As this session of the Leadership Skills Series demonstrated, we can all become better leaders by developing trusting relationships.
For the latest edition of our Leadership Skills Series, we explored the art of persuasion. All leaders in sport have the potential to influence others’ thoughts, feelings or actions through effective communication and interpersonal techniques.
The session highlighted four related areas of focus.
Trust is rightfully acknowledged as the cornerstone of effective leadership and the foundation of relationship-building. To unpack all of that we turned to the Trust Equation. It is a conceptual formula used to describe the components that build trust in professional and personal relationships. It’s often represented as: 
This is what each component means:
Credibility speaks to words and credentials. How authentic are we?
Reliability is the perception of a person’s integrity. Do you do what you say? Are your actions connected to your words?
Intimacy involves the feeling of safety or security when sharing information with someone. How safe or secure does the client or colleague feel in sharing with us?
Self-orientation reflects the degree to which a person’s focus is directed towards themselves as opposed to being focused on others. What are our motives? For our benefit or the benefit of others?
The higher the numerator (credibility, reliability, intimacy), the greater the trust. Conversely, the higher the self-orientation, the lower the trust. Ultimately, the equation serves as a mindful tool to enrich discussions, elevate trust levels, and deepen relationships within our teams.
When leading a team or a department, it matters how you are perceived by others. The ability to self-assess your personal status is another strategic tool wielded by seasoned leaders to convey confidence and authority. It includes an assessment of your:
Such elements can be ranked on a scale from 1 (‘low status’) to 10 (‘high status’) and, when done sincerely, this can be an invaluable guide for navigating various workplace scenarios and can even foster emotional intelligence, which is pivotal in forging genuine connections with athletes and team members. It can also facilitate the development of more impactful leadership skills that inspire and motivate with greater efficiency.
Flows of logic are the pathways our minds create to connect ideas and evidence to reach a reasoned conclusion. They are essential in critical thinking, problem-solving, and, of course, forming persuasive arguments. Flows of logic involve a sequence of statements or steps that follow one another in a rational and coherent manner. These frameworks can take three different forms, depending on your scenario:
These can be indispensable guides when constructing persuasive arguments. By grounding our narratives in these logical flows, we enhance storytelling capabilities and foster deeper connections with our teams. This pragmatic approach ensures proactive, relevant support while avoiding unnecessary complexity, thereby maintaining clarity and engagement, particularly in high-pressure situations where decisive leadership is paramount.
If you can put those three factors together then you can be better at delivering your message. Mindful communication is another tool upon which you can rely. This idea urges leaders to remain present and deliberate when communicating. It can help a person to:
The members in attendance discussed the success and failure of these elements in the context of people that ‘think to speak,’ and those that ‘speak to think’.
Here are some effective mantras to keep in mind:
Final reflections
As members reflected on the transformative potential of incorporating these persuasion techniques into their leadership repertoire, they described the following as essential steps towards mastering persuasiveness in your leadership approach:
29 Jan 2024
ArticlesFrom the English Premier League to the NBA via the AFL, the Leaders Performance Institute Think Tank gives coaches, managers and directors the opportunities to share lessons and ideas around the performance questions of the day.
The Think Tank is designed to connect general managers, coaches and directors of performance – the people with responsibility at the highest levels of world – sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best.
The discussions on the day were wide ranging, as the participants delved into five common problems and identified possible approaches and solutions.
Renewal is a continuous process in sport, which is not to say that it is always easy, frictionless and without complications. If you are the person tasked with delivering upon your team’s vision, consider:
It is often incumbent on the head coach to provide the energy to the playing group, but who is looking out for the energy of the coach? At a time when coaches fear coming across as ‘weak’, here are some tips for coaches seeking to protect their personal energy.
Succession planning is hard, particularly when one considers that generation-defining coaches are more a product of circumstance than formal programmes. Nevertheless, how can we give aspiring coaches a better chance?
No one has the fully come to terms with talent development pathways, hence the ever-present questions around attributes, development gaps and purpose. What can we do to better identify and then develop our young athletes?
No other area is as widely misunderstood by coaches and practitioners as artificial intelligence and its role in sport. There is, however, no need to stray from your performance principles in putting them into practice. Remember:
Participants
Mo Bobat, Director of Cricket, Royal Challengers Bangalore
Michael Bourne, Performance Director, Lawn Tennis Association
Matti Clements, Executive General Manager, Australian Institute of Sport
Steve Cooper, football manager
Chris Fagan, Senior Coach, Brisbane Lions
Rob Key, Managing Director of Cricket, England & Wales Cricket Board
Marc-Oliver Kochan, Managing Director, Red Bull Athlete Performance
Sean Marks, General Manager, Brooklyn Nets
Tabai Matson, Director of Performance & Development, Harlequin RFC
Sara Symington, Head of Olympic & Paralympic Programmes, British Cycling
Jess Thirlby, Head Coach, England Netball
Simon Timson, Performance Director, Manchester City FC
Gregor Townsend, Head Coach, Scotland men’s rugby team
23 Jan 2024
ArticlesMembers of the Leaders Performance Institute answered this question from their own experience and shared responses ranging from environmental renewal to the power of positive storytelling.
The notion of ‘belonging’ can be simply defined as ‘a sense of connectedness to others and what you are doing’. The Cambridge English Dictionary extends the definition of belonging to ‘a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a particular group and having a good relationship with the other members of the group because they welcome you and accept you’.
Psychology research shows that in cultures and environments that show autonomy, competence and belonging, individuals will elevate their engage in tasks and activities they are asked to commit to.
It’s clear from both the literature and lived experiences of the group that creating belonging is a powerful tool for a harmonious and high-functioning environment. The aim of this particular roundtable was to share best practices and examples of how we are trying to foster belonging in our environments.
It starts at the induction stage
In one of the breakout groups, they reinforced the idea that the process of creating positive belonging starts at the induction or onboarding phase and how important it is to dedicate time and intent towards this process to set the right tone. The work to create belonging continues week on week during this onboarding phase, with the acknowledgement and value that an individual or individuals bring to the team. From a team perspective, it is an opportunity to acknowledge the variety and diversity of backgrounds, skills and views of those in the department or organisation from the outset.
In summarising this first point, there was an excellent reflection that how we make people or an individual feel is the most important thing. Every interaction matters and what you do is about making them feel the way you want them to feel.
Setting the stall out around the culture
There were a number of reflections on how to give your environment the best opportunity for positive belonging. Identify the values and culture expected of individuals within your environment, and perhaps most importantly, find practical ways to instil them. Is everyone in the environment crystal clear on what the behaviours and expectations are? If you have this in place, there can be collective accountability. Similarly, it is important to be consistent in positively reinforcing, noticing and celebrating positive examples of those behaviours.
A couple of people on the call also suggested that coach buy-in is really crucial in this process. If the head coach buys into the values then the majority of people in the environment tend to follow, such is the influence the head coach carries.
In setting yourselves up for success, create opportunities for athletes, coaches and staff to convene and build the culture together. Creating opportunities for discussion on values and behaviours supports the idea of creating a sense of belonging. It is widely acknowledged that engagement, contribution and a love for what you do leads to a sense of belonging, therefore lies the challenge in ensuring we are bringing this to life.
Finally, there was a discussion around language and its importance. There was a fantastic phrase shared on the call that ‘above-the-line language is powerful, but below-the-line language is powerless’. There is a responsibility to own the standards of the language.
The power of storytelling
A common response from the group around effective ways to instil belonging was utilising the power of story. Find the story that connects to the people that you’re working with, whilst recognising the significant cultural differences that exist in the environment. The story that you use must align with the culture. One environment on the call shared how they leant on metaphor in creating an overarching theme that is reframed every year.
Story also presents the opportunity to connect those across the backroom staff, athlete population and other forward-facing roles. There was a suggestion this should also extend to family members of those involved, bringing them into the culture and environment, knowing the importance of the environment off the field. Do they feel that sense of belonging as well?
Finally, we also discussed the impact story can have around connecting individuals to the cultural environment of the country that you are in. It also presents the opportunity to embrace the culture that individual is bringing into the environment.
Create opportunities for shared experiences & collective input
Responses from the group indicate that every interaction matters and it is important to be mindful of that. Therefore, how are you intentionally creating opportunities for shared experiences and opportunities for collective input from different stakeholders?
A simple initiative to instil is celebrating ‘the good’ when done well and highlighting small wins and successes.
Encourage active listening and understanding of everyone’s opinions – providing a space and opportunity for everyone to have a voice in key decisions is found to be an effective way of supporting belonging in an environment. To ensure the above is both effective and a success, organisational leaders require an openness and receptivity to ensure the environment is designed to be safe.
There were also a number of reflections around the power of ‘inclusive initiatives and rituals’ that bring people together. Finally on this point: are you formally capturing information from the stakeholders in your environment in a consistent way? This is a simple tactic to remain on the pulse of the environment, ensure those in the organisation have a chance to provide feedback and contribute to decision-making and the state of play on the culture.
Providing space to better understand the ‘whole person’
One of the final key buckets of discussion around instilling a sense of belonging in your environment was formal and informal opportunities to better understand the whole person. We should strive to provide space to celebrate authenticity and our true selves. Does your environment provide an opportunity for employees to breathe and express themselves?
A foundation stone of the High Performance Strategy in the Australian Olympic System is the athlete’s voice. The idea is to provide opportunities to understand one’s journey, both as an athlete and as a person. The self-determination theory concept is something that is really key in this piece and its relatedness to belonging. Creating opportunities to understand the whole person allows for further insight around ones intrinsic motivation and the opportunity for honest, open conversations within the environment.
Final reflections
At our Leaders Meet: High Performance Environments event in Melbourne back in 2023, we ran an Open Spaces session on this exact topic. The aim of the session was to allow the audience on the day to share stories, experiences and perspectives on belonging. Five things came through strongly from those in the room that day around what we can do to enhance belonging in our environment.
15 Jan 2024
ArticlesHelene Wilson led the Northern Mystics to the ANZ Premiership in 2021 but not before taking her playing group on a individual and collective development journey.
“Working in netball, in a woman’s environment, and coming from a background of being a teacher, I think that learning is incredibly important,” she told the audience at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.
“And how do we create an environment where high performance comes from out-learning your opposition and people are on a journey together to get there?”
Wilson, who currently serves as Manager of High Performance Sport New Zealand’s [HPSNZ] Women in High Performance Sport programme, was primarily at the Etihad to discuss her five years as Head Coach of the Northern Mystics, a netball team in New Zealand’s ANZ Premiership.
She took the Mystics’ reins in 2017 and would eventually lead the Auckland-based franchise to success in the 2021 Premiership Grand Final, ending their 24-year wait for a national championship. But not before the team bottomed out in 2019. “We were the wooden spooners,” she said.
The team had performed promisingly in the preceding seasons but, in 2018, the unforeseen departure of goal shooter Maria Folau due to personal reasons left the Mystics underpowered. It showed on the court and Wilson admitted that she was perhaps fortunate to retain her job at one stage given the turmoil behind the scenes, “but the players wanted to come back and play for the team because they believed in what we were trying to do.” Two years later they were champions.
Beyond reaching and winning a Grand Final, Wilson and the Mystics wanted to rewrite the history of netball underachievement in New Zealand’s Northern Zone, where Wilson coached the sport for three decades.
“The Northern Zone has the biggest number of participants in netball – a third of our netball-playing population is there. There is also a population of ethnic diversity, age diversity, socio-economic diversity,” she continued. “We had 17 netball centres across that area and I inherited a narrative over that time that we’re talented – more than anyone else – but it’s actually a curse in high performance because that doesn’t matter.”
There had, according to Wilson, been a history of disharmony in the Mystics ranks. “The landscape of where we come from, and thinking about the land, it was actually quite disjointed. Auckland, our biggest city in New Zealand, is groups of little villages that are quite insular and quite different to each other. And we were also sitting on volcanoes and literally it was pretty explosive the way we used to behave.”
By the time they won the championship in 2021 and went close again the following year, this was a team transformed. “We won the Premiership after 24 years of trying, but really the learnings, what happened between 2017 and 2019 and up to 2021 was massive and it’s not just about me and what I did – it was about what we did together.”
Finding energy and bringing clarity to the changing room
The “catalyst for change”, as Wilson describes it, was her involvement in HPSNZ’s Te Hāpaitanga: Women in High Performance Sport Coaching Initiative. Its pilot programme ran in 2019 with Wilson serving as a mentor to women applying to be high performance coaches.
The cohort visited a ‘marae’, a Māori meeting ground, of which the focal point is the ‘wharenui’, the communal house where people meet. A wharenui, with its ornate wooden carvings and elaborate design, is steeped in Māori metaphor. It provides a space for collective, inclusive, reflective practice (‘Rongo’ in Māori) that enables people to reengage with problems in the world beyond (‘Tū’) having formed a consensus on the best solutions.
“There is an energy about it,” she said. “The process and energy is like a coming together and moving apart in a state of clarity, which is collectively built together. The process of ‘Karakia’ – transitioning from one realm to another – takes us from the worlds of Tū and Rongo.”
It was a cultural element that resonated first with Wilson then with her playing group. “You don’t need to know it’s Māori,” she said. “If I stood at the front and tried to be Māori I think people would think I’m a fraud and I’ve got to be respectful, not being Māori, but having a deep understanding because I do come from New Zealand.” Wilson encourages coaches working in other regions or nations to find the cultural artefacts that are authentic their groups. “There’s stuff around us everywhere that you can apply in different ways and it’s the framework that is key.”
Coming away from the pilot programme, Wilson drew on the work of corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson who wrote a book in 2014 entitled Above the Line. According to Henderson, people will come to a team with their own beliefs, which play out as behaviours. People’s values are born of their beliefs and behaviours and, in a team setting, these all help to construct the group’s collective behaviours. These eventually become the team’s culture.
At the Mystics, group behaviours tended to be a product of the disharmony that denoted the team’s decades of under-achievement. The group would seemingly generate a lot of heat but not necessarily much light.
It ultimately comes down to the leader. “The mistake we often make is starting at values rather than giving space for beliefs to be heard,” said Wilson. The trick was to create a space where everyone felt empowered to share their beliefs. “We came together as a group and said ‘everyone’s a leader. The standard we walk past is the standard we are prepared to accept’ and it’s super important not to walk past unacceptable standards. So we redefined our environment so that everyone on our team was a leader and ‘leadership’ was simply our actions and our behaviours. It wasn’t the role or the position we were given.
“We needed to have a better understanding of what being valued and contributing to value looked like and how that would affect performance. So there was intense learning at this time because the players wanted to be a leader but there needs to be clear evidence of what that means for performance – and intense learning is how do we care, listen and bring those diverse opinions to the table, as well as skillsets the people bring. I think we learned that together as staff, performance experts and players.”
Learning from the ‘moment of truth’
In his 2021 book Belonging, Owen Eastwood cited Harvard professors (the late) Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman, specifically their renowned 2008 publication on corporate leadership teams entitled Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make them Great. ‘Of all the factors we assessed in our research,’ they wrote, ‘the one that makes the biggest difference in how well a senior leadership team performs is the clarity of the behavioural norms that guide members’ interactions’.
It was on Wilson and Sulu Fitzpatrick, who was appointed as the Mystics captain in 2021, to create the right environment. “We were trying to learn what stuff we will deploy in that circumstance to ensure that the collective performance outcomes we needed were going to happen. In the Māori world we call this ‘Kotahitanga’. ‘Ko’ meaning a central point’; ‘Tahi’ meaning one; ‘Kotahitanga’ meaning collective unit.”
For the Mystics, Kotahitanga meant reaching a consensus through ‘Wānanga’. “It’s a word that means coming together and meeting to discuss, collaborate and consider,” Wilson told the Etihad audience. “It could look similar to a team meeting but it can take many forms and Wānanga happens in many ways. Conceptually, it happens in the world of Rongo; you’ve got to go deep. At a Wānanga, I put a concept on the table, a picture of performance that I may see as a head coach, or someone else may put it there depending on who’s taking a lead that day, and the Wānanga takes the form of questions, from multiple perspectives, and we keep going until we get some sense of alignment. It doesn’t come with any level of expertise or experience, it comes with everybody’s level and everybody contributes.”
The Mystics would typically hold a team-wide Wānanga once a week and any time the group deemed one necessary. Wilson’s role was to ensure: “enough creative tension in the room to drive performance and shift performance but also making sure that people were able to learn the art of listening, hearing, weaving different perspectives and energy that people brought to the Wānanga.
“Wānanga can get heated, it can be soft and gentle, it can be all of those things, but Wānanga is about is that you sit there in the world of Rongo until you get it done. Sometimes we had training or practice [in the world of Tū] straight after and we were running late because the Wānanga is more important than the physical practice – practice had to happen whenever it needed to happen based on the Wānanga.”
Wilson explained that there were three broad categories of people, characterised through their ‘energy’, who would join a Wānanga: people who connected to others from the heart, those who had insight from their intellect, and people with the drive and willpower to perform. “My shift as head coach was to connect to those three levels of care of where I was with an individual.”
It was not easy. At first, there was a lack of intent, decisiveness and the results did not necessarily translate into performance. “I think setting this up was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done and one of the spaces where I learnt so much as a coach.”
Crucially, the group bought-in, even after the underwhelming 2019 season and the disruption of the pandemic. In time, the group developed its own lexicon, which included the term ‘moment of truth’, meaning a reference to the key moments in a match as defined by players and coaches individually, who would then weave their ‘moments of truth’ together in a Wānanga. “We would stay there until we were ready to define the moment of truth that was going to give us the greatest learning going forward.”
As she said, it was not always Wilson who led the Wānanga. She recognised the need for others to take the lead in order to feel that they belonged and that their input was valued. ‘We look for proof of our values from our leaders,’ wrote Owen Eastwood in Belonging. ‘We do not want our leaders’ personal beliefs forced upon us – we want our tribe’s authentic values articulated.’
That is where Wilson felt the key knowledge sat in any case. “My learning was to sit at the back and know that my knowledge was not sufficient; that the knowledge was in the room and I was there to sense the problem and the Wānanga would sort out what the problem was. I needed to be the last one talking in the room.”
In Part II, we explore how the coaching staff helped the Mystics players to transfer their personal and collective development to the court.
We asked Hockey Canada Head Coach Danny Kerry who has worked with both during his 30-year coaching career and highlight four factors in his personal development.
He cites renowned coach developer Nigel Redman in his response. “Nigel uses this phrase: men have to battle in order to bond, so we have to have gone to battle first. ‘You’re a tough nut so I’ll be around your nonsense’ – sorry – you can see my biases playing out there. Whereas [as Redman says] women have to bond first before they battle.”
Kerry, who led Great Britain’s women to field hockey gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, is at pains to tell the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium that this yardstick should only be used in general terms and may even be an oversimplification. It is, however, illustrative of the dynamics of which a coach must be aware.
He continued: “If you spend time and energy to understand the dynamics that are playing out within high-performing female teams, if you spend the time and energy to talk to those things, spend the time and energy to build the relationships between those players so you can understand what particular perspectives individual athletes carry, why they think as they do, what their life experiences are, that level of trust in the relationship goes up significantly and then they will literally run through brick walls for you. If you don’t do that, as soon as the challenge and threat comes they can be [slow] to it.”
He then reflects on the transition he made from coaching Great Britain’s women to the men’s programme in 2018. “I tried that approach, if I’m blunt, with the men and it was effective to a degree, but if I had my time again I would probably put them into some form of battle or get them to understand each other in that environment along with some of this other work.”
Kerry, who was joined onstage by Emma Trott, the former Women’s Junior Endurance Coach at British Cycling, spoke at length about his personal development as a coach three decades into his career and the evolving demands of his players.
Here, we highlight four factors that shaped the coach that took the reins at Hockey Canada in March 2023.
“I was the classic coach. All about hockey and very hard-nosed. Very cycle and task-oriented, Xs and Os,” said Kerry. However, as he said, when it came to people’s feelings and relationships, “I received some pretty blunt feedback then tried – and failed – to adjust”. He quickly realised he was doing himself a disservice. “I say I failed but it’s still not my sweet spot. So my big learning, whether it was male or female, was around how relationships develop as an entirety and with individual athletes.”
It led him to adapt his behaviour and the most notable example was his pitch-side presence during the penalty shootout that followed the draw in Great Britain’s gold medal match with the Netherlands in Rio. “I always positioned myself high; the reason for that was, one, I was task-focused and, two, athletes pick up on your anxiety as a coach and, being pitch side, that’s not a great thing. You don’t want to add to their anxiety as a coach, so actually being up high helps with that,” he continued. This time, however, he reflected and changed his custom. “I remember just thinking literally ‘what does this group need from me now as a coach and what doesn’t it need?’ And so at that point in time, my ability to ask myself that question at that most pressurised moment, probably of my career, was to self-regulate. All they need now is a ‘we’ve done this, we’ve rehearsed this, our processes, all good?’ Everyone nodded and off they went. I wouldn’t have been able to do that previously. It’s still a struggle, but that was a good example of being able to regulate yourself to then help the athlete be in the right place they need to be to perform.”
As a male coach in a female environment, Kerry is aware of the need to afford athletes personal space when it comes to issues such as the impact of the menstrual cycle on training history, volume and conditioning, particularly as there is still “some debate and ambiguity about what the science is saying”. While working with Great Britain’s women, he would defer to the team doctor in such matters. “It was led by our doctor, a person seen to be on the ‘outside’. We didn’t want athletes to think we were encroaching on something so personal to them. That needs to be handled with incredible skill.” He discussed it in terms of “managing the bell curve and deviations from the group”. “It’s not a science, it is a sense, it’s a craft. What is optimum for this group of athletes as a whole can mean that some people adapt ahead of the bell curve, others struggle because that’s not what they wish for themselves, but that’s an optimum for the entire group,” he said. “All facets of coaching, whether that’s sitting in a meeting discussing the players, whether that’s discussing how we push collectively as a team, whether that’s what we’re going after and how we’re going after it. It’s understanding that you’re trying to find an optimum for that particular team and then helping those people below the bell curve find their value in that, finding what works for them. That is the craft of coaching and, in my experience, that doesn’t get discussed in coach development.”
Kerry was initially taken aback by the Canada women’s often literal interpretation of his instructions. “There’s a lot you can unpack there,” he said. “You can unpack it from the angle of gender, you can unpack it from the angle of your understanding of what’s going on. How are they feeling? Is there literal interpretation because they don’t want to get it wrong? Are they doing it because of the way they’ve been coached all of their life? Are they taking it literally because of the dynamic playing out within that female group? [They could ask themselves] Am I trying to do that because I’ve got a 200-cap athlete next to me?
“There’s a whole raft of psycho-social dynamics playing out there. So based on the experience I’d had, just talking to that very quickly; almost trying to create environments where [I’m asking] does it require me to talk to them? Does it require me to remove myself from that room and get them to sort it out themselves? Does it require me to use data, which involves the assistant coach of the programme leading that? Making these decisions as a head coach requires identifying some of these dynamics that are going on.”
Kerry warmed to the topic and added: “Quite often when people talk about performance, they’re talking about a very objective domain, whereas I think it’s more about these aspects. What is the greatest burden of that environment? What environment are you creating to ensure the most optimum versus the learning curve? What’s your impact on that? How can you create an environment between your athletes that allows them that peer to peer conversation that Emma was talking about? How quickly do you set those things up because they are, in my experience, the single greatest inhibitor to the team and the acquisition of skill?”
There have been occasions in the past where he wishes he could have coached female players differently. “If I had my time again, I would definitely approach it in a different way, but at the time, I didn’t have that experience having been in hyper-masculine environments.”
Kerry believes that leadership skills are fundamental to performance. “You want people to lead even without the title,” he said. “[With Great Britain’s women] we had a discussion about that very early on talking about everyone has the capacity to lead in their own way that’s congruent to them. So if I were to summarise, normalising leadership as one of the fundamentals of performance is one of the key aspects of your job [as coach], so talking to that, raising awareness of what that is and how it can be done, part of that is raising self-awareness in the athletes, how they can influence others, is absolutely fundamental. It’s right up there with are you fit enough? In terms of female role models, I’d like to think the women’s hockey programme has some incredible female role models, someone like Kate [Richardson-Walsh] and others and now stepping into different domains whether that’s big business or sports. I’m very proud of that.”
He continued: “We have some stereotypical views of what it takes to lead, actually. Breaking that down and allowing these athletes to lead congruently to who they are is one of the things I’m most proud about. So Kate leads in a way that’s congruent to her, Alex [Danson] is a very different leader but still effective, and I’m now trying to do the same with field hockey Canada.
“There’s a moral dimension to having a team that’s well-led, there’s also a huge performance dimension to having a team that’s well-led and a depth and granularity to what leadership is. By the same token, whether we’re leading or following, we talk about that responsibility and what it means to follow well. The difference in my experience with male teams and female teams is the female teams seem to implicitly understand the importance and significance of that and really buy-in quite quickly”.
In the final instalment of this Performance Support Series we explored ways that we can all improve when it comes to debriefing performance.
Over the course of the three sessions, we are focusing on three core areas as part of this topic:
For the final part of this learning series, the focus of the content and conversations centred around implementing effective debriefing to create a learning culture in your team.
Outcomes of the session included:
Debriefing as a critical component of a high performing organisation
In setting the scene for this virtual roundtable, we leaned into the work of Arie De Geus, who was one of the early thinkers in the space of systems thinking and how we can learn and ally new learning to create a competitive advantage. De Geus was quoted as saying that ‘the only competitive advantage the company of the future will have is its managers’ ability to learn faster than their competitors’. Effective debriefing forms a key role in creating a true learning organisation and allowing you to use learning as a source of competitive advantage.
Combining the work of De Geus, Peter Senge in his work for The Fifth Discipline suggests that the highest performing organisations consistently learn and put systems in place where they are able to extract information and collective intelligence. When thinking about the topic of debriefing, there are often questions considered around to how we should do it and when. Answering these questions and systematising will support a shift towards a culture of learning.
Before we move into exploring specific elements of debriefing, we also explored the difference between traditional organisations and those who are termed learning organisations.
Senge defined organisations as where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire. Pedlar provides a definition of a learning organisation as being able to facilitate learning of all its members with the aim of continuously transforming itself.
How are we currently implementing debriefing?
Reflecting on how we are currently implementing debriefing provided an opportunity for those on the call to share their experiences of this process in their environment. There were some differences in responses to how debriefing is leveraged.
As part of this conversation, there were some interesting reflections on the nature of debriefing in some of our environments. A point was made around debriefs or reviews leading to us slipping into planning or a solution mindset. We can experience tangents and not effectively staying on the task of the debrief – effective debriefing requires intent and discipline.
There were also some reflections on debriefing tending to focus on the eventuality of a negative outcome such as a defeat, as opposed to when we win. Participants on the call shared that in the debriefing process, often there is a lack of action, something that other members of the team or players pick up on. Actions are crucial for buy-in – it is easy to review and reflect, but to generate actual change is where the impact of a debrief comes in.
Skills for effective debriefing
We’ve discussed the importance of debriefing and how it is currently being implemented in our environments, but it is also important to consider the skills required for debriefing to be effective. When the question of what skills are required were put to the group, these are some of the responses that followed:
For effective debriefing, having a framework or system in place will elevate its impact. We discussed a simple framework that can be used by anyone as a benchmark:
Planning for action. Planning for the debrief is important, particularly how the debriefs will happen and the skills required to make them effective. Often it is easy for debriefs to become emotional – a process in pre-planning helps to keep things on track.
Action. This is the doing part.
Reflection. How do you reflect accurately, especially in an emotionally charged environment, whether positive or negative? Reflection is a key still to aid questioning and listening.
Relating back into action. Take the learning and do something with it. If you do not do this, it is a waste of time. Debriefing is about initiating change and continuous improvement.
To summarise this section, having the ability to reflect, appraise and reappraise is considered a cornerstone of lifelong learning and performance.
Challenges in debriefing
The group highlighted a number of challenges that are associated with debriefing. The idea was to identify what often gets in the way of being good at debriefing, allowing us to evaluate how we currently approach debriefing. There were six key challenges highlighted that we should be aware of.
To summarise
The influence of debriefing is a topic often talked about within the Leaders Performance Institute. We all know the importance of it but there is a feeling that there remains vast room for improvement in how to do it effectively. As we rounded off this virtual roundtable, we reflected on some of the key considerations and opportunities for debriefing, to ensure you engage in it more effectively in your environment.
It’s worth noting that debriefing is free, yet presents a fantastic opportunity for continuous improvement without financial resource. With any sort of debriefing, using a process to embed and plan out debriefing is a positive first step in its impact. Remove outcome bias and instead focus on the learning, decision-making and impact areas – outcome bias will sway the quality of the debrief. Be sensitive of time and, where you can, engage in debriefs immediately after the performance. Keep them short and to the point. Gather as many facts as possible first, allowing you to be dispassionate and objective. As an observation, watch for people proving vs. challenging themselves. Reflection skills are powerful so ensure you practise them to elevate the quality of the debrief. Finally, keep a journal and a log of the key learnings from the process.
The Bees’ men’s under-18s coach discusses her career journey and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
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“There’s no shortcuts, even though everyone seems to want them these days,” she tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our friends at Keiser.
“Time on the grass, working in different environments, working under different people as leaders will help you to understand what it looks like for you.”
Bedford, who has also coached with underage women’s teams at the Football Association [FA], Leicester City Women in the WSL, and served as an assistant coach at Arsenal Women, talks enthusiastically about her first six months Brentford.
In her new role she is a pioneer. One of the few women coaches operating at the top level of the men’s game.
Elsewhere in this episode, she delves into the importance of her mentors, who include Mo Marley, the current Head Coach of England Women’s under-23s.
Bedford recalls a time at an FA training camp when, at Marley’s side, she encountered the senior women’s England squad. She says: “Every senior player that walked passed her gave Mo a hug and I was like ‘I want to be Mo, I want to have that impact’. But actually, the more I worked with Mo, whilst I love her to bits and still have tremendous respect for her, how Mo leads is not how Lydia leads.
“You learn loads of things, good and bad, from people that you work under and then you find your own way.”
Elsewhere on the agenda, Bedford spoke about:
Henry Breckenridge Twitter | LinkedIn
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
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In the final Leadership Skills Series Session of 2023, we focused on this increasingly essential skill, from the required mindset to the need to understand your boss.
It is a popular topic of conversation within the Leaders Performance Institute for those overseeing departments or who have direct lines into executive leadership or board level personnel.
Throughout this session we focused on some key concepts for managing up effectively, taking time to discuss and share best practices around:
Your mindset towards the relationship
Before exploring some of the practical examples of effectively managing up, we need to set the tone through ensuring the right mindset is in place to approach this. Leaning on the work of Richard Boston in The Boss Factor, we focused on four different mindsets you could engage with as part of the relationship and process of managing up.
Boston offers a useful framework to reflect on this mindset towards your relationship with your boss. The key insight from Boston’s framework is to consider the impact of this mindset on the relationship, notably your engagement, motivation and ability to manage up. These are the four mindsets on which we focused:
Understanding your boss
We previously explored your mindset towards your relationship with your boss. As an extension to this point, understand their drivers and pressures so you can both support them and understand their point of view will boost you ability to be collaborative in the conversations.
What can you consider about your boss or direct report which will support these conversations?
Understanding yourself
We’ve evaluated the drivers and pressures of the person you are managing up to. As part of this process we also need to increase our self-awareness around our trigger areas. Before engaging in these interactions, do you have a clear understanding of your own thoughts and feeling to the below?
Proactively develop the relationship
Finally, how can we proactively develop the relationship to make managing upwards effective and collaborative? Below are nine considerations for you to reflect upon:
21 Nov 2023
ArticlesWhat we learned about the importance of uninhibited performance at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
Removing the fear from performance was at the heart of this month’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval.
Over the course of two days, speakers from organisations including the England & Wales Cricket Board [ECB], the Football Association [FA], Australian Institute of Sport [AIS], Brisbane Lions, British Cycling and the National Health Service [NHS] continually returned to the theme of removing the fear factor from performance.
Here we present seven steps towards generating the clarity and purpose that fills people with energy, delivers alignment, and enables people to adhere to principles when challenged.
When Rob Key, the Managing Director of Cricket at the ECB, took the reins in April 2022, the England men’s Test team was at its lowest ebb in decades. The team had lost its last five series when Key, alongside ECB Performance Director Mo Bobat and new Head Coach Brendon McCullum, decided to adopt an approach to performance rooted in positivity rather than negativity. England were accused of naivety – until the team started performing in fearless fashion. Critically, they stuck with it following setbacks and defeats across all formats of the game.
“English cricket has [historically] spent its entire time looking at the danger… my view is that we have so many talented players… it’s not a lack of talent, it’s the mentality of English cricket, especially county cricket, which is so conservative. That was my thing: we need to change the way we think about the game, the way that we do things, the mentality. It wasn’t about winning. There isn’t a person that doesn’t want to win… this informed every decision that Mo and I ended up making.”
Rob Key
Key readily admitted that he could have achieved very little in his first months without the counsel and support of Bobat. He needed Bobat onside – and free to speak without fear or reservations – if the ECB’s renewed emphasis on positivity was to deliver tangible outcomes. It was not mindless idealism.
“Rob immediately made me feel valued… and then I was going to give it my all. The thing that I enjoyed most from him, having worked with him for a year and a half, has been [the realisation] that I am at my best when I’m playful; and working with Rob encourages me to be playful and I think that enabled you to do not worry so much about the risk and the threat. And I think if you’re playful and you don’t take yourself too seriously what appears like a risky decision or brave decision to someone else just seems like the right thing to do.”
Mo Bobat
Bobat’s point was underlined by Lucy Pearson, the Director of Education at the FA, who has worked in both sporting and academic settings. Pearson explained that playfulness in the FA’s approach to education enhances skill acquisition and attainment for athletes and coaches alike.
“I think play and playfulness is really important if we’re going to achieve high performance in any area. How do you foster playfulness in your workplaces and challenge the seriousness that comes with the serious thing of high performance? Because we take ourselves too seriously at times. That doesn’t mean that everything’s hilarious – maybe it is – but it does mean that we adopted a slightly different approach.”
Lucy Pearson
Positivity and playfulness count for little if every error is pounced upon. The fear factor would return in an instant. Chris Fagan realised this upon his appointment as the Brisbane Lions’ Senior Coach in 2017. He took over a team in turmoil and the results remained poor for the following two campaigns. Then Brisbane started winning and gradually became one of the finest teams in the AFL [Australian Football League]. Their grand final appearance in September showed how far they’d come.
“I told the players at the very start when we got together that we’re going to fail our way to the top and not to worry about that because it’s through your failures that you learn. These blokes were really frightened about failing and I had to take that fear out of it for them… [the concept of having a growth mindset] we’ve pretty much been doing that stuff for the last seven years.”
Chris Fagan
The OSAD [Observational Structured Assessment of Debriefing] tool is a useful way of reducing the fear factor in surgical operating theatres. It was based on studies in the UK, US and Australia and, not only does it allow for analytical objectivity and precision, its emergence has seen processes of debriefing brought into an environment where debriefs were unpopular with those who might benefit the most from self-reflection. As consultant emergency surgeon Sonal Arora told the Leaders audience, OSAD seeks to provide evidence-based performance debriefing so that surgeons and surgical teams can train “the gold medallist” rather than the “runner-up”. However, as she explained, such a system must be baked into the culture.
“People said to us… things like debriefing and feedback need to be part of the culture. People need ring-fenced time for this, it can’t just be an add-on, ad hoc that some people are doing well and other people are doing it off the cuff at the end of a game, at the end of an operation, and the end of the week. It actually needs to be given the time and the importance. And that comes from the top down, it’s not going to be down to the individual person in their organisation – we need to get buy-in from seniors… we looked at the components of the ideal debrief from looking at all of the literature, all of the interviews, gathering all the experts.”
Sonal Arora
The safe spaces and psychological safety stem from people feeling that they belong – something that was not true of the AIS. In 2022, the organisation was still developing its 2023+ performance strategy as the nation prepares for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games on home soil in Brisbane. Before the strategy launched, Matti Clements, the organisation’s Executive General Manager, was given a reality check by some of the nation’s Paralympians.
“[Some Paralympians] felt that they were an afterthought. Our system had been created around able-body and that they were just a consideration once everything else had been done. For them to belong to the strategy, they needed to see themselves as part of that strategy. So we made a very considered commitment to them to ensure all of our programmes, the frameworks, models etc. in the future had inclusive design as a basic fundamental principle, which would not only benefit them but broader cohorts in our system.”
Matti Clements
Similarly, Clements explained that Australia has the “longest living culture in the world yet we are white and middle class and do not utilise the knowledge of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peers about passing on knowledge from generation to generation and getting better. We’ve made a commitment to do better at that.”
Her colleague Bill Davoren, the AIS’s Head of High Performance Coach Development, spoke of some of the progress being made.
“I’m very proud that I’ve got a gentleman in my team who comes from an indigenous background. He is a former Australian boxing coach, an amazing story. Was Australian military before he became a boxing coach and he went on to get a PhD in coaching theory and coaching methodology. He’s probably been my greatest teacher over the past three years. He’s talked to me a lot about the concept of yarning, sharing stories, sharing information, building connections.”
Bill Davoren
Inclusion is not just a nice-to-have or merely a moral imperative. Time and again studies have demonstrated that diverse teams produce better results. Remove the fear, make people feel welcome, and when they are empowered to input you’ll alight on a better performance strategy. The point was convincingly made by Jon Norfolk, the Head Coach of British Cycling, who explains that strategising cannot be the preserve of the few.
“The clearest plan wins… the clearer your plan is the more people can access it, the more people understand it, and the more people you’ll have to back your plan. I’ve seen situations where the plan is the product of the coach and it’s only the coach that’s inputted into it… if you have one person inputting into a plan you’ve got their biases baked into that plan. The more people that input the more that bias is neutralised. The clearer your plan is the more people can input into it and the better plan you get. The clearer the plan, the more impactful the plan.”
Jon Norfolk
The AIS’s strategy for 2032 includes in its vision the need to ‘win well’. They embody the growing belief that wellbeing and performance are indivisible. Taking the idea further, wellbeing is critical to the elimination of fear.
“We believe wellbeing is fundamental to sustainable high performance success in our country and we wanted to make a commitment to our athletes, future and current, that we would do better. When all those leaders signed their commitment to standing behind Australia’s first-ever united strategy, they also committed to a win well pledge. As leaders of the system, they said: ‘we stand here and we’re going to commit to creating cultures that consider wellbeing at the core of all high performance programmes now and in the future and we believe it’s going to be a performance advantage.’”
Matti Clements
13 Nov 2023
ArticlesLeaders Performance Advisor Bobby Scales explains why he always returns to his old notes in his ‘Book of Intelligent Stuff’.
A while ago, I asked a friend, and his reply fascinated me. “I’m not reading anything new,” he said. “I’m going back through books I’ve read and I’m really trying to pick up on the things I missed before”.
The idea resonated with me. “Go back through the books, podcasts or articles you really felt you learnt from and relearn,” he continued. We all have a mountain of books or e-books that we dive into with both feet with the intention of learning or educating ourselves in one form or fashion. Even the most intelligent among us can’t catch, retain and process everything.
He is definitely onto something. I have found that when you return to a book, there will be things you want to brush up on but there is also going to be things you missed first time around because you were so engrossed in other ways. Much of this is due to the fact that whether it be six weeks or six months on, certainly there is some personal growth and development. With that in mind, things you either didn’t catch or glossed over will have a different meaning once you go back to it.
We should all make the time.
‘The Book of Intelligent Stuff’
It is not just books or articles. With the forthcoming Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London in mind, you may have notes of previous conferences or conversations that hold even greater relevance today. You could probably even pick up the phone and reacquaint yourself with people you connected with at those conferences.
My first Leaders Sport Performance Summit was at London’s Emirates Stadium in November 2015. I appeared onstage during my tenure as Director of Player Development at the Los Angeles Angels alongside Stuart Worden, the Principal of the renowned BRIT School. We discussed talent development at length and I stayed on for both days and took notes from a number of other sessions.
I revisited those notes recently and it is funny to reflect on some of the things you write down. Events will happen in life and it will amplify certain elements that I won’t say didn’t apply back in 2015, but they can have a boatload more meaning eight years on.
There is research that people retain more learning when we write things down with pen and paper. I keep all my notes in one book I call ‘The Book of Intelligent Stuff’. It sounds like a silly title but there are thoughts, quotes and notes from the different insights that fascinated me. I used to be an eBook reader but there is something different about having a hard copy book with a pen and highlighter at hand. Like many of you, I am sure, I’ll write notes in the margin or highlight certain passages. My shelves are full of annotated books.
As for my Book of Intelligent Stuff, I had it in hand at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2017 when I returned to the Sport Performance Summit, this time as a delegate. I flicked through my notes recently – I remember taking them sat next to Leaders’ Matthew Stone – and there were a couple of concepts that really hit home harder now than they did then just because of the circumstances in my life. I had left professional baseball for a position in private industry. While I was fairly certain what I was doing at the time wasn’t going to be it. I was at a crossroads professionally. In Chicago, Stuart Lancaster spoke about his own personal crossroads after having been sacked as Head Coach of the England men’s rugby union team. Stuart’s presentation that day and the notes I took from it are still staples of my decision making tree to this day. As we all know, when you work in professional athletics more often than not you are going to be sacked at some point… I was again. The first place I looked the last time was ‘The Book Of Intelligent Stuff-Chicago 2017’.
Don’t agree? Do more digging
That’s another thing about conferences. You will look around the auditorium and see people with their heads down taking notes. You are looking at them and thinking ‘should I be writing this down?’ Certain things just resonate with people at certain times.
In my Book of Intelligent Stuff, I’ve got three quote sections where I’ll write down things I hear on Instagram or Facebook, for example. If I’m listening to a podcast and a guests says something resonant, I’ll make a note on my desk or my phone and later add it to my book.
I will also note down things I disagree with. You owe it to yourself to learn why you disagree with a point and investigate it further. If you’re reading an article or a book and they say X, Y or Z, why do they feel that way? You take the emotion out of it and learn why a person feels that way or why they think this isn’t actually as important as we once thought it was. There could be some academic research behind it or some hard numbers. It is important to investigate why that person came to that conclusion and maybe decide that you need to change your position. We owe it to ourselves to think critically and challenge what we think and what others present. It can only make you sharper
All of that is part of the life-long learning process we should all be on.
