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Dan Jackson is the General Manager of Player Development & Leadership at the Adelaide Football Club, but he is quick to dispel any notions that he is a guru.

“I can’t teach leadership,” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “I can help unlock what’s already in there.”

On that note, he is certain that leaders are not born. “Leadership is 100 per cent made, but it’s made from a very young age.”

Beyond the origins of leadership, Dan spoke to Henry Breckenridge and John Portch about the importance of prioritising others [10:40]. “Great sustainable teams are built in environments where everyone’s looking to help someone else out,” he adds. “When you fill someone else’s bucket, it fills yours.”

Also on the agenda were the importance of humour and enjoyment [22:00]; the argument against ‘refreezing’ culture [48:30]; and the practical steps that help leaders to manage team operations [32:00].

Henry Breckenridge | LinkedIn

John Portch | LinkedIn

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By John Portch

Hands up: who came to the Kia Oval last month for the Leaders Sport Performance Summit?

We definitely saw some of you there but, if you didn’t make it, don’t worry. We were sat in the front row with a notepad and, having deciphered our handwriting, compiled a list of six factors for turning setbacks into springboards. It was one of the main themes across both days.

The summit wasn’t all that was happening at the Leaders Performance Institute during November and we reflect on insights into the fields of leadership, coaching, data and human performance and pose five questions.

Perhaps the answers will provide one or two nuggets to help you with your next project.

Do you have all the skills you need to lead?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the of the Peter Principle. The concept, devised by psychologist Laurence J Peter, states that people tend to be promoted to their ‘level of respective incompetence’. Think of the supreme technician who, upon promotion, finds themselves overwhelmed as a manager tasked for the first time with leading people.

Carole Mundell, the Director of Science at the European Space Agency, told the audience at the Oval that while she viewed herself as a creative and independent scientist, that wasn’t going to cut the mustard in an organisation designed by engineers.

“I’m learning to think like an engineer,” she said. “All of ESA’s structures and processes and how we operate comes from the mind of an engineer… We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”

Take time to consider the missing element that might make you a better leader.

What is to be done during losing streaks?

David Clancy, a Learning and Development Consultant at the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group, wrote that the answer lies in purpose. ‘In elite environments, whether you’re a player, coach, or part of the front office, the pressures and expectations are immense,’ he wrote. ‘But the best leaders, those who guide their teams with purpose, know that long-term success is rooted in meaningful work.

‘This drives individuals to not only execute their tasks but also to find value in how those tasks contribute to the big picture. Leaders who strive to inspire meaningful work allow individuals to not just survive pressure, but thrive under it, empowering them to embrace challenges as part of their career journey.’

Clancy highlighted three principles to cultivate meaningfulness in your teams:

1. Reinforce the ‘why’: Constantly remind yourself and your team of the purpose behind the work.
2. Connect the dots: Leaders need to help people see the connection between their day-to-day to-dos and the overarching goals. When team members understand how their role directly influences the organisation’s purpose, they are more motivated, energised and engaged.
3. Celebrate progress, not just results: Recognise the small wins and the milestones achieved on the journey. This acknowledgment reminds individuals that meaningful work is about the process, not just the result.

Who are your friends in high performance?

You don’t need us to tell you how competitive things get at a world championships, Olympics or Paralympics, but there are things that transcend rivalry.

One such area is female athlete health, where the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand have clubbed together to form the Global Alliance. This enables them to share resources and insight in this one particular field.

“We are all under-resourced, we’re overstretched in terms of the time that we’re wanting to spend in this space,” said Dr Rachel Harris, the Lead of the Female Performance & Health Initiative at the AIS. “We really wanted to try and allow the people that are working in our sporting organisations to be more proactive.”

Her peers are just as effusive. “I think it’s a natural step to build an international community; and we do have them, but they’ve been a bit ad hoc,” said Dr Helen Fulcher, the HPSNZ Athlete Performance Support Lead. The Global Alliance is, as she added, an opportunity to raise standards across female sport. “The focus is not just on individuals having great connections but what can we collectively do better for this group of athletes that we all care about.”

The Alliance has every expectation that its membership will grow in the near future.

How do you solve a problem like innovation?

Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, told attendees at Leaders Virtual Roundtable that the best way to approach innovation is to start by defining your problem.

To that end, he employs a range of models, including David J Snowden and Mary E Boon’s Cynefin Framework.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word that signifies ‘the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand,’ as Snowden and Boon wrote in their 2007 Harvard Business Review essay titled ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’.

The Cynefin framework, they continued, ‘helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so they can make appropriate choices’.

Source: HBR

Snowden and Boone identified five operative contexts – simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered. Serpiello touched upon each:

• Simple

Simple contexts are stable and one can observe a clear cause-and-effect relationship (although there is a risk of oversimplification).

• Complicated

Complicated contexts are the world of known unknowns; multiple right answers exist, but they require analysis.

• Complex

Here, there are unknown unknowns; and cause-and-effect relationships are only apparent in hindsight.

• Chaotic and disordered

These are domains of no clear cause-and-effect relationships and high turbulence.

Is your mental skills work simple, relevant and applicable?

Mental skills coach Aaron Walsh wanted to understand the perceived gap between value and impact in his field and embarked on a research project.

It furthered his understanding and, as he wrote in an exclusive column for the Leaders Performance Institute, Walsh alighted on three principles for making mental skills work meaningful:

1. Simple — Psychology is a complex subject; however, there is no need to make the content inaccessible by using language and terms you don’t need to. You don’t need to impress them by demonstrating your knowledge of the subject matter. Additionally, I have made the mistake of presenting too much information. The more information you have, the greater the chances of being confused. If you keep the language simple and try to cover only a little, you enhance the audience’s ability to grasp the key messages.
2. Relevance — Any content we deliver must apply to the athlete’s needs. The athlete cannot integrate irrelevant mental skills into their performance. Not everything you know will be relevant to what they need. One good question for us to ponder is, “What do they need to know that is relevant to the challenges they will face?”
3. Applicable — The content needs to be translated into practical solutions. No one wants to be told they are “doing it all wrong” and then not have a roadmap for growth to occur. They should be able to walk out of a session with some tools they can apply to their performance that meet the demands they will face.

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By John Portch

How do you turn your setbacks into springboards?

A rich seam of answers ran through both days of this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

We listened to speakers from various sports organisations discuss their responses to setbacks. Teams including Chelsea, Racing 92, Harlequins and the Sydney Swans laid it all on the table. Several explained how they managed to turn things around.

Stephan Lewies, for example, captained a Quins team to victory over Saracens in October; their 17-10 win ending a miserable run of eight consecutive defeats to their Premiership rivals.

“Coming off a record like that,” said the South African lock, “you often look for answers in the wrong place.” Lewies explained that season after season Quins would change their usual approach when facing Saracens. This season they stuck to their guns and it paid off.

“When the pressure came on in this game, [we turned to] something we’d done for the whole season, for years previously, versus something new in the pressured moment.”

Kudos to Quins, but neither they nor anyone in sport has dealt with the difficulty of landing a probe on Mercury or the conundrum of trying to thaw a microscopic strand of ice on the lens of a space telescope 1.5 million km from Earth.

For Carole Mundell, the Director of Science at the European Space Agency [ESA], such stories represent another day at the office. Crisis after celestial crisis is routinely averted on Mundell’s watch by some of the brightest minds in astrophysics.

Of ESA’s triumphant run-in with the intrusive ice, she said: “Data gives you information. Information gives you knowledge. Knowledge only gives you insight and wisdom for action if you really understand what it’s telling you and how to interpret it with your own experience on top of that.”

Mundell feared impostor syndrome when stepping onto the Oval stage but her words instantly resonated with an audience of coaches and practitioners.

They also lead us nicely back to our original question: how do you turn setbacks into springboards? We bring you six interrelated smart tips from across both days of the summit.

1. Find the right skills to help you in a crisis

How does it feel to be under the cosh in your role? What tools do you lack in those moments? Carole Mundell has allowed herself to be shaped both by the crises she’s confronted and the organisation she leads. Instinctively, she’s a creative scientist, a physicist with the urge to investigate independently. Yet her work at ESA requires her to think like an engineer and commit to the team; these newly acquired skills have proven crucial in moments of crisis.

“I’m learning to think like an engineer. All of ESA’s structures and processes and how we operate comes from the mind of an engineer… We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”

Carole Mundell

2. Seek key allies above you

Racing 92 were treading water in France’s Top 14 league when they appointed Stuart Lancaster as Director of Rugby. Lancaster, whose tenure began in 2023, was hired to transform their fortunes, but faced considerable obstacles. Language was one, culture another; he also knew he’d be working under his predecessor, Laurent Travers. Nevertheless, Lancaster felt that he was “pushing on an open door” thanks to the quality of his coaching work with England (2011-2015) and, in particular, Leinster (2016-2023).

The big question he asked himself was: should he tiptoe in or smash down the door? As Racing’s revival required more than a cosmetic makeover, he opted for the latter. With the help of his French coaching staff, Lancaster introduced a new working week, a new playbook, and called time on Racing’s long lunch culture. He could disregard those who labelled him an ignorant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ thanks to the relationships he forged with Travers and the Racing board.

“I spent a lot of time prior to the players arriving getting [the management] to understand my vision, my philosophy and what I wanted to achieve; not taking away the DNA of Racing and trying to replace it with Leinster, but trying to merge the lessons I’d learned with England, the lessons I’d learned from Leinster, and then bringing that structure and detail to a French environment.”

Stuart Lancaster

3. Who are your key influencers?

The Sydney Swans had to dust themselves off following their 2022 AFL Grand Final defeat. John Longmire, who this week stepped down as the Swans’ Senior Coach, led them back to the Grand Final again this year. Since leaving London, he has handed the reins to his assistant Dean Cox, who will renew the team’s fight for a first flag since 2012. The factors that propel a team one season will not necessarily apply the next, but Cox is sure to emulate Longmire in learning and applying the lessons from another painful defeat. In dealing with setbacks, Longmire always leaned heavily on the key influencers in his “ecosystem”.

“The ecosystem includes your team, the board, the CEO, your fans. Your playing group and staff are a living, breathing organism, the whole thing, and it needs to keep moving and shifting. I’ve got certain long-held beliefs close to my heart, but also within that [have] the flexibility to shift and understand that the best cultures are the ones that keep moving and keep adjusting to the ecosystem. Understand the good influencers in your group, the ones that can help you with that.”

John Longmire

4. Don’t be afraid to let the wrong people walk away

When Chelsea won the Champions League in 2021, the club would not have expected to slump to a 12^th-place finish in the Premier League just two years later. Nor would they have predicted the organisation narrowly avoiding oblivion and a subsequent change of ownership. Bryce Cavanagh was hired as Performance Director in the summer of 2023 and, while he has long been considered one of the best in the business, an arduous task awaited him.

He admitted his presence created a sense of risk and vulnerability in some quarters, but he was fair in setting out his stall. Some relished the challenge of staying to help build a fresh performance strategy (a work in progress, he admitted), but others sought roles elsewhere. Cavanagh was willing to let them go.

“First of all, we talked and defined where we were going, what we wanted, the behaviours that we needed, then the performance strategy. We had to really define where we wanted to go and what we wanted the bus to look like because then people ended up self-selecting.”

Bryce Cavanagh

5. Have the difficult conversations quickly

As captain of Harlequins, Stephan Lewies regularly faces difficult conversations. They are of added importance when the chips are down and tempers are frayed. Time and again, as Lewies explained, he has been able to plot a path out of disharmony by being proactive, acting fast and ultimately putting the team first. A leader should also strive to understand multiple points of view without leaping to conclusions.

“That’s the main goal in any tough conversation: you turn a negative into a positive that we can use going forward… When we [avoid] a tough conversation, the problem just becomes bigger and bigger… walking away from that conversation is the easy option, but stepping into that space is so important.”

Stephan Lewies

6. Prioritise your stress and emotional responses

Success and failure both present psychological and emotional challenges. In 2021, the UK Sports Institute introduced its ‘Performance Decompression’ tool to help athletes and support staff transition back to daily life following intense competition periods. The tool consists of four phases: first there’s the post-event ‘hot debrief’ followed by ‘time zero’, which, as the UKSI website explains, focuses on ‘restorative care in a soothing place’; then it’s ‘process the emotion’ and, finally, a ‘performance debrief’.

The tool can be used anywhere. British 1,500m runner Jake Wightman, for example, chose a sofa in a Twickenham café to unpick his underperformance at the Tokyo Olympics. A year later he was world champion and, while there was much more to it, psychologist Sarah Cecil believes the tool helped Wightman to plot his comeback. She and the UKSI’s Head of Performance Psychology, Danielle Adams Norenburg, are also happy to teach their tool to any individual or organisation who may find it useful.

“By the end of this process, Jake had made sense of the experience, he was able to tell his story about where he was, and he was also able to process all the emotions that surrounded his performance and the lead-up to his performance… I don’t need to tell people in the room that lots of factors contribute to performance… but in the same position, with 300m to go, Jake had what he needed to run fast enough to be world champion.”

Sarah Cecil

By John Portch

To what extent do you use technology in your decision-making processes?

Your answer is likely to be governed by your levels of confidence in a tech modality, which will be influenced by its accuracy and reliability, its ability to help deliver insights, and its applicability to the performance problem at hand.

In the second session of this three-part virtual roundtable series titled ‘How to Approach Innovation’, Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, led a discussion on how coaches and practitioners might employ a decision-making framework to inform how they use technology to innovate.

“I think we’re on a plateau in tech when it comes to innovation,” he told the virtual roundtable. “Technology needs to solve problems for the decision maker. The definition of ‘innovation’ is finding new ways to solve problems. Technology needs to support the decisions you make – if tech is not supporting that, then you have a problem.”

This session explored David J Snowden and Mary E Boon’s Cynefin Framework to help attendees better understand and define both their innovation challenges and the role technology might play in solving them.

Software: the difference-maker

Serpiello contemplated the future and is in no doubt where tech will best aid innovation work. “If you look at hardware or software, there is some cool innovation coming in the hardware space with patches and smart materials,” he said. “But I think the future is in the software.”

He feels that effective software will be defined by its ability to:

• Read and interpret context.
• Personalise recommendations.
• Make decision-making easier.

The Cynefin Framework

Serpiello spoke of his efforts to find a framework for decision-making and adapting it for tech in the world of sport. He alighted upon the Cynefin Framework.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word that signifies ‘the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand,’ as Snowden and Boon wrote in their 2007 Harvard Business Review essay titled ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’.

The Cynefin framework, they continued, ‘helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so they can make appropriate choices’.

Source: HBR

Snowden and Boone identified five operative contexts – simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered. Serpiello touched upon each:

Simple

Simple contexts are stable and one can observe a clear cause-and-effect relationship (although there is a risk of oversimplification). “Your job as a leader is to make simple, quick decisions based on categorising the information available to you,” said Serpiello. “The technology that we use in the simple domain should be able to categorise information and communicate it easily.”

Complicated

Complicated contexts are the world of known unknowns; multiple right answers exist, but they require analysis. Serpiello said: “Your job as a leader is to sense, analyse and respond” and “the tech in this space needs to be focused on analysing the environment and then communicating a response”.

In Serpiello’s opinion, training falls between simple and complicated from a decision-making point of view. “The majority of what we do happens in training and it’s where we can control the most variables,” he added.

Complex

Here, there are unknown unknowns; and cause-and-effect relationships are only apparent in hindsight. “Most sport competition is complex,” said Serpiello. “You have relationships between athletes, coaches, the environment, the scorelines etc.”

Here, “your role as a decision maker is to probe the environment, sense, and respond,” he continued. “So probing, as in inserting something into the system to get a reaction, to get an answer – technology should be able to support that.”

Chaotic and disordered

These are domains of no clear cause-and-effect relationships and high turbulence. “In a chaotic environment,” said Serpiello, “you act first, then you sense, then you respond”. This tends to refer to catastrophic events, although if an athlete failed a doping test, for example, the team may be thrown into chaos and disarray.

“If you’re using tech, it needs to be able to support your quick action. So I don’t think it applies often in performance,” he added. “So, in my opinion, performance happens between a simple, complicated, and complex environment.”

Load monitoring: from the complex and complicated to the simple?

Using load monitoring as an example, Serpiello explained how tech use in the complicated or complex domains can lead to confusion and leave decision-makers overwhelmed.

“Most of this technology is sold to us as allowing you to do complex stuff, complex analysis, 100 metrics,” he said, “and you collect all this data, but perhaps it’s not the right way to use it.” Instead of focusing on sensing and analysing, “tracking technology should be used in a simple decision-making framework”.

He emphasised that technology should simplify decision-making rather than complicate it; and perhaps load monitoring technology currently has its best application in categorising the outcome of drills. “Your athlete management system tells you ‘yes, you’ve met this goal’ or ‘no, you haven’t’,” he added.

Serpiello also suggested that once the simple aspects were well-managed, organisations can then explore more complicated or complex analyses. “Is the decision maker at training – the coach – actually making the right decision with their tech? I don’t know.” He explained that he would use the aforementioned frameworks if he were a coach. “I would use an innovation framework first to inform the performance challenges and a decision-making framework to say, ‘OK, do we actually have the right tech for the right decisions?’”

Final thoughts

Can technology help define problems more effectively? By leveraging technology, perhaps a coach or practitioner can identify the necessary expertise and perspectives needed to tackle their challenges.

Sustained innovation may appeal for its perceived lower risks, but it is important to first define the problems you face. With this in mind, should the focus, in fact, shift to better research?

There is immense value in engaging external experts who can provide different viewpoints on interpreting data and findings.

The Cynefin Framework can help people to organise their thoughts around decision-making and technology. It also allows for a better understanding of how to align technology with the specific needs of their environment.

Further reading

‘Innovation’ Means Different Things to Different People – No Wonder Progress Can Be Hard to Track

By John Portch

“Are you doing what you want to be doing?” David Clancy asked his audience.

Clancy, a learning and development consultant with the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group, was speaking at the October launch of his new book Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: a Personal and Professional Development Framework at London’s Tate Modern Gallery.

“Maybe this day will make you think a little bit more into that question,” he continued.

The gallery’s East Room, with its panoramic views of London, is a suitable backdrop for some of the brightest minds in sports science and medicine. Each of them knows there’s more to their success than talent.

“When we’re in college, we’re taught the technical, clinical, hard skills, but it’s the soft skills that make a difference,” said Clancy.

Essential Skills is an effort to address that reality, bringing together as it does experts who, in some cases, had never previously met in order to collaborate. “That’s the beauty of the book because it shows we can all get better together.”

The book’s proceeds will go to Children’s Health Ireland [CHI], a cause dear to Clancy and his family given the care they have provided to his four-year-old daughter Grace. “This way I can help people like my daughter and her friends.”

Clancy then introduced his roster of speakers – friends, collaborators and mentors – all of whom had wisdom to share.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute picks out five thinking points to help you reflect on Clancy’s original question: are you doing what you want to be doing?

1. Define the behaviours that will take you from potential to peak

First onstage was James Kerr, the author of the renowned Legacy, who detailed the lessons leaders can take from New Zealand’s All Blacks.

He explained that the right behaviours are the real “force multiplier”. Good behaviours, whether you’re an athlete, coach or practitioner, will “take you from potential to peak more consistently”.

For the All Blacks, that may mean ‘sweeping the sheds’ but how does that look in your environment? What will enable you to show up more often and apply the right behaviours?

2. Seek to understand, find common ground

Behaviours shouldn’t be separated from your values, but how comfortable are you calling out poor behaviours? Any discomfort you feel may be amplified if you’re a woman trying to progress in a male-dominated environment.

Alicia Tang, the Head of Academy Medicine & Physical Performance at Derby County, recognises this “internal battle” well enough and believes the first step is to speak to the relevant stakeholders. “Seek to understand, find common ground, and then work on the resolution,” she said during the second session.

This view is shared by business consultant Michelle Carney, who said, “If you meet people where they are, you’ll find the right people”. They will not only be colleagues but allies.

“I think it’s definitely empowering when you have those people around you,” says Ashar Magoba, the Lead Academy Physiotherapist at Charlton Athletic, who is also starting to work with the club’s first team. “Perhaps those people can see something in you that you don’t quite yet see yet.”

3. Take a look over the fence

Where do you look for insights and inspiration? Jack McCaffrey, a six-time All-Ireland Senior Football champion with Dublin GAA, enjoys himself in his day job as a paediatric doctor at CHI at Temple Street in Dublin. “I get to hang out with kids all day; and kids are just great,” he told performance coach Ronan Conway during their fireside chat in session three.

In some ways, McCaffrey’s medical career is a sanctuary from his Gaelic football (particularly following a bad result). One could say the players of the strictly amateur Gaelic games in Ireland have a natural separation between the athlete and person that can often be lost in professional sports.

During his intercounty career, McCaffrey’s work also gave him lessons to take back to the Dublin panel, where the training environment was, to all intents and purposes, a professional setting.

“Most of my learning of dealing with high-pressure situations has come from work,” he said. “How to remain cool, how to have feedback loops, how to make sure you’re sticking to algorithms.”

4. Find the information in your trauma

In sport, we continually speak of ‘controlling the controllables’ and yet 95% of human brain activity is subconscious. It is a troubling thought for life coach Mark Whittle, the Founder of the Take Flight performance consultancy, as he told us during the fourth session.

His presentation returned to the question of behaviours, which he said are governed by both our drive towards pleasure and wish to avoid pain. Tied up in that avoidance of pain is fear, which can be born of trauma.

Consider a setback you’ve suffered: how can you learn from that event and respond appropriately? “What can you make it mean?” Whittle asked the audience.

5. Identify your gaps

It takes humility to recognise what it takes to excel in a new role. In the final session, Jeff Konin and Trevor Bates warn of the Peter Principle. The concept, devised by psychologist Laurence J Peter, states that people tend to be promoted to their ‘level of respective incompetence’. Think of the supreme technician who, upon promotion, finds themselves overwhelmed as a manager tasked for the first time with leading people.

For Konin, the important thing is finding your ‘where’ when looking five or ten years into the future. “What skills do you need that you don’t currently possess?” said the Clinical Professor from Florida International University.

Similarly, Bates may be the President & CEO of Mercy College in Ohio, but he has no problem with being the “pupil”. He said: “I might be the one who moves a programme forward, but intellectually I might be a pupil in that space.”

Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: a Personal and Professional Development Framework is available now from Elsevier.

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.