By Luke Whitworth with additional reporting from Rachel Woodland

Performance = Talent x Environment. This equation forms part of the work of Prof Kurt Lewin. Lewin suggests that ‘environment’ is a multiple. Aligned to the topic of conversation for this particular roundtable, if you’ve created and are fostering a supportive and inclusive environment, the environment coefficient goes up as a positive, thus positively impacting performance. As part of Lewin’s equation, the environment is the thing that we can influence the most.

One of the groups on the call used the above as the start of the conversation – a question was asked whether or not Lewin’s equation is a linear relationship around trying to get as much talent and as good an environment as possible to maximise performance. Or is it actually about optimisation? Finding the optimal relationship between talent and the environment. Different talents could be successful in different environments, and vice versa, as opposed to just trying to put as much talent into a particular environment, and then make it as good as it can be. Something to think about.

Reflecting upon psychological safety

When we reflect on experiences of feeling included, often we hear responses such as the feeling of being heard, feeling safe to speak up, challenge and ask questions without a level of self-censorship – this is the essence of psychological safety. If that self-censorship is present, Lewin would say this would really impact the environment. It can create hostility and have an impact on performance. It will also affect the authenticity of the environment. If we feel a level of covering or lack of authenticity, social scientists have found it can actually compromise our ability to think by up to 30%.

There are four levels of psychological safety:

1. Inclusion safety: I feel valued & a sense of belonging. Safe to be myself.
2. Learning safety: I feel safe to show gaps in my knowledge & competence – ask questions, ask for help, admit mistakes.
3. Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas. & I feel trusted to act on my initiative.
4. Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge the status quo.

For the purpose of this roundtable discussion, we emphasised the importance of inclusion safety as the first level of this process – it is a precondition for the other levels of safety. Are your athletes or staff comfortable in that coaching or leadership relationship? Social sciences research suggest that in the need to feel valued, there needs to be a sense of belonging first to allow the rest to grow together. If you want to explore some deeper thinking around belonging, consider some of Owen Eastwood’s work.

Finally on this point, in the quest for establishing psychological safety, role-modelling is key, particularly from those at the top of the organisation who have influence. A clear statement of intent can go a long way to increasing psychological safety, and comfort for other stakeholders aligned to the organisation.

Onboarding

Throughout the group conversations, the onboarding process was identified as a crucial component in fostering a strong sense of inclusion safety, and one where we felt thinking around this is currently under developed. The consensus from the conversations is that many environments are often more mature in their thinking around onboarding with players, as opposed to staff. Circling back to Lewin’s equation that was used at the top of the call, staff however, are the ones that are often the biggest shapers of an environment so there’s work to be done here. So what’s working and what can be improved?

Most organisations are striving to be quality learning environments – this often starts with having psychological safety present. Are we making it clear and backing it up with action, that the moment new people walk through the door and are being introduced to the culture, that there’s an intent and commitment to invest in one’s growth? ‘The better you are will make for a better collective’.

Do we need to challenge our thinking in this space? Why do we recruit somebody? Often we think about the technical elements, but are we considering and paying enough attention to the ‘softer’ skills as a key component, and then bringing them up to speed on the environment from there? Specifically to inclusion, some organisations have started to add an inclusion question in their interview processes as well, which has been an interesting addition to see how many people struggle to articulate their position on it.

To create true inclusion safety, the onboarding process can in actual fact begin before an individual is in the building, during the recruitment process itself. It’s important to think about a 360 approach to connect to all elements of the organisation. What are the cultural connections someone will live and see on a daily basis? What does that tangibly look like for specific teams, because we know sub-cultures exist? Then there is the relationship with the athletes themselves – what do they look like? Often it comes back to relationships and how we treat each other was a comment from one of the groups, which is why there is an emphasis on recruiting the right individuals for your environment, and also role-modelling from those that carry influence.

Finally, seek to measure the impact of these processes. We know there is a high turnover in professional sports. Are you surveying your culture in general and also capturing insights into the effectiveness of those best practices that are integrated as part of the onboarding process? Be intentional and frequent in checking if people feel a part of an organisation.

Front loading through education

It’s perhaps not a huge surprise that ‘education or educating’ as a term was frequently used in our conversations, from a variety of different perspectives. As a provocation within the group, the question of what are the behaviours that create inclusion safety is a simple but effective place to start when considering this process.

One environment on the call shared an anecdote of how they front-loaded education around psychological safety with their coaches across a two-year period, with one of the end results being that this could have a positive impact on how they then create environments for players. Those in the organisation felt it was important to respect where coaches and other staff are coming from, respecting those opinions and creating opportunities to ask questions and develop thinking around psychological safety. The safety it created for coaches thus created better safety for the players. There was a clear undertaking of needs analysis with stakeholders (in this case coaches) to support psychological safety.

As an extension to the point above, there were discussions about leading inclusively, and how some traditional coaches may not have experienced this style before – assuming that ‘hero leadership’ (leading from the front, pushing, directing) is the way to achieve success. It is important to help and educate coaches to lead more from the centre, and not to dismiss people if they are less successful at the beginning of their leadership journey.

Transparency and choice of language is important here as well. We discussed high standards and high support environments. To create alignment, there needs to be high support and education resources to accompany the expectations of high standards. There needs to be clarity around expectations on the front end. For example, sharing that a particular training session is going to be really hard, and the failure rate is probably going to be pretty high, and that’s okay. The relationship between transparency and willingness to share information is more important than ever before.

Finally, consider the power of facilitation with those in the environment. Do they have self-awareness of their own biases? How do you work to respect different individuals’ backgrounds through understanding their perspectives and an awareness of where they’ve come from? We are striving to encourage that level of safety so that people can be more open and buy-into the environment. Culture often starts with the identity of the group, so this creates the opportunity to design that culture from safe foundations and the removal of self-imposed thoughts and beliefs.

Respecting differences

Environments have different cultures. Educating players and staff on each other’s background and culture shows respect and awareness. The heritage and lineage of where people are coming from is really important. What we can do to bridge those cultural gaps? The importance of delivering according to need – for example, prayer rooms and certain types of foods.

People want to be expressive. Whether that’s to dress in a certain way as an example. How are we welcoming that? Inclusion can be a combination of belonging and uniqueness working collaboratively with one another. How are we helping somebody simultaneously fit in and stand out?

Empathy is crucial. Create an environment where empathy is on display and can be nurtured. We also have to think about the idea of being comfortable with inclusion looking different to certain groups and people. Do you ask your players and staff ‘how can we include you more’ or ‘what would help you feel more included here?’

Takeaways: Group Reflections & Insights

At the end of the call, attendees were asked to share a key reflection of thoughts from the roundtable that they’d like to take forward:

1. How do you actually know how people are feeling in this space? How are we intentionally reviewing how people feel in our environment with regards to inclusion? How do you challenge it when it’s taking place negatively: do you address it right away rather than enable it?
2. Let’s assume we are all championing and fostering psychologically safe environments – has this changed the demographics of our teams?
3. Ask more questions (open vs closed). Meet people where they are vs what we expect. Design opportunities for others to develop and create space for learning. Learning from others and not assuming what “the right way is” vs the end result being what we’re looking for.
4. Invest in and be intentional with staff introductions to the organisation. Induction is a great place to show an organisation’s commitment to growth and learning for the individual, which starts with psychological safety.
5. Increasing value in educating current members of the organisation to allow future new members to achieve high psychological safety in the early stages of onboarding.
6. Actively recruiting diverse candidates. Creating pathways for diverse candidates (internships, development positions, etc.). Onboarding – the details matter (clothing, name tags, etc).
7. The dichotomy of leadership is meeting where each staff member where they are at emotionally, mentally, and psychologically and making sure each and every staff member is heard and feels safe within the environment while also navigating organisational needs analysis for the greater good.
8. What needs to be considered to ensure an environment provides opportunity for growth individually and as a team?
9. Considering best practices as part of the onboarding process: how do you as coaches support new staff coming in? Having self-awareness. Understanding of ones biases. Build own culture. Support planning. Technical level pitched at right level. What are the unwritten rules? A learning organisation.
10. Look for and “celebrate” both similarities and differences with staff and athletes.
11. Optimising vs maximising. In relation to onboarding, the consideration and evaluation of technical and non-technical skills. Being comfortable with evolution of inclusiveness – what it is today may not be tomorrow.

By John Portch

Wales have made a positive start to their 2023 Women’s Six Nations campaign, with wins at home to Ireland and away to Scotland in their first two matches under Head Coach Ioan Cunningham.

A stern test awaits them this weekend in round three, with England travelling to Cardiff Arms Park on Saturday (15 April), with Wales’ schedule wrapped up back to back away matches. They will face France at Grenoble’s Stade des Alpes on 23 April before ending their Six Nations campaign against Italy at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi in Parma on 29 April.

Cunningham explains to the Leaders Performance Institute that, instead of coming home after the France match, the team will then make the six-hour coach journey to Parma and spend the week in Emilia-Romagna preparing for Italy.

“You don’t lose two travel days [returning to the UK and setting out again] and it gives you the best chance to prepare,” says Cunningham, who recently contributed to a Leaders Performance Special Report on how teams can manage their preparations for major competitions.

“We can set up camp in Parma ready for the week,” he continues. “Already family and friends are looking to come out and spend time with the players.” He indicated that the players would have some free time in Parma on the Wednesday. “They get to see their friends or family and spend some time outside the camp. The weather will be decent in Italy in April and they can feel good; ‘the sun is good, I feel I am in a good place, and I’m getting ready to play Italy at the end of the week’.”

Cunningham also emphasises the importance of fun. “We created mini teams within our squad with different responsibilities or creating games. We asked the girls to name their teams. They chose famous Welsh people and had t-shirts made and, suddenly, you have an identity and you’re part of a team.”

What were some of the names chosen? “Duffy, the singer, was one,” he says. “The Nessa character from [British sitcom] Gavin & Stacey. So you’ve got a t-shirt with the picture on front and it’s quite funny when you get those up and running. What was really good, you had an opportunity then where I might say there’s a trade opportunity here, ‘do you want to trade anyone out of your team because they’re not pulling their weight?’ And those are quite funny when they’re trading players and there’s an opportunity to draft. It was quite fun.”

Connection and downtime are essential too, which is why friends and family were invited to Parma, just as they were for Wales’ 2022 Rugby World Cup campaign. “If you’re away from home and family and friends have travelled to watch you, making sure the players have contact time with their family and friends and also inviting the family and friends into our environment is massive. On those downtime periods, parents are always welcome to come into our hotel and team room to spend time with the players, as well as the players going out.”

Cunningham also spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute about the development of his newly professional squad. Here, we turn attention to Cunningham as a leader.

How important are your instincts? How do you prevent yourself losing touch with your intuition?

IC: Instincts are huge. Your gut feel. Your coach’s eye as well as your gut. ‘I’m not feeling this today, it’s a bit off, I need to have a chat with this person’. Another part of instinct, as well as data, if you have a short turnaround and you haven’t had much in the tank in that week, we might do a 20-minute run through on a captain’s run day [usually a Friday, although Cunningham’s team do not undertake this traditional rugby practice in a typical fashion; see below] but the majority of the time we won’t. But it’s having that feel, even at the start of the week, if you’ve come off a good win, for example, they think they’re in a good place, they have just beaten one team but there’s another team coming after us, so maybe it’s bringing their feet back to the ground and why. Instinct is huge, not only on players but on management; feeling if they’re a bit fatigued. We did something last year when we felt people were tired and we’d been in a long time; ‘right, let’s cut tomorrow. We won’t come in tomorrow’, just having a mental recharge away from the environment or we know someone who’s very friendly with us in the group and he’s got a coffee van so we put a coffee van up inside the training field, so we’ll finish the session and then go have a coffee at his van; just spending time together, having a chat, we put some music on, and then just having those connections then. It just recharges us and makes us feel like we’re ready to go again.

Must data back your intuition?

IC: 100%. It’s got to be aligned to everything we want to do. Regarding rugby stats, our main page is stats that are important to us in the game and which change behaviour. So if we want to get off the floor quicker, we’ll stat that up. Say with that, ‘60% speed of feet, we need to get to 70%, then. How do we get off the floor quicker?’ That’ll change behaviour. But then there’s other data regarding volume and load from a GPS point of view, which we know now the type of load we want to put into the players in a test week; ‘if we want to cover 22k, we need to get this amount of high speed metres into the players’. That’s all important and relevant to the game we want to play.

What is the key to getting the big decisions right and managing them effectively?

IC: Regular communication with the right people, constant drip effect of the same message; ‘why we’re doing it, this is the game we want to play, because it’ll give us this’. Those conversations in a week are huge for me. We’ll always wrap up the day with ‘how did it go? ‘it went well’ ‘do we need to change anything tomorrow?’ We’ll run through tomorrow’s sheet and we’re constantly working a day ahead, then we’ll look to the week ahead. It’s really important.

Do you reflect on your own decision making and communication skills?

IC: Some of that could be better, if I’m honest. When you’re in it, you’re entrenched in the work and when someone asks you a question you’re into something else, but I do deliberately try to give myself time to reflect on ‘did I give that message correctly? What tool did I use? Did I react well to that? How do I want to come in tomorrow? I need to speak to this person and how do I do it?’ I do try to deliberately reflect on my day and what I’ve done. It’s a huge part of performance. I like to have good relationships with some key members of staff as well that will give me feedback on how I’ve done; or ‘how was our meeting? Were we happy with it?’ Those things are important for me as well.

How do you protecting your own time and resources?

IC: You can turn around and, before you know it, the day’s gone and there’s so much happened in that day that sometimes the car journey or just driving the car is good, reflect, and put something on, music or a podcast, just putting something on to reflect is good.

What do you do in lieu of the captain’s run?

IC: We do a walkthrough and we do this exercise called ‘walk the map’. So the map is our pitch. We’ve got this five-metre pitch that we roll out and we walk through everything that we’re taking into the game both with and without the ball. We’ll do ‘what-if’ conversations. ‘What if we concede in the first two minutes? What do we do? What does it look like? What if we get a yellow card to a nine? Who steps in?’ We cover those sorts of things as a team as we walk the map. On the captain’s run day, we’ll actually walk the ground from try line to try line with our leaders just walking and talking through what we’re going to do and the kickers will kick and that’s it.

Ioan Cunningham is a contributor to our latest Special Report, titled Navigating Your Way Through Major Competitions: a snapshot from Olympic, Paralympic and elite team sports. In addition to Welsh Rugby Union, it features insights from Swimming Australia, the Lawn Tennis Association, Athletics Australia and Hockey Ireland. Each has teams competing in major tournaments this year, and all are bound to give you something to think about in your future projects.

Download Report

By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth

The Leaders Think Tank is at once a network and a knowledge platform.

It is designed to connect people with responsibility for performance at the highest levels of world sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best. The top jobs in elite sport are often lonely places and always comprise unique challenges. The following is a record of the Think Tank meeting that took place on 28 March at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. A behind-closed-doors event, the account that follows is a general one and aimed at presenting the lessons learned from the conversation.

Attendees

General Manager, Toronto Maple Leafs

Head Coach, Toronto Maple Leafs

Senior Basketball Advisor, New York Knicks

Performance Director, Manchester City

Head Coach, Scotland Rugby

1. How leaders can create environments for their people to be successful

How can the leader of the team reduce both the pressure and distractions faced by coaches and athletes? The first and most important step is to create an environment that enables athletes and staff to be at their best.

Key points:

• External noise and distractions can be reduced if you are laser-focused on the processes that underpin your standards of performance. When it is clear what the procedure is, the leader can assure that athletes and staff are supported in a suitable fashion.
• Communicate expectations and give athletes and staff an understanding of the resources available to them. The leader can also enable people to share feelings, learn from the past and, ultimately, remove pressure.
• Anxiety is normal is any high performance environment. Normalise people’s experience of anxiety by identifying hidden stressors and understand the roles in the team where people are always close to the edge.

2. Replacing an iconic coach

Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, Mike ‘Coach K’ Krzyzewski, Joel ‘Coach Q’ Quenneville. These were some of the longest-tenured and most successful coaches in sporting history when they left their highest profile roles. Replacing figures of such stature can be daunting and fallow periods are almost inevitable as teams seek to fill the vacuum. What can be done to ease the transition from a legacy coach?

Key points:

• An internal successor may or may not be the way to go. The key is to communicate that a playing style is a collective philosophy and not beholden to one individual. Reassure athletes and staff while reducing fear of the unknown.
• A team must be aware of the mechanics of its system, as it is all but sure that a successor will not enjoy the same power and influence. It will take a collective effort to bridge that gap.
• Can you be intentional in engaging your long-time tenured coach in a handover (circumstances permitting)? ‘Centennial’ companies – those who have survived and thrived for in excess of a century – are particularly adept at managing these transitions.

3. The best approaches to load management in performance

In some elite sports, there is an underdeveloped understanding of when athletes are conditioned or deconditioned. Moreover, this does not always align with training-to-game models. Where should the emphasis be placed in this continuing challenge?

Key points:

• Do you truly understand the demands of the game? Yes, there are physical components but there are also emotional considerations, perhaps linked to your people, style of play and intensity – understanding those is critical.
• Prioritise recovery. Educate your people and insert recovery practices into your processes. Consider how you can take what you do at home on the road. What are the recovery opportunities on the journey home?
• Decisions around training and programming should be made independent of results. Emotion is removed and the health of the team is not compromised.

4. How to be your organisation’s greatest-ever team

A lofty ambition, for sure, but a noble goal for all teams regardless of their pedigree. At the very least, all teams can strive for their pinnacle.

Key points:

• At what can your team be the best in the world? Consider: what are your super strengths and where might your weaknesses prevent your progress? Contextual training is another critical component.
• Resilience is a characteristic of all great teams and shared experience of previous failure can help you to better understand where support is needed at moments when your team is under pressure. Equally, people in your environment need to feel safe when displaying vulnerability and, with time, connections and relationships develop as you become battle-tested.
• Shared belief should come right from the top. There needs to be an input from senior management or ownership in developing the right strategy.

By Sarah Evans

Recommended Reading

What Are your Trade-Offs in the Quest for Success?

Our Athletes Are Not Always in Tune with their Bodies, But Help Is at Hand

Performance Perspectives: Balancing the Emotional and Rational in Performance Support

Framing the topic

This was the third and final session of our first Performance Support Series of the year, which focused on ‘The Performance Paradox’. Across these sessions, which are led by our Performance Advisor and performance specialist Dr Meg Popovic, the aim is to explore the trade-offs, and considerations in the quest to win for staff, athletes, and their wider organisation. This series is centred around Transformational Learning Theory; how we learn to transform ourselves and our teams we co-create. This final session focused on the voices in athlete-led leadership.

Recap

The Oxford Languages definition of ‘paradox’: ‘a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true; a statement, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities’.

“A flower won’t open if I yell at it and say ‘bloom!’” – Marion Woodman

Assumptions

1. Our athletes are growing into their (young) adult selves.
2. Athletes become great via being highly coachable. Part of coachability is being able to be told what to do, how and when.
3. We as organisational leaders have yet to fully embrace athletes’ voices, thoughts and insights into our design, processes, multidisciplinary teams.
4. We have a responsibility as adults and roles with power in and over athletes’ lives to help them be their best versions of themselves; this includes creating a container for them to find their voices in their athletic journeys and lives.
5. The co-active way is possible for athlete-led leadership in high performance sport.

Holding space: athlete-led leadership

If we imagine more space for athletes to find and integrate their voices into the system (club/team/organisation that surrounds the athlete):

1. What would it look like?
2. What would it feel like?
3. What would have to change?

Our own voice process – “All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Pedagogy, coaching = reflective practice, self knowing.

Meg asked our members to reflect on their own voice process, and make notes on the following questions:

• What is the age of athletes you work with? If it’s a large range, pick either one team or level of the athletes you relate to least. This is the age you need to remember yourself at. Try to relate these questions to you at this time of your life.
• Details – where did you live? What school did you go to? What sports did you play? Did you have a part-time job? Did you travel at all by that time in your life?
• Influencers – who were you living with? Who had the greatest impact on your life decisions and choices at this time?
• Life learning – what was something that this younger version of yourself had to go through or learn from? What happened in your life that made you learn an important lesson?
• What were your greatest worries? How did you handle it? Who did you talk to?
• What was your peer group like?
• What were your relationships like with people in their 30s/40s at this time?
• How did you think about and/or handle money and wealth at this time?

It’s important to understand our younger athletes, think about what life was like for you at that time, and how to help them in order to get the best out of themselves as people and performers.

Agency vs structure

When looking at the social relationships between individuals and larger groups and social institutions that have influence on those individuals, consider the following:

Structure – macro: the recurrent patterned arrangements / social structures which influence or limit the individual choices and opportunities available. The Club / Organisation and its departments.

Agency – micro: the capacity of the individuals to have the power and resources to fulfil their potential, express themselves and act upon their own will. The athletes.

The structure and the agency are always in a co-active dance together, let’s see where they blend and where they don’t.

Low agency, low structure = drift

• Athletes are vulnerable.
• Little resistance and athletes disengaged and disconnected.
• Boundaries and expectations are unclear.
• Staff are out of touch with the athlete’s needs, wants, feelings and experiences.

High agency, low structure = laissez-faire

• Under-regulated, no clear boundaries.
• Expectations are not clear or articulated for the athletes.
• Athletes speak and often drive decisions, but results in wishy washy standards and inconsistency.

Low agency, high structure = regulation

• Compliant athletes.
• Shallow resistance.
• Shallow engagement in broader decisions made for them.
• Dominant authority by staff over athletes.

High agency, high structure = alignment

• Integrity and awareness in athletes and staff.
• Strong engagement between athletes and staff.
• Co-active player development; athlete voices invited into the decision making and ideation that impact their careers.

Think about the departments of your organisation, if you were to evaluate the relationship between the club, the department and the athletes and the dialogue between them: where would you plot them on a graph with the quadrants above?

Strength-based best practices

Thinking about the departments within your club or organisation, if they’re really good at engaging players’ voices:

• Why so?
• What are they doing?
• How are they doing it?
• What’s the impact?

By Sarah Evans

We often hear about the importance of problem solving within high performing environments, but what is the process of identifying, reviewing and then effecting this problem solving? We looked into the ways in which our members were going about this process within their own environments within a recent Topic Led Virtual Roundtable.

Here are four key themes that we pulled out of our conversation around how to effectively define and solve performance problems.

1. The power of questioning

• It is important to have an inquisitive mind when it comes to problem solving. Our members stressed how important it is to be able to ask ‘why was this data collected?’ ‘What was the context?’ The more we ask questions and tease out more depth before jumping in to solving problems the more effective you will be. As leaders, they explained it is important to continuously challenge the coaches when they come with a solution, break it down and ask what else could you do?
• There is huge value in having multiple, and varied sources. Asking others, ‘we’ve already tried this’ and thinking, ‘what lessons can we learn from it’.
• One of our members highlighted the need to clarify one thing right from the beginning: ‘what is the question we’re going after, is it actually the right question and presented in the right way so people are aligned?’ Therefore as leaders, influencing the narrative is also important, especially when considering the language and then the approach to how you go about this.
• Often the first question is not always right, but you have to start somewhere. Sometimes the original question is needed to prompt discussion and collaboration to get to the better answer. However, often we wait for the perfect question, but actually within that time the problem has changed or evolved.

2. Reframing

•  As mentioned above, huge importance is placed on asking lots of questions to provide context to define the problem to fully understand it. However, it is then imperative to try to reframe the problem to get other perspectives and see it from a different angle to help you come to different solutions in order to solve the problem. Working as multidisciplinary team, pulling in the athlete’s perspective are just two ways to go about gathering different perspectives.
• Do we do enough of getting past the surface level? Part of the problem is where inexperienced coaches within a multidisciplinary team don’t delve into enough detail in terms of framing the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ before they come to the table. But on the other hand, very experienced coaches often feel like they need the answers before they come to the table. Do we allow them to be vulnerable and help frame the problem, to allow them to have more input from others, before sitting down with the whole group?
• It is important to highlight before the meeting, what the purpose of the meeting is. Is it to define the problem or come up with a solution? Setting this out from the outset allows everyone to be aligned and come mentally prepared to the meeting.

3. Diversity of thought and experience

• Spending time in non-traditional environments is a great way to improve problem solving. One member explained about how, every month they intentionally spend time in environment that is left field, and not in sport. Sport organisations are large with cultures and subcultures, and in order to navigate these and keep things moving, you have to look outside the norm.
• Understanding yourself, your blank spots, and then widening this to your team and wider organisation is hugely valuable. If you understand what your blank spots are you can seek out people or environments which complement your weaknesses and make for more well-rounded problem solving. Often the problem lies within the people in the room and their preferred way of thinking, so being able to take a step back, be humble and honest with yourself and the group about the collective shortcomings.
• Engaging with multiple stakeholders is imperative, you need to incorporate the insight from people with different experiences. Don’t just seek out those who are the most engaged, seek out the insights from those that might sit on the periphery or who are not as bought-in.
• Diversity of thought in the coach development team has been a key factor in one member organisation’s team success. This team was very much intentionally put together incorporating their different skills and backgrounds to complement each other. This helps them to constantly reframe the questions and get different inputs.
• The community of practice approach. Social learning is a big part of one of our member’s problem-solving process. Understanding the problem, providing the context and allowing people from different backgrounds to frame it from their perspectives.

4. Symptom vs problem

• There are different kinds of performance problems, those that are reactive and symptom-like which need solutions right away, and those which are fundamental problems. Often teams look to solve the symptoms but miss addressing the fundamentals.
• It is crucial to understand the fundamentals on where the team could have tackled that earlier to understand for next time. Then, form taskforces to ask questions. You have to trust the taskforce, to have the understanding of the structure. If people have a narrow-minded way of seeing structure, it is not fruitful, so building trust and having overview are two key things to have in the taskforce.
• Often teams are brought a lot of problems, but it is most important to think of a way to facilitate an environment in order to fix them. You have to find a way in which you can delve deeper into specific problems whilst maintaining a multidisciplinary approach. One example is where rather than meeting as a multidisciplinary team in order to be collaborative and open, one of our members explained that having the group of physios meet more regularly, really getting into the weeds of the problem and learning from one another, allowed them to problem-solve more easily. They then could set a meeting structure with a process that is conducive to them bringing all their problems to the table and using the network to help solve the problem, then reporting back to the wider team to take it further.

Recommended reading

The Cynefin Framework – Using the Most Appropriate Problem-Solving Process

Design Thinking Defined (IDEO)

Five Tips From IDEO for All Leaders in Sport

Pig Wrestling: Clean Your Thinking to Create the Change you Need (Goodreads)

Procrastinate on Purpose

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Amazon.co.uk)

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (Amazon.co.uk)

By John Portch

How does a leader in sport make sure they are choosing the right ownership group?

“That’s a very tough question to answer because you don’t always know everything about what everyone’s doing,” says Jack Easterby, the Former Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the Houston Texans.

“It becomes important to look at wide windows of decision-making patterns. Most of these owners have other businesses. You can study some of their investment strategies or their potential investments in those businesses.”

Easterby, who also worked with Bill Belichick, the General Manager and Head Coach at the New England Patriots, believes a prospective leader can learn from studying how the owners structured their C-suite and delegated responsibilities.

He does, however, issue a caveat. “It’s not good to do that based on the media because the media doesn’t always tell the story of what owners are really about,” he continues, “but it is incumbent upon the leader to pick the right place because that alignment is key, from jump street”.

In the first part of this interview with the Leaders Performance Institute, Easterby explores the art of the inquisitor, the questions he thinks should be asked by the leader, and the questions he wished he’d asked in the past.

Jack, what is the risk to the leader in failing to ask the right questions?

JE: People are going to give you information, and when you have whatever reporting structure you have set up, people are going to come to you and say: ‘hey, this needs to be done, this needs to be dealt with’; and they’re going to do that based on their tension points. ‘We need a better bathroom for everyone to use’ or ‘we need a better cafeteria’. You don’t just want the inputs you get to be based on their problems. You want the inputs to be based on what’s going to make the program better. Sometimes, if you don’t ask good questions, and you don’t persist in the deep questions that you feel are better for everybody, what happens is that you get a lot of issues – but the issues that you hear about are not the real issues. So you may solve a lot of problems but you’re not actually getting better. As a leader, I think the question is not ‘do you solve problems?’ – every leader has to solve problems – it’s ‘which problems are you solving?’

What are the important questions?

JE: The ones that make the biggest impact on the clubs that I’ve been part of are the ones that solve the big questions; and in order to solve the big questions you’ve got to ask the big questions. ‘How do we function as an overall group? How are you held accountable for your job? How does each individual person feel cared for in their professional and personal existence? How do we create a better version of ourselves year by year? What are the inputs of information and how we receive data from the outside world? And how do we store data on the inside world and how do we communicate with each other?’ Things like that – when you ask those questions you’re going to get systems, past experiences, a lot of stuff that people throw at you. You can go through it and be able to say ‘here’s what we do from here to go to next place as a group’. But if you don’t ask really good questions you’re just going to get a newspaper of today’s problems sent to your desk. That’s good, but that’s not always the long term best information that you want to go through.

What are some of the questions you wish you’d asked in previous roles?

JE: How do we build or how do we digest the multi-phase implementation of a program? Meaning that I think we all want to win, we all want to be great, but that’s a question I would have asked in Houston, maybe even in New England. How does the leadership team or the executive team digest a multi-phase program and how do we make sure that we’re all going to stay on track no matter how many phases it takes? Because when you diagnose a problem and you go from A to B to C to D to E and you’re trying to elevate slowly to get to a place of prominence, you know that’s going to take some time and phases. It’s going to take some iterations. You might be at phase two and everyone is like ‘we’ve got to get this done’ and so you’re not really at phase two because everybody is ready to abort the mission. I think that’s something I would have asked going in. ‘How does everybody in here receive the multi-phase vision and how do we keep everybody on track to a multi-phase vision so that we’re not evaluating the ham when it’s only been cooking for 15 minutes?’ You can’t pull it out, you have to leave it in there and let it cook because then you can really push out different challenges along the way and say ‘hey, remember we’re at phase two of six’ versus ‘this is the next thing’ and I probably didn’t do a great job of that. I was just trying to sell that next thing as we all got excited about growing. You’re trying to sell that next version of yourself versus ‘hey, this is version two of our nine-step process to get us to where we can be the best version of who we can be here within the club’.

Perhaps it is not always obvious at the time.

JE: That’s exactly right. Hindsight is 20-20. It’s like the stock market, which tells us every day where we are at the moment. You have forecasting but you also have that daily metric on where you are; up down or whatever. When you’re leading, you need to be able to do both of those. You need to be able to forecast and then come back to today and say ‘this is where we are within that forecast’. If you’re buying a bond or something that’s going to mature over time, you need to be able to know, ‘OK, I’m going to remind you. It’s not going to mature today, it’s going to take a second’. And if you do that, your checkpoints are going to be a little easier because you’re not looking for the best possible result within a short period of time.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth and Matthew Stone

The Leaders Think Tank is at once a network and a knowledge platform.

It is designed to connect people with responsibility for performance at the highest levels of world sport with each other and the ideas that have served their peers best. The top jobs in elite sport are often lonely places and always comprise unique challenges. The following is a record of the Think Tank meeting that took place at Collingwood FC in Melbourne on 7 February 2023. A behind-closed-doors event, the account that follows is a general summary and aimed at presenting the lessons learned from the conversation.

1. Peer-driven cultural change

Peer-driven cultural change places the responsibility of shaping a team’s culture in the hands of a playing group, letting them drive the desired behaviours while also ensuring that all new team members are onboarded in a suitable fashion.

Key points:

• A co-constructed plan has more credibility. Reverse-engineer your team’s culture and vision by engaging the playing group from the outset.
• The behaviours and values of a team are more definable and sustainable when they have been devised by the playing group themselves.
• Consider placing some of the younger members of your team on a leadership development programme or empower them to lead meetings – this way they can directly influence the culture while focusing on their personal development.

2. What does winning look like?

It would be disingenuous to suggest that there are not markers that denote a champion team or a medal success, but there are also cultural elements, particularly around communication and connection, that connote a winning team. Therein lies the path to success, where the score starts to take care of itself.

Key points:

• Find ways to measure and evaluate the body language of your players. What are they telling you that might be left unsaid?
• Similarly, what about your group’s collective energy? How are the players syncing up both verbally and non-verbally with each other?
• Winning teams tend to say little, which is not to say that your efforts to communicate effectively should flag. Identify and pick your moments.

3. The shifting demands of modern sport

The shifting demands in this instance are the increasing individualisation of high performance and the implications for sustaining a team ethos and culture.

Key points:

• Be engaging and exciting in your programmes and systems – athletes want to be involved in something that grabs their attention and draws them in.
• That is easier to achieve when there is clear alignment across an organisation from top to bottom.
• Is a ‘star model’ the way to go? Is there a happy medium where you provide the necessary support for your players to lead the way?

4. Changing mindsets

It is common for head coaches to assume control at a time when their new team is at a low ebb. When a playing group has lost the winning feeling, the muscle memory of what success looks and feels like, what steps can the head coach take to instil the mindset necessary to kickstart their tenure?

Key points:

• Solicit informal player feedback from your coaches and support staff. This means a head coach should accept that they may not be a player’s primary point of contact if they are to acquire the information necessary to proceed.
• You can still challenge a player. Ask them: ‘what are you going to sacrifice in order to make the team stronger?’ If they haven’t got a ready answer give them some time to think.
• Reward good behaviours and adherence to your team’s values; and then be sure to back it up with evidence, whether through datapoints or some other means.

5. Managing the moments

The best teams are able to manage the big moments in competition, putting daylight between themselves and the rest. It doesn’t happen by accident and there are steps that all leaders can take to prepare their teams for those clutch moments.

Key points:

• Do you consider the mental and emotional in your post-competition debriefs? Beyond skill execution, it is helpful for your players to understand their feelings and responses at key moments, particularly during scenario-training.
• Find video clips that support your beliefs in the direction of your team. Be intentional in highlighting when things went well and you will begin to manufacture belief. It may also make conversations about performance gaps a little easier come the time.
• If you happen to lose, give your players an opportunity to mull over what went wrong. When they know they will be heard and their coach will listen, it may generate the necessary energy for development.

By John Portch

What traits should sport scrap?

It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute poses to James King shortly after he appeared onstage at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“I think sport needs to maintain a very specific focus on what it takes to win,” says King, an advisor who has counselled government agencies, specialist military units and provides guidance to owners, managers and athletes within elite sport. In 2021, he released a book called Accelerating Excellence: The Principles that Drive Elite Performance.

“One of the popular themes over the past few years has almost been this obsession with culture,” he continues. “And I think in the popular media there’s been some incredible TED talks, great books around the topic, and I think it’s very easy to chase a subject because it’s so interesting and then look to apply it rather than focus very specifically in terms of your specific organisation in sport.

“Where are we leaking progress? Where are we breaking down? Is our culture a problem? If it is then fine, go out and read. But instead of reading and trying to copy-paste from others, really try to spend that time doing the thinking yourself. ‘Where are we leaking progress, what can we do about that?’ and intervening very specifically in that area.”

The concept of ‘leaking progress’ is one that King returns to time and again and one he referenced onstage alongside Greg Newman, the CEO of the Onyx Capital Group, which is a renowned trading firm. Both have joined the Leaders Performance Institute for a further chat. Here are some edited excerpts.

Greg, what is the best way to test your strategies around individual and collective performance?

Greg Newman: It 100% comes down to experimentation. You don’t know if things are going to be successful and you need to have that scientific approach of first hypothesising what it is you think is actually going to happen and being quite specific about that, and then you’re testing it with historical data, and then it goes to actually applying it from a non-risk perspective. So we’ll put on a strategy in live terms but it’s not actually going to make or lose money. So that’s the way you start; and then you refine that and make sure you get the learnings, refine that strategy, and then ultimately go live with it once you’re ready. When you go live, it’s also [implemented in] stages as well, [through] progressive exposure.

What steps do you advise when it’s clear that the strategy isn’t working?

GN: I think the main thing for us is to be clear about what we can control and what we can’t control. If we look at a given strategy, a given area, a given team, and they’re applying the process that we know well, we know we succeed in other areas, we know what we want from people, the skills we want them to have and demonstrate and the processes we want. So they’re doing all of those things and it’s not working, then it’s more likely going to be the market conditions or something external. It’s looking for that answer, but you have to have that ruthless approach when something isn’t working objectively. Is it better just to move on, cut your losses, and pivot somewhere else? Again, it comes down to experimentation. If it’s not working, it’s not too big of a deal, you just keep moving forward and nothing lasts, right? It’s constant adaption and evolution.

James, how do the principles of your book Accelerating Excellence most readily apply to sport?

James King: When you define ‘sport’, one of the defining elements is competition. Therefore, the objective is kind of winning or iterating towards winning more than you might lose. The foundational principles that I discuss in the book are designed with that in mind completely. They all derive from the academic study of outliers, whether that’s an individual or an organisation. So it’s breaking down and examining the causal mechanisms that are truly predictive of superior performance across time. So I think the application to sport couldn’t be neater and tidier in that respect.

In your view, what are the traits of serial winners?

JK: There’s one trait that all elite performers have in common more than anything else and that’s this concept of self-concordance. So there’s three defining themes in that. The first one is that everyone that I’ve seen that excels, and also examining the literature, is very clear that those individuals perform roles where their strengths align very much with the roles they perform, whether that’s a style of play, whether that’s the domain they’re in, full stop. The second component would be their sincere interests. Some might describe it as ‘passion’ but I prefer the word ‘interest’; to me, passion’s a short-term temporary high, whereas an interest is this almost semi-permanent attraction or instinctive attraction to a certain activity or area. And I think that everyone I’ve seen excel has that almost obsession with the craft they’re competing in. Then, finally, it would be this concept of the goals they’ve pursued in sport have aligned with their values and they’ve probably had maybe a little bit of luck here but have been exposed to demonstrating their strengths and interests for an organisation that sincerely aligns with their own values, again whether that links to the style of play or the behaviours that are acceptable in that environment or what that club and organisation stands for. And I think you get this sweet spot when people are able to pursue a role that optimises all their natural strengths in that area where they are sincerely obsessed and for an organisation where their values just align and they’re just so in sync with what that organisation wants to achieve.

If you could both give one piece of advice to coaches here today, what would it be?

GN: Like I was saying onstage, it’s absolutely following a process. I know that’s become embedded in sport now, that’s like the way things are going; really believing in processes even when it comes to wellbeing, people around you and getting the best out them. So your vision, setting that north star, setting that constant improvement. All these things can seem on the face of it very vague and maybe even wishy-washy, but there are processes out there that you can apply. [Being] rigorous and really concentrating on that process, whatever it might be, and sticking to it. If something it’s going to be about you, and that’s not really definable, that’s not really scalable; [you need] a process that you can apply and improve, teach other people, and scale that way.

JK: The one piece of advice I’d give to coaches is to make sure you’re very clear on what it takes to win in the craft you’re coaching in, then, secondly, understand very specifically where the athlete or the performer you’re coaching is in relation to that, where they’re – I use the term again – leaking progress, and then, thirdly, make sure you understand who they are as an individual and how they are optimised. What are their strengths technically? What are their strengths psychologically? What’s their interest on the pitch or in the boardroom, if you’re working outside of sport. Then what’s most important to them? And make sure you create an environment that optimises those things. The question I get commonly asked is: ‘how do you optimise this person’s performance or that person’s performance?’ I think the real question is how do you optimise the conditions so that that person optimises their own performance? And that’s where I think coaches should be focusing because if you understand those things so well, the solutions in terms of what to coach and how to coach just fall in your lap.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the second day.

(Day 1 takeaways here.)

Session 1: The Cohesion of Teams – What Are The Secrets of Effective Collaboration?

Speaker: Benjamin Northey, Principal Conductor in Residence, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

• Building culture: in the context of an orchestra, the building of the culture has to come from the players – how are they driving that? It is a complex challenge for leaders to navigate.
• Proficiency: the proficiency of players to lead is a challenge – if we can create an environment where players or athletes take the lead in driving the internal culture, it can be harnessed in a much more powerful way.
• Group psychology: the psychology of the orchestra is the biggest challenge for conductors – understanding personalities, managing energy, focus and harnessing the collective will of the players. They all want it to be great but have all of their own ideas of how to get there.
• Communicate clearly: preparation happens incredibly fast, so there is pressure on the leader or conductor in this context to communicate the vision in a very clear way. Ben also talked about a leader having a point of focus that encourages clear alignment.
• Problem-solving: create an environment where there is self-correcting led by the players. Too often we see the leader listen or observe and start to provide solutions to the problem. In the orchestra, allow them to play, create a space for reflection as a group and in the second phase of rehearsal, you will see an impact straight away without the leading having to get involved.
• Collaboration begins with listening: encourage people to listen to each other and the real time processes of creation. The players have roles to play but they all need the creative intelligence to adjust that role themselves in the moment to the response of what they are hearing around them – the parts that unify them around us.
• Elite awareness: the cohesion of the orchestra is to find the understanding of not their own part, but the notes of others. The success of the group relies on connection, shared values and unified work. We are looking to generate elite awareness within the group.
• Creative intelligence: use your own creative intelligence. This concept is something that needs to be reinforced all the time or else it disempowers the innate creativity of the individual. The success of an orchestra relies on individual perspectives to work – ‘everyone is an artist’ is a piece of terminology that is used within the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Session 2: Change & Transition – How to Lead When There is a Shift in Behaviours

Speaker: Reb Rebele, Senior Research Fellow, The Wharton People Analytics initiative

• Consideration: how do you create sustained performance? Where does behavioural change sit within this?
• Behavioural science: studying how to get yourself or others to do something helpful – or to stop doing something harmful.
• Typical approach: when thinking about behaviour change, we collect all sorts of techniques and tools such as research and books. We collect nudges, techniques and hacks. In this toolkit we typically find something that works; rinse and repeat. However, contexts are different and it doesn’t tend to happen the same way.
• Tap into a goal that someone already has or a core value, connecting the behaviour change to that.
• Framework: am I trying to influence ‘temporary’ and ‘enduring’?

1. Temporary

• One-time behaviours.
• Context-specific behaviours (particular time and place).
• Short-term shifts (some kind of disruption – change of behaviours for a period of time before returning to some form of ‘normality’).
• Challenge for leaders: address the proximal cause – immediate goals, environment. 

2. Enduring

• Habit formation.
• Habit breaking.
• Personality change.
• Challenge for leaders: address the root cause (beliefs, values and identity). 

3. Motivated

• Existing desire (someone who comes to you for help)
• Aligned interests / values (clear link between the behaviour change and their goals).
• Challenge for leaders: reinforce current goals and values. 

4. Unmotivated

• Indifference (lack of interest – doesn’t see any reason to change).
• Aversion (active dislike / resistance to the behaviour change).
• Challenge for leaders: create new goals and values.

Bringing the Framework to Life

• How can I help someone to follow-through on that motivation in a particular instance? (Motivated x Temporary)
• How can I help someone be more consistent? (Motivated x Enduring)
• How can I help someone stretch outside their comfort zone? (Unmotivated x Temporary)
• How can I help someone achieve transformation? (Unmotivated x Enduring)

Session 3: Fostering Googleyness – How to Recruit & Retain for a World Class Culture

Speaker: Tova Angsuwat, Recruiting Lead, Google

• Google wanted to figure how to create the highest performing team – one of the hypotheses was if you bring the same people together with the same characteristics together, they would perform well. The second, bringing the best people in the organisation together. Neither yielded the results the organisation expected.
• Project Aristotle: great teams can be measured. Google’s research came up with five characteristics:

1. Psychological safety: comfortable to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. These teams challenged leaders, asked lots of questions and shared lots of things in meetings – it drove innovation and enhanced the ability to collaborate. As a leader, a good question to ask in a meeting or conversation is ‘what is something I might have missed?’
2. Dependability: getting things done on time to a high standard of excellence.
3. Structure and clarity: clear roles, plans and goals.
4. Meaning: work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact: their work matters and creates change.

Keys to defining culture:

• Mission, transparency and voice underpin the Google culture.
• Transparency: Google provides access to all of the information, even if you are an intern. Each Friday there was a TGIF with the founders where you can ask any question you like. This aspect of transparency is incredibly powerful. Can you push to be more transparent? It increases people engagement and buy-in to the organisation.
• You told us this, so we are doing that – a really powerful line for anyone to consider and use as a leader.
• Voice: how do you help everyone in the organisation an aspect of voice? Employee engagement surveys, opportunities for asking questions etc. Every time you do that, thank them for the feedback and share it back with them.

Tips for recruiting and retaining top talent

1. The most important skills to assess are not role-related: this can be very counterintuitive. Every person that is hired is interviewed against four attributes – role-related knowledge, problem-solving ability, leadership, and values fit.
2. Your greatest value proposition is meaning and purpose: sense of meaning and purpose is what people want from their jobs. What’s important to them and what can you offer?
3. Don’t hire people like you: who is going to complement you? In your teams, you need more of what isn’t there or who is going to add to you. Consider ‘culture add’ versus ‘culture fit’.
4. Share your ‘fungus’: as you think about retaining talent, you want to share what is going on within the organisation because they will see it when they do join.

Session 4: Inclusive Environments – Can High Performance Sport Create a Culture of Belonging?

Speaker: Matti Clements, Acting Director, Australian Institute of Sport

• Can ‘belonging’ drive a high performance culture?
• If belonging should be considered as a variable or aid of a high performance culture, how much time in a week do you spend actively prioritising it in your leadership role?
• Self-determination theory: autonomy, competence and belonging. This theory is about how an individual interacts with and depends on their social environment. It is based on the fundamental humanistic assumption we lean towards growth in ourselves.
• Autonomy: have some control over their lives and that they make choices they want to make.
• Competence: achievements, knowledge and skills – the need to build competence and mastery over the tasks that are important to them. We need to feel effective in the culture or environment we are in.
• Belonging: a sense of connectedness.
• Psychological research shows that cultures and environments that show these three needs, that people engage really deeply in the tasks and activities they are asked to commit to, thus enhancing performance. These organisations also have higher psychological health.
• ‘Belonging allows the individual to regulate and focus their attention on the things they need to thrive. It allows the individual to give more to something greater than their own personal needs.’

Takeaways from the development of strategy: belonging

• We often go to a small group of people – made a concerted effort to go wide and broad so everyone had an opportunity to contribute. Constantly asking who might think they don’t belong to this strategy and how do we get them in the room? Who is not represented and how do we make sure they get a voice?
• Check and challenge: scenarios were set up with questions such as ‘what won’t work?’ and ‘what’s the challenge?’ The purpose was creating connectedness to the process.
• Background work: very intentional on helping people to speak up and those that can dominate where spoken to around letting others speak up.

Vision & core values:

• Vision: We win well to inspire Australians.
• Core values: excellence / belonging / courage / connection.

HP 2032 and belonging levers:

• Connection to country.
• Inclusive design.
• Win well.

Session 5: The Application of Knowledge – Making Learning a Successful Process​

Speaker: Eddie Jones, Head Coach, Rugby Australia

• Levers to make a difference: you’ve got to have understanding of how you want to play and become automatic in that. Players can do it when there isn’t any pressure, but when the heat is on and being able to turn it on when it matters is a huge differentiator.
• Intent: when you are coaching with a team without long preparation periods, you have to get the intent right. Players will be given a framework with clarity, but then they have to think and work it out.
• Environment: give your athletes a good environment. The element that coaches do the worst is belonging – with the younger generation today, belonging is so important for them. Simple best practices such as shaping a room in a ‘U’ shape instead of rows to generate eye contact.
• New generation talent: the modern leader also needs to create an environment to generate skills they aren’t experiencing in society as easily anymore. They want a coach they can trust, who will push them to optimise themselves, but who is also loving.
• Be context-specific: be specific on taking learnings back to your teams to contextualise.
• Specificity of training: after travelling to meet the US Navy SEALs, a key takeaway from Eddie’s visit was the specificity of training towards the harshest moments of ‘the game’. We train our athletes to make the game easier. Free your players so you don’t just stick to tradition.
• Power of observation: as a coach, your greatest skill is your observation skills – your players have a pattern of behaviour, so you are looking for those changes. Good coaches observe behaviours and interactions.
• Modern head coaching: the role has become much more complex. In elite sport, staffing has doubled, larger playing squads both inside and outside of the environment – leaders need more assistance. Who is your critical friend and set of eyes to challenge what you are doing? If you are starting off as a young coach, keep an experienced coach close to you.
• Key learnings: quality of staff, don’t shortcut them or else you get caught. Recruit really well for your staff and have a criteria for what you need. Secondly, teams are much more dynamic than before, you have to be prepared to adapt really quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the first day here.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

The focus of our inaugural Leaders Meet in Australasia centred on the theme of high performance environments.

Across the course of two days, we sought to break down this theme by watching a live environment in practice, exploring frameworks and perspectives on how to recruit talent for your environment, the power of teaming and how it drives collaboration and teamwork, and insights from different industries on how to design, shape and evolve environments.

Here are the key takeaways from the first day.

(Day 2 takeaways here.)

Session 1: Collingwood Training Observation

Speaker: Craig McRae, Senior Coach, Collingwood

• Profiling the current environment: upon Craig’s appointment, he asked both staff and players for one word to describe the environment – what came out was really clear, those in the building lacked connection. To drive alignment, the group came back to creating a set of fundamentals they could live by that was agreed as a collective.
• The aim: ‘to create an environment where we live side by side, acting like winners everyday.’

Magpies training observation questions:

For the first portion of the event, we watched the team train. Attendees were asked to note down observations around three core questions, the answers to which were then fed back to coaches. Those questions were:

1. What stood out?​
2. What impressed you?​
3. What do you think could be improved?

Feedback:

Question: what was the focus of the pre-training meeting?

• Players were asked to analyse and evaluate the specific play versus coaches telling them what is required for the play. The purpose was to build the capacity to adapt out on the oval. The coaches wanted the players to feel it in a live space instead of being inside. The coaches wanted to allow the players to see how their movements help to connect with others. A real aim from a staffing point of view is to create on-field coaches, so creating situations for them to think and solve problems is a key strategy of the team’s training methodology.

Question: how often do you do repeat the same drills?

• Collingwood has regular setup on Tuesdays, which is a down day in terms of GPS. A large focus goes into specific roles, with focus and intent. The team talk about the ‘why’ a lot, but an area of improvement for the coaches is how the drills flow and efficiency between them in the nature of their design. A question they are asking is how are you valuing the time versus the efficiency of the time?

Question: talk us through the senior coach and assistant coach relationships – how do you communicate, challenge and collaborate?

• Every day, organically. There is a lot of consistency in the vision and plan. In the AFL, as a league, there is a lot of like-mindedness in the sport – Craig shared that he was determined not to have that in the club, instead having a diverse coaching group. It was important to note that the robust discussions that coaching teams often strive for do not happen immediately – a good question to ask is ‘would you tell the coach or other coaches how you are feeling?’ The robust discussions around coaching are easy, but do you spend a lot of time with each other and others’ families in order to take it to the next level?

Question: how do you balance the winning mentality in the vision versus that mentality in training?

• Craig shared from prior experiences from winning organisations is that they smelled the same and had the same DNA. The behaviours that correlated to winning are consistent in other environments. Players and staff really felt as part of a team, there was a sense of belonging and value in the staff. We can’t guarantee winning, but we can control behaviours and mantras.

Question: what role or involvement in the training is by the leadership group?

• The coaching staff explained that they want them to solve problems, evaluate and come up with solutions. They do some background workshopping off the oval and are asked to come up with solutions on the field. The leadership group are also pushed in terms of leadership development to help lead themselves and others around them.

Session 2 – Performance in Practice: Part 1 – Building a High Performing Team (Selecting the Right Talent)

Speakers: Dave Slemen, Founder, EPP, and Anna Edwards, Managing Director, EPP

• It’s important to always come back to the idea that high performance is a collective endeavour.
• The quality of connections between people is as important as the quality of individual talents.
• With the above in mind, it’s crucial to ensure you have the best possible talent​ ​and​ ​ensuring the richness of connections between them.

Nine-Step framework:

1. Cultural fit
2. Communication
3. Character
4. Leadership & followership
5. Relationships
6. Strategy & planning
7. Philosophy
8. Sporting knowledge
9. Technical skills.

Communication:

• How, when and with whom are you communicating?​ ​Board or team? Or both? Internal or external?​ ​
• This is about understanding the different languages required by different situations​ ​
• Do you vary your style for different team members? What is the impact of your approach?

Character:

• Which of the five types of Emotional intelligence are required for a role?​ ​
• Do you over, or under, index on one or another?​ ​
• Do people need to relate to each other in a particular way?​ ​
• Is there a personality type missing from the team to balance it out?

Leadership / followership:

• Followership can be as important as leadership​.
• Sometimes being effective in a role means taking people on a journey with you​.
• Inspiring people to follow is a very different style to standing at the front and showing the way.

Relationships:

• High performance comes from creating effective relationships at different levels: the board, the media, owners and players​.
• Increasingly we see roles that require individuals to be able to form relationships quickly across boundaries to get things done​.
• The ability to play different roles, while staying true to yourself, is an increasingly important attribute in leaders at all levels​.
• Curiosity about others – their skills and abilities is key to success. This is how we can develop change at pace.

Strategy & planning:

• How people create change is important – do they dictate it or show by example?​ ​
• Are you / your team members strategists, implementers, or both?​ ​
• Do you have a methodology or a systematic and organised approach?
• Do you expect the same in others?

Philosophy:

• How do you know you belong?
• What creates a sense of belonging in your team?​ ​
• Is your job to establish a vision?
• Does the role need someone with a vision of how they want to play or what they want to create?​ ​
• Do you know what you stand for?
• And can you articulate it? Can others?​ ​
• How much flexibility is there on where you are going? How adaptable do you need to be?

Sporting knowledge:

• Is it important to know the sport? Why?​ ​Or is it better not to? Why?​ ​
• How can you translate knowledge from sport to sport? What’s unique, and what’s transferable? ​
• Who in your team can ask the stupid questions and challenge the ‘always done’?

Technical skills:

• The very specific ‘must haves’ usually found on a practitioner brief​.
• These could be financial acumen, medical skillset, youth development experience or qualifications​.
• Is specific applied knowledge required?

Traps & Opportunities: Getting the Right Talent in Your Environments

Speakers: Darren Burgess, Director, EPP, and Craig Duncan, Director, EPP

• What are the most common traps? Those that purely use gut feel. Existing networks can create a sense of safety, but also create groupthink. Not using process for how you go and think about talent development.
• Loyalty over competency: hiring people who are loyal and have your back. Even if they may be loyal, have you checked for competency? If you invest in new people and ideas, they may be more competent and have your back anyway.
• How much input do you get from athletes? The best environments seek that input.
• Not factoring in culture. How do you want people to respond in certain situations? If something goes wrong, what are the reactions you are looking for? Align to the profile of people you are looking to bring in.

Session 3 – Performance in Practice: Part 2 – Building a High Performing Team (Creating High Performing Teamwork)

Speaker: John Bull, Head of High Performance, Management Futures

• Leaders who create high performing teamwork instil a culture of collaboration, galvanising people across silos behind a shared purpose. They create an environment of psychological safety and trust, where people debate ideas and support each other.
• High performance is a collective endeavour – so how are you building a culture of teaming?

Four skills of effective collaboration:

1. Collaborative mindset:

• Build trust at pace.
• Act ‘as if’ it is there immediately.
• Give ‘belonging cues’.
• Reach across silos.
• Invest time and energy in building relationships.

2. Speaking up:

• Contribute – sharing knowledge, insights and ideas.
• Raising issues.
• Constructively challenging.

3. Listening up:

• Situational humility (open to what we don’t know).
• Proactively seek out and be open to other people’s insights and views.
• Lead with questions.

4. Situational awareness:

• Be aware of and take responsibility for how the team is performing.
• Help the team to make good use of time.
• Diamond thinking: what could we do (option generation)? What should we do? (Evaluate options and make a call.)

Six common inhibitors of effective teamwork:

1. Unequal contribution: who speaks is determined by personality and / or status.
2. Groupthink.
3. Tribal: we are naturally less open with people we see as part of a different group.
4. Lack of psychological safety: leading people to withhold their thoughts.
5. Fixed position.
6. Lack of strategic focus: we don’t use time effectively in meetings.

Psychological safety

Psychological safety is the extent to which people feel that speaking up will be welcomed and not judged negatively.

The conversations we are not having will be some of the most important the neuroscience. When people feel social pain it compromises the brain’s ability to think by up to 30%.

Four types of psychological safety:

1. Inclusion safety: belonging, valued and safe to be myself.
2. Learner safety: I feel safe to show gaps in my knowledge and competence. Make mistakes and ask questions.
3. Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas and be trusted.
4. Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge status quo.

How can we increase psychological safety?

1. Put it all on the table.
2. Building trust and belonging.
3. Make it easy to speak up.
4. Model openness and honesty.
5. Praise it.
6. Challenge with skilled candour.

Creating conditions for high performing teamwork

1. Build buy-in to the value of teamwork

• Unite people behind a common goal which requires teamwork.​
• Share your vision of high performing teamwork​.
• Get clear on how teamwork can add value and what you’re looking for in terms of teaming behaviours, and share this with people​.
• Create some quick wins that show the value of teamwork​.
• Build momentum and buy-in by creating some quick win opportunities for effective teamwork to add value​.
• Use feedback to reinforce collaborative behaviour​.
• Praise it​. Challenge in a supportive way where you want more of it. (i.e. hold people to account on it).

2. Create the conditions for high quality interactions ​ – inside & outside of meetings

• Invest time in building trust and respect. Learning a bit about each other’s stories. Unique strengths each person brings.​
• Build psychological safety. To enable honest constructive debate, free flow of all ideas and people asking for help.​
• Agree a set of winning behaviours, you review against regularly. Building collective responsibility.​
• Review the effectiveness of your meetings​ Resolve any tensions quickly.

Further reading:

Check out the takeaways from the second day here.