Main photo: Watford FC/Alan Cozzi

By John Portch

There is rarely people lining up to praise the English weather, but the coaches and performance staff of Watford, West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield Wednesday have their reasons.

The three Championship clubs held pre-season training camps at St George’s Park in July when a number of their counterparts were visiting foreign climes.

“You can guarantee that the weather isn’t going to impact training loads,” says Watford Head Coach Tom Cleverley, who took his side to SGP between 22 and 27 July. “Sometimes you can go to Spain, Portugal and it’s too hot to get the intensities that you want.”

It was the week of pre-season where Watford started their out-of-possession work and intensity was a must. “You can’t be intense the whole pre-season because you’ll burn them out,” Cleverley tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but for one week of pre-season, we identified that week where we could work twice a day on the pitch; we could have a meeting every day in the morning about what we’re going after; and then a meeting in the evening about a target that we’ll set for the season.”

Tony Strudwick is of a similar mindset, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute of SGP. “We’re guaranteed a consistent weather pattern,” says West Brom’s Director of Medical. “We want to try to create that level of consistency in pre-season.”

The 330-acre Staffordshire facility, which includes a Hilton Hotel, boasts 14 state-of-the-art football pitches, which can be configured for a variety of sports, as well as a range of indoor facilities including a full 3G pitch, a multifunctional sports hall, gym, hydrotherapy pools and a cryotherapy chamber. It suited West Brom to a tee. “The one-site solution is perfect for us,” Strudwick adds.

West Brom spent 13 to 20 July at SGP – hot on the tails of Sheffield Wednesday, whose camp took place between 8 and 13 July.

“You literally come off the training pitch, you’re into recovery, lunch, you can maybe get your feet up for an hour or two and be ready for the next session and then it’s the same in the morning,” Neil Thompson, the Assistant Manager at Sheffield Wednesday, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

Here, we explore three clubs with five similar reasons for choosing SGP for part of their pre-season work.

1. An escape from monotony

Monotony was a big issue for Championship clubs in an off-season that for those not involved in the play-offs ran from the last day of the 2023-24 season (4 May) to the opening day of the 2024-25 season (10 August).

The gap led to an extended pre-season. “A seven-week pre-season is longer than usual,” says Cleverley, who explains that the club’s own training ground “can become monotonous if you’re doing double sessions every day for seven weeks”. SGP, on the other hand, is “second to none” in his view.

“It can freshen things up a bit and create an impact,” says Strudwick, adding that it allowed West Brom’s own training pitches a further week to recover. “It doesn’t sound like a long time, six or seven weeks, but given that you’re going to be at the training ground for the next 38 weeks, it does make sense to create something unique and special.”

Tom Cleverley, the Head Coach of Watford, explains tactics to his players. (Photo: Watford FC/Alan Cozzi)

2. Enhanced bonding activities

SGP enabled all three teams the opportunity to promote team bonding, which is particularly critical early in pre-season when new players and staff are settling in.

“You’re there and living in each other’s pockets for a week,” says Thompson. “You might speak to an individual who you’ve never spoken to in depth.”

There are nurmeous “breakout areas” around the Hilton too, as Strudwick explains. “There are plenty of opportunities for players and coaches to interact and engage.”

“The team spirit aspect, I really enjoy,” says Cleverley. “So keeping guys together between sessions, they’re not on their digital devices, they’re together in the evenings, they’re eating together, they’re not going straight back to their rooms – they want to be around each other for that week – which really builds something to move forward for the whole season.”

Neil Thompson, the Assistant Manager of Sheffield Wednesday. (Photo: Jacques Feeney/Getty Images) 

3. Increased training opportunities

There is real value in English teams booking camps in southern and central Europe – Sheffield Wednesday also arranged camps in Germany and Austria – but there is something to be said for having everything on hand at one site at a familiar venue. It is instructive that each of Watford, West Brom and Wednesday previously held pre-season camps at SGP.

“I’m keen to go back there,” says Cleverley, who is already onto the Watford team secretary about the idea. “I’ve had a lot of experience of St George’s Park as an international player, as a club player. I’ve played there, done a camp there with Watford, and now, as a coach.”

“We’re looking at doing the same next year,” says Strudwick of West Brom. “We wanted to reduce travel time and maximise the training opportunities. We didn’t have to get on early flights, go through airports, we don’t lose training days, we don’t lose match prep days.

“We’ve had two years of St George’s Park and both experiences have been fantastic.”

The same works in reverse, with overseas teams such as SL Benfica and AS Monaco enjoying similar benefits in the Staffordshire countryside.

4. Complete control for clubs

Not only is there favourable training weather and pitches at SGP (“the ground staff were putting the sprinklers on at the right times,” says Cleverley), but teams have the full ability to tweak schedules as necessary or make adjustments.

Cleverley, for example, split his Watford squad in two midway through their camp in order to play Scottish Premiership side Hibernian in Edinburgh. The fixture was arranged as part of Ryan Porteous’ move from Hibs to Hertfordshire in 2023. “It was a unique week,” says Cleverley, who was still satisfied with the camp’s outcome.

A team’s plans are subject to “constant iteration” in pre-season, as Strudwick explains. He says: “We’ll have certain priorities that we want to hit, we’ll have certain individual players that need managing, and players coming back into the training process. But I’ve been in football long enough now to understand that the plan you have in early May often changes come mid-July.”

He also discusses the challenge of working in an environment where players employ external practitioners, particularly as there is no firm guidance for clubs. In any case, “it means you can’t switch off. You’ve got to be in constant contact with the players and tracking them outside of the season now.”

Darnell Furlong of West Bromwich Albion is all smiles in the gym during his club’s pre-season training camp day two at St George’s Park on July 16, 2024. (Photo: Adam Fradgley/West Bromwich Albion FC via Getty Images) 

5. Behind-closed-doors matches

As pre-season focuses continue to evolve from conditioning to game-based, there is an increasing need to test ideas out on the grass in realistic conditions. With this in mind, the facilities at SGP can be primed for behind-closed-doors matches, which West Brom used to their advantage this summer.

The Baggies’ first two pre-season friendlies, against Bolton Wanderers and Peterborough United, were held onsite. The team played a further two fixtures behind-closed-doors (versus Blackpool and RCD Mallorca) at their West Bromwich Albion Training Ground.

The matches at SGP ticked many performance boxes for Strudwick and his colleagues. “You don’t want to go into your first game and expose the players to a 70,000 crowd,” he says. “You still have your referees but it allows you to be more flexible in playing minutes.” This is not just in terms of minutes per player, but reducing half lengths to 30 minutes, or even extending them to 60. “It gives you a lot more flexibility to nail down what you want from a team perspective.”

By John Portch

A regular menstrual cycle is generally a sign of good health in female athletes – although not all female athletes are necessarily aware of this.

“There are still female athletes who see it as a positive if their periods stop when they’re training,” Dr Natalie Brown, a Research Associate at the Welsh Institute of Performance Science, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.

“This is because it’s easier and more convenient; they’ve not got to deal with the symptoms or the bleeding.”

Yet the impact on their short and long term health, let alone performance, could be significant. “It’s an indicator that they do not have enough energy for those basic bodily functions.”

Nevertheless, such myths have grown to fill the void left by a lack of education and awareness across sport.

Brown is part of the Sport Wales Female Health & Performance Team who are working to redress that balance by seeking to identify how the Welsh sports system can better support female athletes in their health and performance.

In the first of a series of articles exploring the work of Sport Wales’ Female Health & Performance Team, we discuss some of the major health and performance considerations for female athletes as well as some of the common myths that endure.

Female athletes: long overlooked

It was encouraging to see a 50:50 split between male and female athletes at an Olympic Games for the first time in Paris earlier this year, but the stark reality is that just 22 per cent of leadership positions in sport are held by women.

This is a symptom of a wider gender imbalance. Sport, much like society, has been geared towards males, with female sport often overlooked and under-resourced.

“Females are participating more, and that’s great to see, but the environments in which they are participating have not necessarily been set up for females,” says Esther Goldsmith, who both works alongside Brown within the Female Health & Performance Team and joins her on the call.

A girls’ rugby team, for example, may not have access to suitable changing rooms or toilets. “That means they have to arrive prepared and, if they’ve not got access to toilets, what does that mean if you’ve got someone on her period?” says Brown.

“Even in just focusing on the menstrual cycle you’re ignoring the bigger picture around women’s experiences of sport and how the system that we’ve designed doesn’t enable women to thrive in sport because they’re trying to thrive in a male system.”

She continues: “Girls go through puberty earlier than boys and so they have experienced hormonal changes at a time when they’re very unlikely to have been exposed to a strength stimulus and an appropriate movement at a young age when they would really benefit from it.”

“The other thing is access to physios,” says Goldsmith. “Most female teams don’t have access to a full-time physio, whereas male teams do.” Inevitably, female teams suffer more time lost to injuries than their male peers. “In a male setup you might have a physio input that means that there’s no time loss as a result of a niggle.”

This is compounded by the lack of sports science research on female athletes.

“Females have different biological and physical makeups,” says Goldsmith. “We know our hearts, circulation and hormones are different, our anatomy is different, and therefore our biomechanics are different.”

As long as the performance community overlooks this, from the grassroots to elite level, female athletes will leave both health and performance potential on the table.

Education

The Female Health & Performance Team is focused on trying “to provide practical, tangible things that you can do to support your female athletes without it becoming too complicated or time-consuming to achieve,” as Brown puts it.

Education is a significant lever. “A lot of teams say ‘we need education’ but then they don’t necessarily know how to deliver it,” says Goldsmith. “I will deliver some classes to athletes, coaches and practitioners and work with them to help them take responsibility for themselves.”

Sport Wales is aiming to create a culture where everyone, from board members to volunteers, considers the importance of female health. Goldsmith and her colleagues work with athletes and coaches to address health, wellbeing and performance questions.

It might involve classroom discussions but it could also take in one-to-one sessions. “If you’re working with an athlete there’s a bit of that ‘we’ve got to work on this together’ because every female body is completely different and everyone will respond in a different way,” she adds.

“You’ll go into some sports and work with some female athletes and they’ll respond to or act differently with you to how they might in their day-to-day training environment because you’re external and not part of their setup.”

Goldsmith will also adapt her approach depending on to whom she speaks. “Classes will look different depending on what part of the pathway you’re working on because a 14-year-old is going to respond very differently to a 25-year-old.”

She and her colleagues also strive to go beyond “surface level” initiatives and have carried out behavioural mapping. “How do we actually change behaviour so that females are considered, whether that’s with the athletes themselves or with the coaches and performance directors to look at actionable ideas?”

Myth busting

Around 90 per cent of athletes who menstruate report some symptoms including pain, reduced motivation and fatigue. Brown uses this stat to set the scene for an illuminating story: “I once asked an athlete if their menstrual cycle affects their training and they said: ‘no, not at all. I just miss training if I’m really struggling’. I just had to sit there and say ‘OK, we’re going to have to take a step back here’.”

Brown and her colleagues routinely dispel common misunderstandings and myths.

One such myth is the supposed need to periodise training according to an athlete’s menstrual cycle. “There is inconsistent evidence  that you should completely adjust all of your training based on phases of the menstrual cycle,” she says.

Media headlines suggesting links between ACL injuries and the menstrual cycle have not helped. “I’ve worked with some athletes who are petrified of training in a certain way at a certain time because of those headlines and their anxiety,” says Goldsmith. Another persistent myth is the idea that stopping the use of hormonal contraceptives will restart someone’s cycle (they may experience a withdrawal bleed, which is not the same as a menstrual bleed).

Coaches are just as susceptible to these myths. “You could see them, especially with team sports, asking ‘well, if I’ve got two athletes in that phase and two athletes in that phase and 20 in that phase, how do I make sure that they’re all training based on their phases?’” All are relieved to hear there is an alternative solution to providing female-specific support.

One might also assume that a female coach would be more sympathetic to the needs of a female athlete but that is not always the case. “Some female coaches or practitioners, for example, never had any menstrual symptoms,” says Brown. “Some of them therefore don’t have the automatic motivation to consider it, and sometimes both male and female coaches can perceive athletes as using their symptoms as an excuse.”

It is important that it is not just females either, particularly as the majority of coaches are male. Some have a wealth of knowledge in the area, others don’t. “If you ask male coaches if they think there should be equal opportunities for males and females they wouldn’t say ‘no’,” says Goldsmith. “But that doesn’t mean they’ve factored some of the things we’ve talked about into their practice. They just haven’t developed that understanding. But when you start communicating it as a performance thing, they’re like ‘OK, this applies to the world I live in’.”

To further help athletes, as well as their GPs, Sport Wales Medical Consultant, Dr Katy Guy, has prepared a letter that female athletes can take to their GPs if they were to notice a change in their menstrual cycle. “We know GPs are under the cosh and have a lot to think and know about, so we’re just trying to create a resource to help bust that myth beyond our institute,” says Goldsmith.

For all the obstacles that remain, both Brown and Goldsmith are optimistic.

“In the last two years there’s been quite a shift,” says Brown. “Before that, the conversation was starting and there was some awareness but it was more around what was not being provided. There’s been an increase in both research and support in the last two years.

“The increased visibility of women’s sport has also supported that shift. So rather than us saying ‘this is important, you need to consider it, this is why’, I feel like we’ve shifted towards sports, athletes and coaches saying ‘we know it’s important. What can we do?’”

Stay tuned for upcoming articles where Brown and Goldsmith provide practical suggestions and solutions for supporting female athletes, from enhancing knowledge and establishing supportive environments to embedding positive behaviours and suitable management strategies.

Further reading:

‘Female-Specific Considerations Should Be Part of Normal Practice’

By Luke Whitworth

Let’s begin this month’s Debrief with a question.

How many meetings did you attend in September and how many of those meetings were useful or productive?

On second thoughts, you may want to keep your counsel on that front. If you do happen to feel that your meetings were, let’s say, sub-optimal, you’re not alone.

A 2017 report in the Harvard Business Review laid out some stark facts that ring just as true today:

• 71 % of senior managers believe meetings are inefficient.
• 40% of employees consider unproductive meetings to be the highest cost to their organisations.
• 50% of all meeting time is found to be effective, well used and engaging. This percentage is even lower for remote meetings.

All were discussed in a recent Leadership Skills Series session, which kicks off the September Debrief, before segueing into performance analysis.

Before we get into it, we want to thank those of you who completed our Future Trends in High Performance survey. We’re excited to dissect the findings and begin condensing this into a report which we hope you will find valuable – keep your eyes peeled for this later in the year.

Making your meetings more impactful

Let’s cut to the chase: what we can we be doing practically to make our meetings better? We set out some simple but actionable tactics to deploy right away in our September Leadership Skills Series session.

Before the meeting :

• Ask at the outset, is a meeting actually required for this particular item? Too often we see meetings happen for meetings’ sake. Be diligent and reflective of the purpose and desired outcome.
• If it is agreed that meeting would be useful, clearly define the purpose of the meeting before bringing the relevant people together and create an agenda with those involved. Is the purpose to make a decision? Is the purpose to brainstorm or solve a problem? On the whole, what is it and is everyone clear?
• Create an agenda. This sounds simple but it’s important as many meetings skip this part, which can often derail the quality of the discussions. Start and finish on time. Consider allocating time for items so ‘less is more’ and identify a specific aim for each to give direction – what specifically do we need to take away from this agenda item?
• Identify the required resources and pre-reading required for the meeting or each agenda item.
• Instead of inviting everyone, who do we want in the room who is going to enable the decision or enable the best thinking?
• Assign roles: a chair or facilitator? Who is leading each topic and who is the note taker? Often what happens is the expert or leader of the team ends up defaulting to the chair and facilitator. Look to vary this to bring fresh voices in.

During the meeting:

• Start well. Start with positivity and be mindful of your body language and the impression you’re creating, as we know about the emotional contagion this can create.
• The chair or facilitator should look to set out the ground rules from the outset, do this nice and early: share what the plan is, that there will be equal opportunity, expect interruption if the direction of travel isn’t where it needs to be, and be rigorous, especially around timings.
• Check for buy-in and permission at the beginning of the meeting to stick to the above as this takes away some people feeling a bit nervous about coming in and stopping the conversation or moving it on.
• Consider ‘mini diamonds’. Each agenda item becomes a mini diamond. At the top of the diamond, you look to open up the conversation and bring different people in and then the chair or facilitator needs to bring it to the end point. What were the actions and ideas that came out of the conversation?

After the meeting:

• This is where meetings can lose their impact. A really good discussion is had, there are some actions that come out of it, but by the time we actually get the notes from it, the momentum has been lost.
• In an ideal world, the note taker has some time immediately after the meeting where the notes can be summarised and circulated.
• Ensure all actions have a specific person – not a department – assigned to them.
• Ask for feedback. If you haven’t gone out to your teams or the organisation to review what people think of meetings recently, how effectively they’re being used, what’s working and what isn’t working, it’s perhaps an idea to do that.

Mobilising performance analysis: solutions for common challenges

In last month’s debrief, we touched on some of the learnings and reflections from part one of our series titled Advances in Performance Analysis. As part of that first session, we asked attendees to reflect on some of the common challenges they are facing in the space. As a refresher, these were:

1. Integration: efficiently setting up datasets that allow for different data points to intertwine with one another.
2. Communication of the data: consider: how good are you at data visualisation and storytelling?
3. Buy-in: how strong is the understanding around the value of performance analysis across the organisation to show return on investment? How well are you showing and measuring the impact?
4. Data management: given the amount of metrics being collected, is there clarity and prioritisation of what matters?

The aim of session two, was to explore these challenges in more detail and, by leaning into a couple of case studies from different environments, share some ideas and solutions to shift the dial. Those case studies were provided by the UK Sports Institute’s Head of Performance Analysis, Julia Wells, and Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Head of Performance Insights & Data Strategy, Mat Pearson. Both shared some useful ideas.

Integrating and connecting data

• Focus on data skill development. This means upskilling the relevant staff involved, from the right data, correct formats and in the right places, before the interrogation and analysis even begins. Go back to basics and upskill everyone in the team.
• Structures can support this too. There is clear data strategy and leadership within the UKSI environment, all geared towards supporting performance planning. Roles such as Data & Insight Lead and Performance Data Lead are embedded within the organisation to help those leading programmes with the direction and the integration of their data.
• Do not underestimate the importance of clear strategy as part of your performance planning. Know what needs collating and why within your team.

Data collation

• Taking the time to pause and critically reflect is really important in the process as it can be very easy to stay on the hamster wheel and just keep collecting.
• Ask quality questions: why are we creating the data, what is its purpose, what decisions is it informing, particularly in the coaching process? Do this periodically and continue to plan, do and review.
• Engage in conversations with key leaders in the environment to discuss what to start, continue and stop. It’s important to intentionally carve out those opportunities as part of your performance planning.

Communication of data

• Communication is a critical skill. Wells suggested that some people would say that communication is a non-technical skill, but it is highly technical, in her opinion. Therefore, it is really important to upskill those working in this space considering the critical nature of human engagement in the process.
• At the UKSI, staff work closely with the psychology team to help elevate understanding of self and others. If we can better understand the people we work with, it will support how to get the best out of each other. They’ve tapped into better understanding one another’s preferences to be more impactful in how they support each other.

Buy-in

• Alignment to the sport’s strategy helps to provide a clearer connection. If this alignment and connection isn’t there, you’ll naturally get disconnection so it will be more challenging to get the buy-in.
• Relationships are key. Invite key stakeholders and leaders into your world and shadow them. When they immerse themselves to better understand the process you’ll find that it can quickly lead to them becoming a voice for you in wider conversations.

Data literacy

This is a bonus challenge and set of solutions, which does have some relevance to communication and buy-in.

• Often practitioners can suffer in silence when looking for solutions. In the latest Olympic cycle, the team at UKSI have introduced an internal online data community that provides access to resources. This accessibility allowed them to be able to connect with others in the network and share good practice.
• The UKSI team put together a Data Leadership Programme which was focused on pulling together the data leaders in their sports to look at opportunities, challenges and future direction. Courses and best practices, called ‘Data Camp’, ‘Project Automate’ and ‘Code School’, were created to improve skills and processes for coaches and practitioners to help them be more efficient.

By Luke Whitworth

We spend copious amounts of time in meetings and yet only 50 per cent of all meeting time is found to be well used and engaging – that percentage drops further for remote meetings.

Furthermore, 71 per cent of senior managers believe meetings are inefficient and more than 37 per cent of employees consider unproductive meetings to be the highest cost to their organisations.

These stats derive from surveys conducted across the business world and, in a recent Leadership Skills Series session, members of the Leaders Performance Institute indicated there was considerable room for improvement in their environments.

The case for more effective meetings

The Leadership Skills Series session sought to explore and discuss best practice for effective meetings, share top tips, and promote practical ideas to trial in your environment.

We started with some potential benefits when meetings are well-chaired and well-structured:

• Improved communication.
• Enhanced collaboration and creativity.
• Increased accountability.
• More effective decision making.
• A boost in employee engagement.
• Greater alignment of goals and priorities.

What works in meetings?

Attendees were invited to reflect on what they think works and what frustrates them in their usual meetings. Ideally, you’d double down on what works and adapt what isn’t working.

The group suggested the following as important:

• Have a clear agenda.
• Appoint a good moderator.
• Ensure there is engagement from everyone.
• Establish pre-reading or preparation to elevate productivity.
• Ensure there is clear alignment / positioning between the goals of the meeting and the title.
• Establish the purpose of the meeting: is it a discussion or decision focused?
• Make sure that actions and next steps are completed and communicated.
• Be considered in making sure that the right people are in the room.
• Implement an agreed set of acceptable behaviours.

What frustrates in meetings?

The group believed that the following got in the way of effective meetings. If you can avoid these eventualities you should see an immediate uplift:

• When there is a conversation between two people but there are ten in the room.
• A lack of engagement and agreements around expectations.
• A lack of preparation from others.
• If last minute cancellations occur but the meeting is still run it often means the same conversations need to happen twice.
• People ‘spectating’ or not contributing to discussions.
• Personal agendas hijacking objectives.

Best practice: before, during and after meetings

The session provided some tactics to provide right away.

Before the meeting:

Firstly, is a meeting actually required for this particular item? Too often we see meetings occur for meetings’ sake. Be diligent and reflective on the purpose and desired outcome.

If it is agreed that meeting would be useful, clearly define the purpose of the meeting before bringing the relevant people together and create an agenda with those involved. Is the purpose to make a decision? Is the purpose to brainstorm or solve a problem? On the whole, what is it and is everyone clear?

Create an agenda. This sounds simple but it’s important as many meetings skip this part which can often derail the quality of the discussions. Start and finish on time. Avoid blocks of time – calendars on laptops and phones work in blocks, but if only ten minutes is needed or 40 minutes is better, take the time it needs and not how your calendar is designed. Similarly, in the creation of the agenda, consider allocating time for items so less is more and identify a specific aim for each to give direction – what specifically do we need to take away from this agenda item? We should be able to answer that clearly and make that obvious for the people who are attending.

Identify the required resources and pre-reading required for the meeting or each agenda item.

Instead of inviting everyone, who do we want in the room who is going to enable the decision or enable the best thinking? You don’t need everyone in the room all of the time. When there is alignment on who needs to be there, assign roles: a chair or facilitator, who is leading each topic and a note taker.

Often what happens is the expert or leader of the team ends up defaulting to the chair and facilitator, look to vary this to bring fresh voices in.

During the meeting:

Start well. Start with positivity and be mindful of your body language and the impression you’re creating. We know about the emotional contagion this can create.

The chair or facilitator should look to set out the ground rules from the outset. Do this nice and early: share what the plan is, that there will be equal opportunity, expect interruption if the direction of travel isn’t where it needs to be; and be rigorous, especially around timings. It’s important for those in the room to have confidence around the agenda.

Check for buy-in and permission (at the beginning of the meeting) to stick to the above as this takes away some people feeling a bit nervous about coming in and stopping the conversation or moving it on.

Consider ‘mini diamonds’. Each agenda item becomes a mini diamond. At the top of the diamond, you look to open up the conversation and bring different people in and then the chair or facilitator needs to bring it to the end point. What were the actions and ideas that came out of the conversation?

The note taker should not be passive. They should be pushing for actions, especially if there is an agenda item being discussed with no clear actions coming out of it.

After the meeting:

This is where meetings can lose their impact. A really good discussion is had, there are some actions that come out of it, but by the time we actually get the notes from it, the momentum has been lost.

In an ideal world, the note taker has some time immediately after the meeting where the notes can be summarised and circulated. This is really useful for clear actions: who’s doing it? By when? If these can’t be done immediately afterwards, ideally it should be the same day and certainly within 24 hours or our memory starts to fade, and we’re not capturing what we need to.

Ensure all actions have a specific person is assigned to them – not a department. And ask for feedback. If you haven’t gone out to your teams or the organisation to review what people think of meetings recently, how effectively they’re being used, what’s working and what isn’t working, it’s perhaps an idea to do that.

Some final top tips to try:

1. ‘Peel away’

Nina Sunday is a renowned expert in workplace culture and someone who specialises in meetings. She talks about the notion of ‘peeling away’. Sunday suggests that if you organise your agenda well enough, relevant people can leave after each specific agenda item if there isn’t a need for them to be there. It prevents people from sitting in the meeting and going through the motions, plus those that have got out of the meeting what they needed.

2. Vote

Often in meetings, there is a decision to be made, but what can materialise if a question is opened up on that decision, is that you hear from everybody in the room and it just becomes a conversation based on opinion that doesn’t help to make a decision. Before asking, check-in to see who thinks they know what decision they’ve already made to get a sense of if collating opinions is actually needed. You can ask for a show of hands or use different technologies, which is something that can help cut to the chase around the actual decision.

3. OPUR

OPUR stands for ‘one person ultimately responsible’. Make one person responsible for an agenda item or a particular action. It keeps things clean.

4. Fast assessment of choices

This tactic may save a lot of time but it may also prolong a meeting. On the whole, though, it will save a lot of time in the long run. Do a fast assessment of choices that considers the impact and energy of doing something. If something is low effort and it has high impact, it’s going to be a big bang. If something is going to take a lot of effort, but has high impact, it’s something that might need to be evaluated a bit more to have clarity on how it is going to be approached.

5. Stand

Finally, hold stand up meetings. The evidence shows that it brings, focus, energy and often makes meetings shorter.

By John Portch

When Australia retained the Women’s Ashes in the English summer of 2023, there were mixed feelings for future captain Alyssa Healy.

“It feels a bit dirty in a way, but we got the result we were after,” said Healy in the aftermath. “I think the gap’s not necessarily been there as much as everyone has spoke about.”

There was a sense amongst Australia’s players that their success owed to a quirk in the format. Yes, they had won the series’ only Test match, but they had lost both limited-overs series 2-1 to England. Nevertheless, the scoring system was weighted in favour of the Test and, at the series’ conclusion, the teams were tied on eight points each, which meant Australia retained the Ashes as holders.

It was not the type of emphatic victory to which Australia and their Head Coach Shelley Nitschke had become accustomed. After years of blazing a trail and lifting trophies galore, Australia’s rivals were beginning to bridge the gap.

“There were just a few signs along the way that the game was changing and other teams were getting close to us,” Nitschke told an audience at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

She also spoke of her team’s resilient but laboured performances in their 2022 Commonwealth Games semi-final and final. Those matches against South Africa and India, respectively, could have gone the other way were it not for decisive moments of inspiration from Australia’s serial winners.

“We were finding ourselves in those positions more often than I would have liked,” Nitschke continued.

She had led Australia into the Commonwealths as Interim Head Coach and was appointed on a permanent basis after the competition. For all the planning that went into retaining the Ashes, the drawn series rang alarm bells in Nitschke’s mind, and the post-tour debrief was not going to her liking.

“We were happy to bring the Ashes home, but we knew there was work to do heading into the T20 World Cup [taking place in the UAE in October] and the discussions just weren’t moving the dials as much as I was hoping.”

Nitschke responded by pushing for change and her efforts have so far been vindicated by Australia’s subsequent results. The holders enter the World T20 as the favourites to defend their title.

Here, we explore the four steps Nitschke has taken to keep Australia ahead of the chasing pack.

1. She found the reason for change

Nitschke had noted Australia’s opponents’ increased aggression and strategic use of powerplays [ten-over spells in an innings where the fielding team is restricted in the number of players they can place outside of a 30-yard circle around the batting team’s wicket]. Without adaptation, Australia’s approach would not cut it at the highest level for much longer. “I went to the analysts and started to crunch the numbers and have a look at what other teams were doing and where we fared in regards to the rest of the world,” said Nitschke. “We like to think that we would have been ahead of the game, particularly around powerplays, but there were certain parts of the game where we just weren’t.” It led to a fresh set of winning measurements and KPIs; and Nitschke had her vision for change.

2. Then she found the right words

It would not be what Nitschke said but how she said it. As she prepared her pitch for change she first presented to her Team Psychologist Peter Clarke, a popular figure within the playing group. Nitschke said: “He was really useful in recommending the language to use; saying ‘don’t dumb it down and ‘don’t say it’s not a huge challenge’ or ‘just a few tweaks’.” Clarke guided Nitschke in her use of words and reassured her that in several key elements, such as assessment, stakeholder analysis and change strategy, she and Australia had already made a start. Armed with the right delivery, Nitschke could begin to instil the team’s revamped style and strategy.

3. She asked for input

After the initial pitch, Nitschke would deliver a data-informed dossier to every player during Australia’s October 2023 series with the West Indies. The coaches had already decided it was not the moment to implement wholesale change. “We contacted them and just let it stick with them for a while – it probably would have hit a few between the eyes.” It was a frank admission and not without risks. The trick was to ask each player for their opinion. “It led to some really good suggestions,” said Nitschke, who also consulted her staff, several of whom chipped in with ideas from beyond cricket.

4. She identified her change agent

When leading a transition, you need influential people to have your back when enduring setbacks. “We’ve lost a few games we ordinarily may have won,” said Nitschke, who was keen to take advantage of the relatively low stakes series following the Ashes. She would lean heavily on Alyssa Healy, who was appointed Australia captain in December 2023. “Alyssa was involved from the start in driving [the change] through the playing group.” Nitschke would need to call upon every bond of trust developed between the duo in their six years working together. She continued: “There were some senior players that were probably challenged a little bit through being asked to play a little differently than what they had been for the last few years, even though they’d been successful. It could have gone in a completely different direction because if we didn’t have buy-in from the captain then we probably weren’t going to get buy-in from the rest of the team.”

By John Portch

Since Beijing in 2008, British Cycling has topped the medals table in cycling at each subsequent Summer Olympics and Paralympics.

The ‘marginal gains’ philosophy of Sir Dave Brailsford, who served as British Cycling’s Performance Director between 2003 and 2014, was at the heart of this success throughout.

It was Brailsford’s “daily bread” said Jon Norfolk, the Head Coach at British Cycling, at last year’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

British Cycling, long after Brailsford had departed, continued to focus on maximising the one percenters – and it worked.

“These were really exciting times for the organisation,” Norfolk continued. “We were quick, we were agile, we were really detailed.” There was, however, a price to pay.

“I think I’m going to call it a ‘cost’. I think a cost of that agility and that speed was that we were moving very quickly. I’m not sure at each point we understood genuinely what created that performance.”

By January 2020, Norfolk and his colleagues had identified that cost and decided that the solution lay in better performance planning. They hoped to implement a change in emphasis after the Tokyo Games but, when the worsening pandemic caused their postponement in March 2020, they could begin that process earlier than anticipated.

Here, we explore British Cycling’s motivations and their rationale for ripping up a way of operating that was working – and still worked – in favour of a new approach weighted in favour of collaborative performance planning.

What was wrong with the ‘marginal gains’ philosophy?

Three factors rendered the philosophy unfit for purpose, even as the team continued to be successful:

1. British Cycling was so focused on the one-percenters that it couldn’t fully account for the performance of its riders.
2. The International Cycling Union [UCI] shifted its Olympic programme away from straight-line to more volatile competitions, with fewer of the ‘controllables’ beloved of GB Cycling.
3. The team was forced by an UCI law (introduced in 2023) that declared any equipment used in competition must be commercially available. The secrets born from marginal gains had to be shared with Great Britain’s competitors.

Why was performance planning British Cycling’s first port of call?

An internal audit revealed an inconsistent approach to planning across its numerous disciplines that too often did not harness the talent in the building. Some performance plans were good but too often people had little scope for influencing a rider’s plan because it was too protected. Sometimes the plans were downright unclear. “People were struggling to get their handprints on the plan, to make an impact, to improve the plan,” said Norfolk.

What needed to change?

A good performance plan will tell an athlete where they’re going and how to get there; coaches will use that plan to stretch their athletes and be bold in their approach; and, if the plan is clear, leaders will be able to ask how the plan is tracking and where they can support the athlete and the coach. If British Cycling gets that right then the sky’s the limit. Said Norfolk: “I want an environment where coaches can leverage their plan, stretch athletes, and aim for things they may not be able to reach; but as a consequence, we’ll get a lot further because we’ve set clear, brave and long-term targets.”

Was there any resistance?

Plenty. “It’s a really tricky thing to encourage someone to let go of something which has worked,” said Norfolk. Some coaches carried the plan in their head and found it difficult to communicate their thoughts to a multidisciplinary team; others felt threatened and exposed when laying a plan out on the table for others to check and challenge. For some coaches, it was, as Norfolk explained, a “stick”. On top of that, he explained that some environments, such as BMX, were seen as “plan-resistant” given their “free-form”, “pack-like” approach to performance. Any approach would need to consider the environment as well as the demands of the discipline.

What was the answer?

Turn that stick into a carrot. British Cycling chose to encourage performance plans that actively separate the coach from the performance outcome. It made sense. “We’ve all been in a spot where we’ve seen great coaching but the athlete hasn’t performed for a particular reason; and we’ve also seen athletes perform and it’s not really due to the coach,” said Norfolk.

If the coach is armed with a well-considered, clear and powerful plan, it will amplify their coaching. It also makes things easier on the senior management at British Cycling, who are juggling multiple individual performance plans at any given time. “The clearer your plan is, the more people can access it, the more people understand it, and the more people you’ll have back your plan.” It’s also a useful way of removing the biases of an individual in pursuit of a more compelling proposition. “When we’ve got 20 plans in front of us, we’ll back the clearest plan with resource and time.”

Have there been positive outcomes so far?

The proof will be in the pudding in Paris, but Norfolk cited some initial successes, including the greater clarity enjoyed by the British Cycling leadership team and coaches freely admitting to missteps in management meetings. Norfolk and his colleagues can now watch events and the planning is evident in the execution. “It’s not perfect, we’re not finished,” he said, “but it’s exciting because we’re learning, stretching and growing and we’ve got a systematic path towards great performance.”

By Rachel Woodland, Lottie Wright & Sarah Evans

There needs to be more support for practitioners, coaches and others working in sport when it comes to better understanding women’s health.

That is the consensus across our Women’s High Performance Sport Community, from ongoing conversations to a recent mini survey conducted during our latest Community call, where the focus turned to education for staff.

We were joined by Dr Natalie Brown who is a Research Fellow working as part of a collaboration between Sport Wales and Swansea University with the Welsh Institute of Performance Science [WIPS].

Brown leads the Sport Wales Female Health & Performance Team, which has grown to seven members and is responsible for supporting all staff at Sport Wales in their journeys towards better understanding women’s health.

Brown’s own reasons for her specialism in women’s health stem from her time as a performance scientist with Welsh and British Swimming. She wanted to know more about what she didn’t know and to support the female athletes as best as possible to optimise their performance. It was an early nod to the relevance and interconnectedness of women’s health for practitioners.

Support for female athlete health at Sport Wales

In Brown’s time, Sport Wales’ approach to female athlete support has progressed from being wrapped around individuals to three areas of focus:

1. System level support
2. Individual athlete support (and support for practitioners too)
3. Sport-specific support

There are also three key themes that span everything Sport Wales do: athlete development, health & wellbeing, and athlete environment. Where once Brown worked alone, she now oversees a multidisciplinary team of seven, with specialisms in physiotherapy, physiology, medical, nutrition, strength & conditioning. The work has gone from focusing on the menstrual cycle to include puberty, relative energy deficiency and more to fully encompass female health support.

It is critical for those practitioners to be a good fit and Brown’s team was put together by grouping those who had an interest and the drive and motivation to work in this area of sport. Across the Welsh system, it enabled a network of voices to be created, rather than a single voice; making it more embedded and more natural.

The team work both in overseeing projects and research into specific areas of women’s health and in supporting the athletes, practitioners, coaches, and sports in applying knowledge to their performances. As Brown said, “we’ve got a knowledge development, but we’ve also got application and those two things run in parallel.”

Their efforts to speak to athletes help them to better understand areas where there was suitable support and where there was not. It enabled the sports science and medicine teams to adapt their athlete support. Concurrently, Brown and her colleagues captured all this information to help inform their progress.

Surveys to better understand ways of working

Seven years ago, Brown’s team circulated a survey for all of Sports Wales’s sports science practitioners. It asked:

1. Did practitioners have conversations about the menstrual cycle in their sports, with their athletes, with the coaches?
2. How confident are they talking about the topic?
3. What is their knowledge level?

The survey was circulated at a time before women’s health proliferated as a topic of interest. It identified gaps, highlighted the steps needed to effect change, and what practitioners were requesting. And so the team came together that now works within Sport Wales.

Having a dedicated Female Health & Performance Team allows planning around how to move forward in support of both female athletes and performance practitioners; and as staff members have changed, so Sport Wales has continued to survey its people. They continually assess people’s comfort levels discussing multiple topics within female health and the factors that influence that comfort.

Brown was also particularly interested in whether or not practitioners know where to go to seek further support. The figures are startling. “20 percent still say no, which is too big,” said Brown. That 20 percent is therefore part of her team’s plan. All practitioners need to know that the Female Health & Performance Team is there to support them, and also direct them to other resources and, just as importantly, emphasise that the whole of a team behind a sport need to have this information shared with them.

A more recent survey enabled Sport Wales to better understand how it can support its system’s network of coaches and practitioners. Indeed, there is a growing cohort that see the relevance of a female health lens in addressing issues such as injury risk and performance improvements. This information has helped Brown’s team ask for additional resources and support. It also helps build the full story and picture.

The emergence of a common practice

Sport Wales conducted the survey, put together a team, worked across its sports, and what has emerged are common practices that help to embed female health as a topic within the Welsh sport system.

For example, as Brown said, “across the three themes [see above] there are always at least two people from the team asking how does that apply from a female perspective? Have we considered XYZ from a female-specific angle?”

The current approach is praised for creating an open culture. The Female Health & Performance Team have worked with the sports to normalise conversations around women’s health and how it relates to performance.

Potentially the most interesting piece to emerge from their most recent survey was around knowledge improvement and how the team want to receive information. The two highest reported options were athlete stories & experiences and resources to read. This has led to a shift in how Brown and the team are supporting practitioners and prevented them from heading down the wrong route. It also means that Sport Wales can also think about how to use the stories and experiences to support wider practitioner development. For example, what would it look like for a new starter?

It’s standard practice for all Sport Wales projects to be evaluated as they happen, which means that check-ins keep the team challenged and relevant, as well as aligned to organisation’s wider aims. Their purpose and rationale remains clear.

Another positive consequence is that Welsh sports proactively approach Brown and her team to request help and support. There’s also now an induction for any athlete joining Great Britain’s World Class Programme. It looks across all areas of female health and includes screening from an MDT approach, which then means specific areas can be addressed for the individual, as well as from the perspective of their sport. The overall goal is to ensure that female health considerations aren’t an extra thing or a tick-box exercise that’s added on but are standard, truly embedded and normal practice for providing individual holistic support.

Compared with how things were done previously, one of the biggest changes for Brown has been planning ahead and thinking about how you upskill practitioners and how to engage with sports, as well as identifying which elements are sport-specific and require different support or consideration; and how to provide those resources for athletes, coaches, and practitioners. This is all with the key moment in mind: ‘the doing of it’.

In monthly meetings Brown’s team create scenarios and engage the practitioners in conversations around topics such as energy deficiency or puberty. It provides the space to address meaningful questions as part of the conversation, such as ‘how does that apply in practice?’ or ‘what does that mean?’ This space has potentially been the most impactful development, according to Brown.

Beyond the work that she and her team are completing, they’re linking in with the other parts of the Welsh network across other universities supporting WIPS and Sport Wales, as well as the other Home Nations of the UK. “So in terms of staying ahead of the curve, it’s always a challenge, especially with the pace at which female sport is currently moving.”

How to make female health a performance priority at your team:

• Invite people external from your female health and the performance team to come in and join the conversations, raising different questions.
• Balance individual needs versus sport specific challenges with whole system support.
• Specialist areas need to consider the female specifics as normal, for example nutrition is thought about with that lens too.
• If you’re working as a lone ranger in this space, consider how things are being embedded, knowledge is being passed on, and progress to creating a team is happening.
• Language is a really important area too. Don’t exclude anyone, but also correct. Underpinning language with evidence has been effective. Language can also be the key to confidence to talk about the topics and roll it out with athletes.
• Consider behaviour changes and the role of psychology in female health.
• Always provide the evidence of why behind knowledge, advice, support. Especially considering the volume of information, including misinformation, being shared around these topics at the moment.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whitworth

In the modern landscape of high performance sport, we often here the phrase ‘everything that is managed is measured’.

Such is the desire to show impact and return on investment, we are indeed measuring much of what can be measured.

Nevertheless, it can be difficult to measure the impact of areas such as coach development work or, as discussed in a recent Virtual Roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members, mental skills work.

A number of environments on the call were already in the process of measuring their mental skills work, some to a high success level, whereas others were closer to the start of their journey.

In any case, it is fair to say that there are no teams with all the answers, but here are some points to consider.

Measuring the success of your mental skills work

While it is easy to jump into the measuring process, it is important to first build some pre-requisites.

We can’t be trapped into the tendency to measure for measure’s sake. Have you defined and discussed what you are measuring and why? Is it and will it impact performance outcomes? On the roundtable, some members suggested positioning mental skills as a development tool to impact performance; it presents a more positive and forward-thinking narrative.

Make sure you are capturing the data and insights in a valid and reliable way. Also, make time to debrief and discuss results to understand how stake holders are interpreting data.

Does trust exist in the environment between staff, players and the coaches? When we think of the success of effective mental skills or sport psychology support, trust is a cornerstone of a well-functioning approach. Build up the trust before jumping into the measurement or else the data or insight you collate may lack purity. Involve the athletes early in the process as well – working with the athlete on a version of self-evaluation that can be trusted.

Additionally, how can you work through your coaches to get athlete buy-in while garnering their feedback on the athletes’ growth and improvement?

How to capture the impact of mental skills more effectively

Separate the process from the outcome. There is a combination of quantitative and qualitative data in all evaluations of outcome or impact.

One member shared that they combine goal-setting information gleaned from their athletes and ‘progress’ notes within their athlete management system. As part of this process, there have group evaluations centred around athlete makeup twice a year.

Athletes need to have personalised baselines and, therefore, baseline profiling can enable teams to identify the individual’s unique characteristics. Athlete profiling can entail a battery of behavioural observations and group debriefs, which allow you to crowdsource your staff members’ insights into the key areas in which you are trying to measure impact. Psychometric tests may also prove a useful tool. A member at the roundtable outlined how their organisation has started to ask their coaches to provide feedback and rate their mental skills programme.

If you can identify patterns, then your programmes will be much easier to scale. An organisation at the roundtable, an environment with a large number of multisport athletes, has developed a custom in-house tool that enables them to highlight performance gaps, opportunities and focus areas.

By Luke Whitworth & John Portch

Remember: innovation doesn’t necessarily mean the introduction of new technologies but can also be simple changes to existing methods.

In high performance sport, there is increasing pressure on expenditure and efficiency of resource, but innovating within a constrained budget isn’t about cutting costs indiscriminately, it’s about strategic allocation of resources.

The topic was discussed at length during a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable and has long been on the agenda for members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

Here, we draw on those discussions to bring you six ways to sustain innovation on a budget.

1. Set realistic targets and align with strategic objectives

Prioritise initiatives that directly contribute to your mission and long-term success. You should evaluate existing projects and programmes rigorously. One programme whose members joined the roundtable spoke of the value of simple and consistent performance planning using a ‘plan, do, review’ approach. You can also set realistic timelines for identifying trends that enable you to cut through the white noise and better support internal decision making.

2. Leverage existing resources creatively

Evaluate your projects rigorously. An attendee at the roundtable explained they are looking into efficiencies around athlete monitoring and tracking. It speaks to the constant challenge of optimising the efficiency of data inputs, with several members highlighting the collaboration within their teams of different departments around data capture and assessment. It has led to a clearer way of leveraging information and influencing delivery across coaching and other elements of their programmes.

It calls to mind Richard Burden’s presentation at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance last September at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester. “What can you do with information that you already have?” he asked an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members. From his position as Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], he discussed the notion of rethinking existing evidence and spoke of the UKSI’s drive to centralise all blood screens across the British high performance system. It enabled that information to be used in a more informed and impactful way for Great Britain’s athletes.

3. Measure, prioritise and adapt

You need to continuously monitor the impact of your innovation efforts. Use data to assess progress, adjust strategies, and reallocate resources as needed. This has been the approach in climbing, which is a new Olympic sport for Paris 2024. Budgets are small and creativity is a must. Representatives from the climbing world spoke on the roundtable about their key focus being the identification of impactful performance metrics and a more highly attuned understanding of the sport’s demands. It is important to identify projects that have the potential to create significant value or solve critical problems. The roundtable raised the question of coach development support, a “cornerstone enabler of our programme”, as one attendee put it, in environments where money is more constrained.

Similarly, an organisation in cricket on the roundtable spoke of the introduction of small-sided training matches. Though the training ground had to be modified, cricket is notorious for players in training environments inadvertently left standing around. By tweaking the design of training, players in that environment are better engaged.

4. Collaborate and share

Partner with other organisations, universities, or research institutions. Collaborative efforts can pool resources, share costs, and, ultimately, accelerate innovation. On the coach development question, an attendee at the roundtable spoke of collaborating with an academic institution with a speciality in that field. It requires less investment and all sides are reaping the rewards.

This approach has been of benefit to numerous organisations, including British Rowing, whom Burden spoke of during his presentation in Manchester. They worked with Manchester Metropolitan University and the UKSI to ask: how is the menstrual cycle influencing British Rowing’s ability to deliver training and what impact is it having on internal load, competition and the performance of athletes?

“It’s their question – it hasn’t come from research or a university – it’s come from the sport,” said Burden of the project. “We’re there to provide some of the research and innovation expertise to help them formulate the question and work out a path to answer it.”

5. Meet your people where they’re at

This goes for so much more than innovation. You have to tap into the creativity of your coaches, athletes and staff – they will often have valuable insights and ideas. Several roundtable attendees, particularly at talent pathway level, explained how they have taken steps to better engage and support their athletes, enabling them to thrive.

It called to mind the recent efforts of the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA]. Last year, Kate-Warne Holland, the Under-14 girls’ captain at the LTA, told the Leaders Performance Institute that UK pandemic restrictions compelled them to host the majority of competitions in the midlands of England where all players and coaches could travel with relative convenience. The LTA has kept these tournaments due to their transformative performance and development benefits.

“They were so valuable and they were encouraging the private coaches to be there and coach on court,” said Warne-Holland. “It provided an opportunity for the coaches to develop the players right in front of them. So they weren’t on a balcony, watching four matches, and then going home and working on it. We allowed and encouraged them to sit on court so they were able to impact on the player immediately.”

And it’s not just athletes. Performance programmes can be so much more effective when the leaders understand their people’s motivations and how they are doing away from the practice facility. Innovations can emerge from all quarters through the right levels of challenge and support.

6. Fail cheaply and learn fast

Instead of large-scale, resource-intensive projects, focus on failing cheaply in lower stakes environments and learning quickly. As a roundtable attendee suggested, you could have small cohorts of people testing and working on projects safe in the knowledge they have not been tasked with finding the ‘perfect’ solution prior to testing.

By John Portch

When Mike Anthony, the Head of High Performance at New Zealand Rugby, spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Melbourne in February, the new All Blacks Head Coach, Scott Robertson, was sat in the audience.

Robertson then, just as now, had yet to take charge of a match. His first opportunities will come against England in a two-Test series in July, shortly after conclusion of the club rugby season.

“He’s got nine days to prepare for two Tests against England and, obviously, they can start their planning now, but they won’t get those athletes till then,” said Anthony with the tone of a person well-versed in the public scrutiny that greets the All Blacks and the New Zealand women’s national team, the Black Ferns, at every turn in their homeland.

“There’s an expectation on our teams in black that they should win everything all the time.”

This idea was prominent in the minds of New Zealand Rugby when, in 2022, the organisation launched its Strategy 2025. Their aim is for the Black Ferns to retain the Women’s World Cup in 2025 and the All Blacks to continue building towards winning the 2027 World Cup. It’s world domination, but not at all costs.

“There’s an expectation that we will continue to win, so while that’s really important to us, the way we win is critical,” added Anthony.

Strategy 2025 is New Zealand Rugby’s post-pandemic reset and, as their website states, a ‘launch pad to be bold in reimagining rugby – to look at every aspect of the game and ensure it is enjoyable, sustainable and well-positioned for any futures challenges’.

Here, the Leaders Performance Institute sets out what that looks like in practice.

The Rugby Way

As part of Strategy 2025, New Zealand Rugby is promoting Te Ara Ranga Tira, which translates from Māori as ‘The Rugby Way’. Anthony said: “This is how we want to operate as an organisation, not just within New Zealand Rugby but in rugby across the country.”

The Rugby Way sets out four guiding principles that are not just about how the game is played on the field but how it is represented, managed and integrated into the community.

1. Be welcoming (Te pou maioha): rugby is a game for all, regardless of backgrounds, beliefs or identity.
2. Be our best (Te pou hiranga): a striving for excellence on and off the field, driven by a belief that rugby can improve people’s lives.
3. Be passionate (Te pou ihilhi): a belief that rugby builds communities and fosters a lifelong love of the game.
4. Play fair (Te pou tika): this means acting with honesty and integrity at all times.

These all emphasise the importance of respect, unity, passion and fairness, which are fundamental to the spirit of rugby in New Zealand. Underneath those values are Strategy 2025’s four strategic pillars across the sport, namely:

1. Winning with mana: the bringing together of on and off-field support structures to allow for optimal performance.
2. Rugby at the heart of our communities: growing rugby at the grassroots level – its source of strength.
3. Loved game, loved brands: through increased understanding of fans and customers, creating elite sporting experiences and lifelong attachment to teams and brands.
4. Unleashing rugby’s commercial potential: seeking increased investment and developing a sustainable operating model for the future.

Anthony largely focused on the first in Melbourne – winning with mana.

What is ‘winning with mana’?

Strategy 2025 promotes the notion of ‘thriving people, thriving game’; and mana is central to that aspiration. It is a Māori concept encompassing honour, status and spiritual power – and it can only be earned. “It’s something bestowed on you,” said Anthony. ‘Winning with mana’ means winning in a way that enhances the mana of all those involved through actions on and off the field. “We want to be ruthless on the field; we want to be a team that’s feared and respected. But also off the field, that’s the humility piece; how we’re perceived.”

‘Winning with mana’ tends to manifest itself in five ways in New Zealand Rugby:

1. Smooth inductions and soft exits

New Zealand Rugby seeks to induct people in the right way while ensuring their connection to the team endures. Anthony cited the example of the New Zealand men’s rugby sevens, where the co-captains will routinely go out of their way to meet new young players – most just out of high school – at the airport. The other end of the cycle is just as important. Scott Robertson is set to lose players from his squad with more than 150 appearances between them. “How do you retain some of that DNA? What are some of the things you’re retaining in that environment?” Expect All Blacks and Black Ferns alumni to be part of the future picture.

2. Teams rooted in their community

While not all examples are so extreme or prominent, the All Blacks delivered on their commitment to their community following the flooding at Hawke’s Bay in February 2023. They participated in the clean-up efforts and provided both community and emotional support while raising public awareness.

3. Learning, stimulation and fun

While Anthony explained his view that true performance cultures are tough places in which to survive, there is a balance to be struck between learning, stimulation and fun. During a match week, the All Blacks’ schedule will be front-loaded, with intense work and analysis done on Mondays and Tuesdays, before giving way to opportunities to socialise, decompress and eat meals together ahead of the weekend.

4. Learning that goes beyond classroom

Anthony explained that recruits to rugby in New Zealand are not necessarily “students of the game.” It is an increasingly common observation across other sports too. They will do as they are told without necessarily seeking out information. As such, New Zealand Rugby has worked to manufacture more organic learning environments. Anthony is full of praise for the Auckland-based Blues in Super Rugby, who reacted to their empty analysis suite by starting to put laptops in their café. “Players could grab a coffee and something to eat and sit around and you’d just start to talk about the game.”

5. Family voices heard

A Rugby World Cup campaign can mean players spending up to ten weeks away from their loved ones. It is not conducive to stable home environments. New Zealand Rugby invites families into the team environment and sets out expectations and demands. The families can also feed back and, thanks to this process, they now spend a couple of nights inside the camp on each tour.