet following a tricky start to their inaugural season when Rushton unexpectedly resigned in late-June. Her departure shocked observers, but her achievements during the year she spent in southern California were considerable.

It is an exciting time for the club, who attract average crowds of nearly 15,000 to a stadium that is not their own. They speak enthusiastically of planning a new practice facility and stadium. Crucially, the ownership group have the means and the will to make it all happen.

But beyond supportive owners and astute marketing initiatives, what does it take to get a new team off the ground? The Leaders Performance Institute explores four factors put forward by Rushton.

1. A vision that informs your culture

Bay want to be the best team in the world and renowned for their people-first approach. They plan to get there by adhering to their B-A-Y values (Brave, Accountable, and You). Rushton explained each in turn:

• Brave: “being bold in the industry, pushing boundaries and innovating”.
• Accountable: people “being responsible for their actions and being willing to push themselves forward”.
• You: this stems from Bay’s desire to “celebrate each other as individuals so you can bring your true, authentic self to work every day”.

2. Finding the right personalities

Rushton believes it takes a particular type of personality to thrive in an expansion environment. “You have to have someone that’s more risk-OK,” she said. “To bet on themselves to go ‘I can go there and make a difference.” Her appointment of Head Coach Albertin Montoya showed that they can be male. “A lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female team because it’s a different environment, with a totally different feeling, vibe, boundaries, rules.”

It is crucial, however, that you hire for diversity of background and experience despite the inherent challenges. “It’s much easier to sit in a room with people who are like you,” said Rushton. “It brings added work because you’re taking yourself outside your comfort zone – you have to be willing to do that.”

3. Elevate player care and support

Rushton explained that while male players tend to consider the bottom line above all else, female players are compelled to prioritise their living conditions. It led her and Bay to use all available mechanisms – housing, support staff, medical care – to tempt players to this corner of southern California. “How are we on a day-to-day basis trying to help them a) be in the best position they can be for the longest possible; and b) live a nice lifestyle out of football?”

It has given Bay considerable pulling power beyond the US. Three ceiling-raisers arrived in the form of Barcelona’s Asisat Oshoala, Madrid CFF’s Rachael Kundananji, and Arsenal’s Jen Beattie. Others are sure to follow.

4. Managing challenges and setbacks

Bay have had their fair share of challenges in year one, but the club has not been fazed. They went as far as dropping a player over a disciplinary issue on one occasion. It likely cost them the game, but the senior leadership believed that team values were more important. “It’s in those difficult moments that you set the culture,” said Rushton. “It showed our players and our staff what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

By John Portch

Leaders don’t always know how best to have those difficult conversations.

They may recognise the need to take someone to one side, but if they are unable to broach the topic in a skilled and productive way, then a small problem can quickly escalate.

At the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, Jide Fadojutimi and Marianne O’Connor from Management Futures led an onstage skills session explaining what to do and what not to do when approaching someone to have a ‘courageous conversation’.

What is a ‘courageous conversation’?

The term was 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 devised a skills grid to illustrate what it takes to lead a courageous conversation. O’Connor and Fadojutimi shared Scott’s grid with the Leaders audience but changed the top-right quadrant from ‘radical candour’ to ‘skilled candour’:

Image: Management Futures

“We’re going with ‘skilled candour’ because it’s a skill we can all learn and build,” said Fadojutimi of Management Future’s way of teaching the topic.

The three pitfalls to avoid

The arrows on the grid suggest that the path to skilled candour lies in giving people a sense of psychological safety and the feeling that you care about them. The grid also suggests three pitfalls, which were discussed at length by Scott in Radical Candor:

1. Ruinous empathy: when you want to spare someone’s short-term feelings, you don’t tell them something they need to know. You care personally but fail to challenge them directly.
2. Manipulative 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.
3. Obnoxious aggression: 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.

The five steps towards skilled candour

O’Connor explained that there are five steps you can take to help develop your ability to approach conversations with skilled candour:

1. Master your story: if you hold negative views of a person it is going to hinder your ability to make them feel safe. O’Connor said: “It’s really important that you master your story and any assumptions you might have about the other person and what’s going on for them”.
2. Create safety: this starts before you have the conversation in both the broadest and narrowest sense. Do not ambush someone in the corridor and don’t shut the conversation down once you’ve made your point. Bear this in mind when the other person is feeling challenged, vulnerable and defensive.
3. Provide skilled feedback: this means evidence-based feedback free of judgement. “To be able to give evidential feedback, you need to talk about what you observed and the impact that it had,” said O’Connor. “It just helps to keep the conversation safe and on track.”
4. Open a two-way dialogue: don’t just download information on someone without being curious about their perspective or seeking to understand what might be at play for them.
5. Make the other person feel heard: after a balanced conversation, it’s important for both parties, as O’Connor said, “to agree next steps or further action so that things don’t get lost in translation.” This enables both parties to feel accountable and understand what they need to do next.

By John Portch

Gregg Popovich confounds contemporary thinking on how a leader should conduct themselves in modern-day elite sport.

The San Antonio Spurs’ Head Coach, a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, is known as an disciplinarian; and he might also be regarded as an anachronism were it not for the fact that he is revered for creating – and sustaining – one of the most harmonious cultures in elite sport.

Some might say Coach Pop’s gruff demeanour and willingness to yell at players would be sub-optimal in any other environment, especially with a roster full of Gen Z players, but his focus on the people and the environment afford him all the leeway he needs to express himself at the Spurs.

Coach Pop, the alchemist

Popovich, having served as an assistant coach at the Spurs between 1988 and 1992, returned to San Antonio as Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations and General Manager in 1994. He added the head coaching role early in the 1996-7 NBA season

He would in time relinquish his other responsibilities but there was no guarantee that Popovich could make a successful step out of the front office, particularly as his coaching resume amounted to little at that stage.

“He said, ‘hey, I want to do this and I probably have one crack at it’,” said Phil Cullen, the Spurs’ Senior Director of Organizational Development & Basketball Operations. Cullen did not join the Spurs until 2016, but this story, like so many featuring Popovich, has long since entered Spurs folklore.

“Pop said, ‘I want to do this and I want to do this with the people I want to be around’.”

This desire shaped the Spurs’ famous ‘pound the rock’ ethos, with its emphasis on persistence, patience and resilience. It helped to create an environment where a previously inconspicuous franchise could claim five NBA Championships between 1999 and 2014.

Cullen, speaking at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse in February, talked at length about the Spurs’ culture, which has been emulated across the globe, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Look a little closer at those other teams and it seems that some have been seduced by ‘pound the rock’ without paying full attention to San Antonio’s unique alchemy.

Not a Spur?

Good people are very important to San Antonio. As Cullen explained, their scouting template includes a check box labelled ‘Not a Spur’. It is a short-hand way of saying that a player lacks some of the team’s character-based values such as integrity, accountability or humility. “It’s very difficult to uncheck that box,” added Cullen. “We have to understand that when we do that there’s a reason why.” They do not always get it right, as he admitted, but their success rate is admirable.

All the same, many teams in the NBA and beyond, have adopted a similar approach, so there must be more to the Spurs success story than any notions of character.

Popovich himself is certainly a major factor, particularly at a time when the Spurs have the NBA’s youngest roster, with an average age of 23.52.

“Right now, we’re probably a coach-led team because of the youthfulness of the roster,” said Cullen. “Ideally, you’d have players that are actually holding each other accountable.” That is the end-game but, in the meantime, “the coach is having to manage the game, not coach the game – there’s a big difference.”

So coachable players are important, as is the coach; there are also key environmental factors at play.

Community, casual collisions and fine dining

The primary environmental factor is food. Cullen shared an image of the cafeteria at the Spurs’ new $72 million Victory Capital Performance Center practice facility, which opened in 2023. “This is the most important room in the building,” he said.

Popovich places a premium on team meals; the players’ families are regularly invited to eat with the team and staff . Cullen said: “There is nothing better than sitting across the table from somebody else from a different culture, with a different set of experiences, and just being able to share a meal together. Food and drink is very important to us.”

Mealtimes, they believe, help to develop mutual empathy and promote selflessness. “This job is hard and if it’s going to be all about you, you’re probably not going to reach your max potential,” said Cullen. “We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves – it can’t just be about you.”

Cullen played a significant role in the design of the facility and was influenced by Popovich’s words of advice when the project was green-lighted. “He goes: ‘I’ve got two things for you: protect the culture and protect the people’.” It confirmed Cullen’s belief in human-centred design. “I may never have the conversation directly with the player, but what we can do is design the space so that Coach can have that conversation with that player,” he said, explaining that players spend more time at the new practice facility than they did at the old one. “It’s shocking as you’ll go in there today and the players will be sitting there next to an equipment manager, next to the travel guide, next to your lead physio; and they’re just hanging out.”

Life beyond basketball

Beyond mealtimes, Popovich promotes a wide range of extracurricular learning opportunities. Cullen recounted the time ahead of a road game at the Washington Wizards in 2018 when Popovich took the team to the US Supreme Court. There are numerous examples on his watch of similar site visits and non-basketball focused discussions, with topics ranging from US federal law and international politics to same-sex marriage and social justice.

Again, these are issues far bigger than the individual or the sport of basketball. “It’s so easy to be insulated when you’re a professional athlete,” said RC Buford, the former San Antonio General Manager (2002-2019) and current CEO, in Dan Coyle’s 2018 book The Culture Code. “Pop uses these moments to connect us. He loves that we come from so many different places. That could pull us apart, but he makes sure that everybody feels connected and engaged to something bigger.”

Coyle also explained that Popovich relies on three types of belonging cue and ‘toggles’ between each in an effort to say ‘this is a safe place to give effort’. Those cues involve:

1. Personal and up close connections: in practice and in warm-ups, Popovich will rove and get almost nose to nose with a player or coach. Such moments, as Coyle wrote, translate as ‘I care about you’.
2. Performance feedback: Popovich will offer a continuous stream of feedback from ‘the middle distance’ in both practice and games. This translates as ‘We have high standards here.’
3. The big-picture perspective: as Coyle put it, ‘Life is bigger than basketball’. The team meals, coffee conversations and history lessons are testament to the Spurs’ belief in this approach.

It led to Coyle conclude: ‘Popovich’s yelling works, in part, because it is not just yelling. It is delivered along with a suite of other cues that affirm and strengthen the fabric of the relationships [at the Spurs].’

Consider this the next time you see Popovich raise his voice.

A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

“I’ve been told I give really good hugs.”

So says Lindsay Mintenko, the Managing Director of USA Swimming’s National Team, in the second episode of this new series of the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser.

“Just being able to sit with an athlete; sometimes you don’t even have to talk,” she continues, “it’s just so they know you are there.”

It is difficult to imagine many of her predecessors demonstrating such empathy with athletes whether they’re a multi-medal winner like Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky or a swimmer who came agonisingly close in some of sport’s most competitive trials. The top-two finishers are guaranteed a spot on the roster; those in third – who would likely medal with other nations – are almost certain to miss out.

“After the trials, our main job is to make sure our athletes are focused on Paris, but we don’t always take a step back and look at those who came third by a hundredth of a second. That’s a tough place to be; so we really need to make sure that we do a better job of looking out for those athletes afterwards.”

It is perhaps no surprise that USA Swimming is currently the only national governing body in the US to have an in-house licensed clinician on staff.

This has happened on the watch of Lindsay, a two-time Olympic gold medallist in the 4x200m freestyle.

She is the first former athlete and first woman to serve as Team USA’s Managing Director, but as she tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch, it is not about her but serving her athletes and their coaches.

Lindsay also spoke about her role being analogous to that of a general manager in the major leagues [8:00] and the importance of providing a challenging but safe environment [17:40].

Elsewhere, she elaborates on the importance of providing mental health support for her athletes [29:50] and explains how her swimming career began when as a six-year-old Lindsay fell out of a tree [5:30].

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By John Portch with additional reporting from Henry Breckenridge

“One of the great things about the job is there’s no typical day,” said Michael Bourne. “There’s gate posts and structures in place to keep us on track, but my job is very much to adapt to that.”

The Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] was a guest on the Leaders Performance Podcast in early July, where he discussed his remit.

“I break it down as if we want to deliver performance, then performance equals the talent that you’ve got multiplied by the exposure you can give that talent to them to develop and grow, minus interference.”

When it comes to high performance, tennis has several traits that separate it from other sports and this is reflected in the LTA’s provisions. For example, the organisation offers full-time multidisciplinary support to players from under-10s through to elite level, but player needs vary from individual to individual. They provide coaching too, at camps and competitions, but players tend to have private coaches.

It is a balance and one that he has been trying to strike during his four years in the role, which began during the first year of the pandemic. “It was a huge learning curve for me,” said Bourne, whose non-tennis background has never held him back.

Here, we reflect on his thoughts about his role.

He has a firm focus on the mission

Bourne, who has worked in sports science for organisations including UK Sport, the UK Sports Institute and the England & Wales Cricket Board, has a clear understanding of what the LTA is trying to achieve and why. “Our mission is to be world-class and respected at player development,” he said. “The slightly longer answer to that is that we create a pathway for our most talented players to go on a journey to becoming elite professional players, whether that’s in the tennis game or wheelchair tennis game.” It requires continuous self-evaluation on both his part and the LTA’s as well as acknowledging how the challenges faced evolve. Bourne emphasised a people-first approach. “However you cut it up, we are a performance-based industry and you have to have great people to do great things.” He spoke of “passion and care”. “We have a team of individuals who deeply care about the journey these players are on”. Passion is one of the LTA’s values and the sight of others in service to players is one Bourne finds “very humbling”.

Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the LTA. (Photo by Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for LTA)

His role in driving change

In addition to being mission-focused and people-centred, Bourne places a premium on critical thinking. He also believes that having great ideas is one thing, but being able to apply them is quite another. “You can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught,” he said. “Ultimately, leadership is about being able to drive and support change.” His team bring their tennnis-specific expertise and Bourne ensures everyone is aligned around the work that needs to be done. “It gets the balance between my background and their backgrounds in the right space.”

He does not assume things will happen on their own

Bourne readily admits his expertise is not rooted in tennis. Nevertheless, the necessary traits and skills are made familiar to him through his staff. He has set up a clear chain of direct reports and basic processes, but it needs constant attention. “Don’t just trust that they’re going to happen all the time – make sure that you’re around enough and verifying whether the communication, the connection that’s supposed to be in place, is actually in place; and if you need to step in and just give the person that support or just give that reminder of what we’re trying to do to prevent those dreaded silos developing people ploughing their own furrow”.

He relishes the daily challenges

Bourne feels that his role is inherently challenging; and that’s alright. “I feel like in these types of jobs, if your job is easy, something is wrong – I don’t think they’re meant to be easy,” he said. “If they’re easy, then you’re missing something or you’re not pushing when you need to push. There’s always more.” It feeds into his attitude towards the challenges faced by the LTA. “It should be unacceptable in a high performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.” There will often be “brutal facts”, as he put it, “then it’s my job to ensure that we’re all leaning into that and in the right way in a professional way and in a safe way; having the right types of conversations that we need to have.”

Listen to the full interview below:

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A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

Michael Bourne has a sports science background, so it is no surprise that he places a premium on critical thinking.

“It is core to me,” the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] tells the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.

Critical thinking is a skill that also served him well in roles at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board amongst others before he took the reins at the LTA in October 2020 (with Covid restrictions still in place).

“But,” he cautions, “leadership for me is about change and progress, and you can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught.”

It starts with taking stock. “As a leader, make sure that you are ensuring everybody else is confronting those brutal facts and you’ve got to be ahead of that,” he says, adding that he too must be open to feedback.

“It should be unacceptable in a high-performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.”

In the first episode of this new series, Michael explains his mission-driven and people-centred approach to helping produce British tennis players with the means to compete with the world’s best [33:10].

During the conversation, we also touch upon the challenges the LTA faces and the benchmarks set [8:30]; his belief in the unique qualities of British tennis [14:30]; why the flow of information cannot be taken for granted at the LTA [38:30]; and the enduring power of the Lion King to move him [48:00].

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By Luke Whitworth

The old adage that people learn best through experience is not necessarily true – at least not on its own.

For learning to take place, people need to both reflect on and make sense of the experience; then they can think through how they will apply the knowledge gained.

Therefore, it follows that one of the most powerful applications of coaching is to facilitate learning through an effective debriefing process; to squeeze as much richness out of the experience as possible.

Done well, it can drive a very steep learning curve, build responsibility and confidence, and increase the focus on results.

In short, the high performance organisations that best sustain success know how to debrief.

What the literature says…

Debriefing was at the heart of the most recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute spent time considering some academic findings on the topic.

A 2008 study in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport found that coaches only recall between 16.8 per cent and 52.9 per cent of events. This underlines the notion that if coaches don’t debrief consistently well, they are missing out on potentially rich conversations and insights.

Here are some further numbers:

• Leaders who engaged in reflection and debriefing improved their decision-making skills by 18 per cent, according to a study in the Academy of Management Journal.
• Reflective practices in leadership were linked to a 25 per cent increase in innovative solutions and problem-solving abilities in organisations, according to a report by the Center for Creative Leadership.
• Looking through a sport-specific lens, a survey of professional coaches found that 90 per cent believe debriefing is crucial to athlete development, with 85 per cent reporting noticeable improvements in performance and strategy understanding following regular debriefing sessions.

The positive effects of good debriefing

• The process builds self-awareness and enables ownership of individual and collective learning.
• Consistent and well thought-through debriefing fosters an openness to feedback.
• Helps to build relationships and team cohesion.
• Can decrease negative emotional effects.

What Leaders members are doing well in this space

During the session, members were invited to rate their teams’ debriefing skills on a scale of one to five and the mean was 2.8. Much room for improvement, no question, but there were a list of things that people believe they are doing well:

• At most teams, there is a genuine honesty and curiosity around enhancing performance.
• Intelligent framing and consistency.
• The creation of a safe space.
• Prioritising the debrief as a crucial source of information about how to get better.
• Appropriate priming. Differentiating between a ‘hot debrief’ and a post-event review. If it’s a review then sharing content beforehand allows for productive discussions.
• Taking nothing personally, instead, taking feedback professionally with the goal to be better – detaching from the emotional side of things and sticking to facts.
• Sensitively-phrased questions that focus on positive outcomes and changes even when asking what could have been better.

Six steps towards an effective structure for debriefing

The following is a six-step approach to debriefs. Consider each when designing the structure that works for you and your team:

1. A focus on reviewing where you are against your goals.
2. Dedicate time to draw out the learning around what has gone well.
3. Explore areas for improvement and insights around what’s not gone well.
4. Focus on learning, not blame.
5. Use root cause analysis.
6. Understand the key lessons and how they inform future actions.

David Kolb’s learning styles model

The session explored the work of educational theorist David Kolb, who devised a structured approach to understanding how individuals learn from their experiences. It involves a four-stage cycle and four separate learning styles. Much of Kolb’s theory concerns the learner’s internal cognitive processes, therefore can be a useful model to consider when thinking about both individual and collective debriefs.

The four stages of learning:

Graphic designed by Educational Technology.

1. Concrete experience

The learner encounters a concrete experience. This might be a new experience or situation, or a reinterpretation of existing experience in the light of new concepts.

2. Reflective observation

The learner reflects on the new experience in light of their existing knowledge. Of particular importance are any inconsistencies between experience and understanding.

3. Abstract conceptualization

Reflection gives rise to a new idea or a modification of an existing abstract concept (the person has learned from their experience).

4. Active experimentation

The newly created or modified concepts give rise to experimentation. The learner applies their idea(s) to the world around them to see what happens.

Kolb developed his four learning styles to illustrate different ways people naturally take in information:

Graphic designed by Educational Technology.

1. Diverging (concrete experience/reflective observation)

Learners who prefer the diverging style are best at viewing concrete situations from multiple perspectives. They prefer to watch rather than do, tending to gather information and use imagination to solve problems.

2. Assimilating (abstract conceptualization/reflective observation)

Assimilating learners prefer a concise, logical approach. They require a clear explanation rather than practical opportunity. They excel at understanding wide-ranging information and organising it in a clear logical format.

3. Converging (abstract conceptualization/active experimentation)

Learners with a converging style can solve problems and will use their learning to find practical applications for ideas and theories. They prefer technical tasks, and are less concerned with people and interpersonal aspects.

4. Accommodating (concrete experience/active experimentation)

Accommodating learners are ‘hands-on’, and rely on intuition rather than logic. They use other people’s analysis, and prefer to take a practical, experiential approach. They are attracted to new challenges and experiences.

The STOP model for live debriefs during the event

The session also discussed the STOP model, which is useful for ‘in the moment’ debriefing (sometimes known as ‘hot debriefing’).

Stand back: take a helicopter view of a situation or problem.

Take stock: analyse what is happening in the moment.

Options: explore options around what you can do differently.

Proceed: step back in and take action. Then assess what impact your new approach has.

The features of a great debrief

• Psychological safety and the notion of creating a calm, positive and supportive space.
• An approach that underlines belief in the potential for great performance, that encourages learning and reduces defensiveness.
• Reduces the impact of power differentials between leaders and those they lead.
• It involves good questioning. Use open, non judgmental questions and be prepared to follow-up.
• Focuses more on learning than results and allow time for reflection.
• Strikes a balance between focusing on the positives and areas for improvement. People learn quickest by reinforcing what works.
• Pays attention to group dynamics in order to get the best possible contribution from all individuals.

By John Portch

Jen Overbeck painted a scene for Leaders Performance Institute members.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power v influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to elicit change

Overbeck explained that there are three types of behavioural strategy:

1. Dominating

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

2. Negotiating

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

3. Supplicating

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

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

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

The tactics available to a leader

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

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

The six types of capital available to leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social and intellectual capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final questions to ask yourself:

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