A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

The meaning of ‘wellbeing’ in Australian sport has continually developed and the most marked development has been in the last five years.

“Traditionally, it centred around careers and education,” Matt Butterworth, Mental Health Manager at the Australian Institute of Sport [AIS], tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “There may have been some mental health support but nothing as formal and structured as a mental health service. Then there was a fundamental shift in how the AIS did things.”

One of the key milestones was the launch of the AIS’s Wellbeing & Engagement initiative in 2018. “The resulting services were a statement that we’re helping people to be the best athletes but we’re also helping them to develop into well-rounded people that can get on with their lives while they’re athletes. They’re also as well prepared as possible when they transition out,” Butterworth adds. “It’s not ‘you’re a high performance athlete and that’s it’, it’s more about ‘you’re a high performance athlete and we’re here to support you as an overall human being as well’.”

Within the theme of wellbeing, the AIS Mental Health Referral Network overseen by Butterworth operates as a national service where athletes, coaches and high performance support staff can see a mental health professional such as a psychologist for individual support that is confidential and at no cost to them. “The benefit of a national service is that you can operate at a larger scale to benefit more people across sports in terms of the resources we can build and offer in the mental health space. Then the sports themselves can choose to engage with the services they find useful.”

Here we explore where mental health sits in the wider picture for Australian athletes, coaches and practitioners.

Matt, where does the line sit between mental health and mental skills?

MB: There is a network of performance psychologists who are employed by individual sports  and they focus more on helping people with matters related to their performance on the field, on the track or in the pool. This is more mental skills-focussed. Our mental health services at the AIS focus less on performance or execution of a sporting skill, and more on helping people in managing wider aspects of their lives, such as their overall mood, relationships, and day to day functioning. The issues that my team assist with, such as anxiety difficulties, may be happening during an athlete’s performance but they’d also be occurring in other important areas of their lives such as during work, study, or with family and friends.

Can you truly balance wellbeing and performance?

MB: I think a balance can be achieved. The way I’ve heard others explain it really well is for people to be aware of what their priorities are and to spend most of their time doing things that are important to them. That’s the terminology that I think we’ll start using a bit more down here because usually when you say ‘lifestyle balance’ you see people roll their eyes and start turning away from you. If we’re aware of what our priorities are, the important things for us to be doing, the things to make life quite meaningful and enjoyable for us, then that’s a good way to be spending most of our time.

How can you address the common fear, that mental health services are only for making athletes feel better about poor performance?

MB: I think the people who choose to come into a high-performance system, whether they are athletes, coaches, or high performance support staff, like physios, dietitians etc. they probably self-select in that they are quite focused on performing and wanting to win. My perspective would be ‘what are the things we can do to help them move towards that?’ There are times when you have setbacks, there are times when you don’t win. If you can accept not necessarily feeling awesome, accept when things don’t go to plan, it is quite important to manage your emotions and figure out what you need to do to change the result or get a better result in the future. If that involves people feeling a bit better instead of being absolutely crushed and devastated every time that they have a set back or they don’t win an event, then I’m OK with that. I would say it’s more about the journey and the trend to where you’re heading rather than feeling devastated any time you lose. That’s not helpful either.

How are the mental health issues facing Australian athletes evolving?

MB: Typical presentation issues for us are anxiety and depression. That’s the same for pretty much most mental health services around the world and it’s not that different in sport. It is not necessarily a new issue but we’re becoming better at detecting more things. I think our system is now doing more work in the space of eating disorders. We’re becoming aware of just how common traumatic experiences are for people generally in life and that people in our system experience traumatic experiences too. So we’re starting to get better at how we might educate people around that, how we best provide services to support people. An athlete, coach or staff member can go and see a psychologist or mental health clinician for one-to-one support if they want. The Mental Health Referral Network has been operating since 2018 and referral rates are continuing to trend upwards. Generally, the people who access the service have difficulties  at the mild to moderate end rather than needing to go to hospital or anything like that, and I think that’s an indication that people feel less stigma and are more comfortable reaching out for support. We’ve evaluated our services in the last year too and our clients are telling us that our services are helping them to be more aware of what’s more important for mental health, and how to look after their mental health as well. We’re thinking about how we continue to make this sustainable and accessible for more people as well.

How can an athlete refer themselves?

MB: Athletes and other eligible people can refer themselves to the Mental Health Referral Network directly by calling or emailing us. They can also be referred to us by another person, typically this would be by an Athlete Wellbeing Manager in their sport, but we also get referrals on behalf of people such as family members, performance psychologists, coaches, doctors or other support staff. Anyone can make a referral on behalf of an eligible person.

What about the mental health of coaches?

MB: Any coach or high performance support staff member can access the Mental Health Referral Network. Our stakeholders told us back in 2019 that if we want a healthy system then we’ve got to look after as many parts of the system as possible – particularly the coaches and performance staff that work directly with athletes. Coaches play a crucial role in the wellbeing of athletes and the broader system. We know that the expectations and pressure on coaches are very high, their roles are multifaceted, and their job security can be low. This combination of factors can take a high toll on them and their families. With coaches in particular, there’s been a development at the AIS in the past two years of having a specific High Performance Coach Development team. They focus on how best to develop coaches in the Australian high performance system. Part of their work has  a wellbeing aspect as well. We liaise with their team about how they best get information about services available to them in front of the coaches that they’re working with.

Have you enjoyed much success?

MB: Yes, I think so. Independent research that we’ve commissioned over the last four years has told us  that mental health rates in our high performance system have been fairly stable across that time but access to our Mental Health Referral Network has continued to increase year on year. We take this as a positive sign that people are increasingly aware of the need to take care of their mental health and that they’re feeling more comfortable, and less stigmatised, to proactively reach out for support when they need it. A recent independent survey of people who’ve accessed the Mental Health Referral Network also told us that the service has helped them in managing their mental health, in some cases they said it had saved their life, and they want the service to continue to be available to them. We also know from this research that we’ve got work to do around building more awareness, continuing to have the right skills mix of professionals, and we’re about to do some work around how we keep the service sustainable into the future as demand continues to increase.

Do you feel these initiatives have built the credibility of the Mental Health Referral Network?

MB: Yes. The credibility of our programs such as the Mental Health Referral Network has been built by a number of factors. A key one which I think is a hallmark for any type of success has been having great leadership. My team and I have been fortunate to have excellent leadership sitting above us so that we could get on with the job of helping athletes, coaches and staff. There’s been many leaders who’ve assisted. Our current Acting Director of the AIS, Matti Clements, has been a leader at executive level and has really owned and driven the AIS’s approach to wellbeing over the last four years. I think it’s accurate to say that her vision and leadership has been transformative for our system. I think that other factors that have helped in building credibility is the authenticity and work ethic of the people providing mental health services to athletes, coaches and staff. The people involved have taken the approach that if we say we’re going to do something then they’ve worked really hard to deliver that for our stakeholders, whether that’s an individual athlete or a national sporting organisation or one of the organisations that runs the various games in terms of Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth Games.

What is next in the mental health space for the AIS?

MB: I think moving more into how we best support mental health at a systemic level, so the overall Australian sport system or the National Sporting Organisations (NSOs/NSODs) who are running their high performance programs but, at the same time, also needing to support the mental health and wellbeing of their athletes.

Does that research tend to back up what you thought in the first place?

MB: Yes, I think so in a number of areas. It’s also given us insights into particular issues we should be targeting more. The trauma space is one of those, the eating disorder space is another one as well, which is why in our Mental Health Referral Network we’ve done a lot of work to ensure professionals with those skillsets are available to help people in our system. Moving forward, we want to create pathways for people who experience more serious  mental health difficulties. While the rate is probably lower than we have in the broader community, we’ve  got some work that we need to do in that space around having good pathways.

By John Portch

What are the fundamentals of a good practice facility? For the Toronto Blue Jays, who opened their Player Development Complex in Dunedin, Florida, in 2021, those fundamentals were summed up in an acronym that pulls together their values: CLEAR. It stands for collaboration, learning, empowerment, achieve and respect.

Each was explained by Angus Mugford, who served as the Jays’ Vice President of high Performance at the time. “We want to have a highly collaborative environment where different departments and people are close to each other,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2019. “The open spaces are more attractive for people who want to come together. It’s the same thing with the high performance offices and space. It’s together and unified and it’s also physically and metaphorically in the centre, so that the ease of communication and collaboration is right there, but it’s also a space for players and coaches and other staff can be together easily.

“‘Learning.’ You don’t have to be in a specific room to learn but we want to create some specific environments where learning is enhanced. One of the critiques other teams were telling us about were in auditoriums, how easy it was for guys on the back row to close their eyes and switch off like a movie theatre, so we’ve leaned towards more a business school lecture theatre, which is less about lecturing and more about having a pulpit in the middle and more of an inclusive, collaborative environment between whoever is leading the discussion and everybody who is in that audience.

“The E is ‘empowerment’ and that goes for staff and players. That people can take the initiative, that we want players to be at the centre of that ultimately. So creating spaces where people have the autonomy and ability to create discussions; open meeting rooms. When we toured Google, that was a really good takeaway, they have this idea of ‘collision spaces’; so creating spaces where people can organically meet.

“Then the A is for ‘achieve’. Not just winning but really just more about a process of excellence and really trying to be consistent and thoughtful about the details. I think with the details that we’re trying to get into with the design and setting up, we also realised that in this process of moving in we’re going to screw some things up. Or people are going to have even more ideas that we can think about until they’re actually in the space so I think that whole process of moving in, taking feedback, and saying what people need and want to make that space even more functional is going to be a priority once we do actually move into the space too.

“Finally, ‘respect’ is the R. Not just for each other and the team but our environment and our physical space is an element that can be a thread throughout our team.”

Here, we explore six more themes that define a good training environment.

1. Flow and efficiency

Efficiency is essential and that comes from frictionless circulation of athletes and staff. “You have everything on one level when it comes to training, preparation and recovery,” said Martin Buchheit of Paris St-Germain’s Ooredoo Training Center in 2019. Buchheit served as PSG’s Head of Performance between 2014 and 2020. He now serves as a high performance consultant with LOSC Lille in France’s Ligue 1. “Everything is central and everything is connected. From the locker room you enter straight into the mobility, stretching and warmup area, which is chronological as well. You get ready, you get changed, then you go for functional work. Afterwards, their recovery, the stretching and mobility area is connected to the locker room, the hydrotherapy area is connected to the locker room; it makes it very efficient to get those recovery routines straight after training.

Flow is also crucial to an aligned, interdisciplinary approach. “One of the things I’ve found historically is that people gravitate towards their own space,” said Mugford, who now serves as the Senior Vice President of Player Development & Performance at the New Jersey Devils. “The strength coaches may want to sit together and the trainers may want to sit together. People gravitate towards their own discipline and what we really want to make a commitment to doing is sharing that space so that we’re really maximising the collaboration. We’ve already made that shift over the past few years, but something as basic as that is really fundamental when we have affiliate staff and groups sitting together so that natural exchange happens as we’d like it to.”

2. Touchpoints for collaboration and creativity

The Jays’ upgrade made Mugford the ideal man to talk with Phil Cullen, the Senior Director of Basketball Operations & Organizational Development at the San Antonio Spurs, ahead of the team’s move to its $510m Human Performance Campus at The Rock at La Cantera, Texas. Cullen told an audience at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London that the facility will boast human-centred design characteristics that promote collaboration and creativity. “A lot of times it’s focused on the coaching element, which is extremely important, and player amenities, but how do you facilitate those casual collisions?” said Cullen. “The people that would be in your facility the most and have the most touchpoints are probably not who you think they are. For us, it was our equipment guy. Very often you’ll go back and the players are hanging out with the equipment guy. Why? Because they can just hang out. It’ll be the athletic trainer, it’ll be the guy who’s taping his ankles and helping the guy rehab.” This has been uppermost in the Spurs’ thinking, who have even installed TVs close to the ceiling of their current facility to help take players eyes away from their phones.

Cullen added: “How can we make sure we have the best possible experience so that we’re actually giving them opportunities in their career development; giving them all the resources they want to advance? So that when we go into the marketplace to recruit these guys to have elite talent in our building, we’re not only attracting elite basketball players and elite coaches, but also the staff around them. That’s where collaboration is key. For us, the human-centred design piece is really trying to break down those interactions and it starts when the players pull up into the facility; what’s that experience when they enter in, get out, walk into the parking lot? Who are they walking past when they go to the locker room?”

3. Create a pleasant work environment

Beyond upgraded modalities, modern practice facilities need to be appealing destinations and Art Horne, the Director of Organizational Growth & Team Development at the Boston Celtics, speaks with a sense of awe about the 40-foot glass windows that overlook the city of Boston at the Auerbach Center, which opened in 2018. “Natural light is a huge plus in Boston when it’s cold and dark,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute the following year. “It’s an inviting place,” added Jay Wessland, the Celtics’ Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, who sat next to Horne. “All that natural light and the city skyline; we needed a place that people are encouraged to go and work out in; that they didn’t think it was a chore.” Such considerations were uppermost in the minds of PSG, who plan to move into their Paris Saint-Germain Training Center later this year. The complex is to include the Club House, which the club’s official website says is: “Entirely glassed at ground-floor level to provide views out into the surrounding landscape and create an illusion of levitation. Inside, a shape entitled ‘The Blue Flight’ rises skywards, symbolising the ultimate goal of all of the Club’s athletes.”

4. If you’re building a new facility, be sure your architect listens

Cullen explained that San Antonio had an issue with the sports-focused architects whom they consulted. “They try to give you the best rendition of what they’ve just completed,” he said. “They’ll kind of tell you what you want rather than really listening to what you need.” The solution was to partner with an architect that had experience of other sectors. “All of us now are becoming small tech companies; the technology’s integrated in everything we do. Why aren’t we looking at technology companies and how they work to see how it can impact how we’ll work in the future?” The Spurs were left pondering aspects and thinking points they may not have otherwise considered.

5. Does your building have agility?

Training facilities need to allow for the preferences of head coaches and PSG’s Ooredoo Training Centre, even as it comes to the end of its life cycle, has that covered – quite literally. In line with numerous clubs in European football, PSG have a 45x14m tent, which covers a pitch of synthetic turf right next to one of their main training pitches. It is a useful tool for group work. “A lot of work can be done outside,” Buchheit explained. “A portion of the group can be training outside on the pitch and the other half can be doing some strength work or some other exercises in this area – they don’t need to go back inside to take their boots off and a coach can do rotations. It offers efficiency and it also offers flexibility; depending on the coach, we’ll be using the tent a lot or not. It’s about being able to allow all staff and coaches to run their programmes as they wish. The agility of the building today is a legacy of the different coaches who worked with us in the past and so these adaptations are the fruit of a collective process involving the current and past backroom staff.”

6. Future-proof your facility – leave some space free

It can be tempting to throw the kitchen sink at a new facility but the Spurs and Cullen are wary of doing so or being locked into one type of technology. “We’re trying to be intentional about not designing a space for one specific use because it can very quickly become a closet if it can’t be used for more than one thing,” he said. “By far the No 1 thing people tell us is make sure you have enough space. You may not have all the nice designs and be able to finish it all out, be able to brand it, be able to story-tell the way you want, but make sure you get the space because you want to future-proof and you can’t move around in it.”

By John Portch

“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind,” says Rob Pountney, the Chief Operating Officer at Breaking GB.

He is talking to an audience at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London about the announcement that breaking was to be added to the list of competition events for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

“The decision was made in December 2020,” he tells moderator Edd Vahid. “We scrambled then to put together an organisation in a very short space of time that would enable the best breakers in the UK to have a chance to feel supported, have the opportunity to qualify, compete and obviously make the important relationships with the organisations, that I’m sure you’re all aware of, to support them with funding, training, and explore the new ideas of transitioning from what is essentially a cultural dance into the sporting system and find the ways that we can add value to the breakers – we can call them ‘athletes’ now – when you see what they can do I think you’ll appreciate the physicality and the dynamics of what they’re able to do.”

Breaking (sometimes known as ‘breakdancing’) is a type of street dance, characterised by four kinds of movement, known as toprock, downrock, power moves and freezes. It has its origins in the Bronx and emerged as part of New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene in the early 1970s.

There is a long-established competition circuit and in contests, known as ‘battles’, the breakers receive no notice of what a DJ may play and they have to respond in the moment.

The challenge for Pountney and Breaking GB is to understand where they can add value. “We’ve only had one official test camp,” he says. “We went to the University of Bath Sports Village and essentially it was an induction three or four days but it’s trial and error for us because breaking is quite circular in its path and, to become an amazing breaker/performer, there’s no straight point A to point B. We’re not trying to be faster, stronger; ‘who can jump the highest?’ That kind of thing. This is about pushing the individual boundaries of your own creation to where they can possibly go.

Breaking’s current challenge was recently faced by the woman who sits next to Pountney onstage, GB Climbing’s Head of Performance Lorraine Brown. The organisation sent Shauna Coxsey, its first Olympian, to the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021 when competition climbing was itself added to the Summer Games list of sports.

“We’re actually employing full-time coaches for the first time,” Brown tells Vahid. “But part of it is understanding what it takes to win in the sport. Previously, if you were sixth-best in the UK, you get selected, you go to the competition. ‘Well done’. It’s more about the taking part. The focus on performance has definitely stepped up and really understanding the nuances and the performance standards within the sport and the massive cultural shift that we’re probably looking at.”

The challenge of shifting the needle remains ongoing for GB Climbing and, for his part, Pountney understands where Breaking GB can presently add value for its breakers (commonly known as B-boys and B-Girls).

“The benefit of working in a sporting system is the more scientific approach to the body. It’s not something that we’ve ever had to consider before. The guys are fit, they go to the gym, and they exercise but they never actually have any outside support in a professional capacity – so strength & conditioning, flexibility coaching, psychology, even nutrition – everything to do with what sport brings to the table can definitely benefit the breakers.”

Days before the summit, in early November 2022, the Guardian reported on a study between Break Mission, a British community-based breaking initiative, and Birmingham City University, to better understand the physical attributes of breakers. In the Guardian piece, sports scientist Matthew Cole explained that the breakers’ lab scores are often on par with athletes in other sports and were athletes in the “truest sense”.

Cole added that with growing sophistication in data analysis, insights could ultimately identify potential champions. “Take Lizzy Yarnold in the skeleton bob,” he said. “She went to a talent ID day. She had the characteristics, four years later wins a gold medal.”

Pountney is optimistic about the impact that Breaking GB can have. “We’re fortunate that on our board we’ve got two highly skilled professionals in Rebecca Edgington-Harvey who’s the Performance Manager for GB Boxing, who is used to working with data analysis and capture, and we also have Tracy Whittaker-Smith who’s the Head Coach of British Gymnastics,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute backstage.

“Between them they are looking at video analysis, we’re looking at competition analysis of the performers and how they’re faring in competition, what are their strengths and weaknesses and we’re taking those bits of information and we’re doing feedback sessions regularly with the breakers and, in terms of a collecting data at the moment, it’s a new path for us, we’re only just starting out.”

Nevertheless, Pountney and his peers are keen to prevent breaking’s cultural heritage being sacrificed in favour of performance. “It’s also important that we try to create an environment for them that feeds their inspiration. One of the things we can try to do is find locations and hubs that bring people together.”

That brings its own coaching challenges. The United States, as one would expect, has an established breaking culture, while France, Japan, China and South Korea have a long-standing global pedigree. Great Britain, by comparison, is a relative newcomer. “Exploring the idea of who can come in to coach, that’s quite challenging, especially in GB, we don’t have high level advisors. Some of the other nations may have recently-retired breakers who are in that mid-30s age group who can come in very professionally, and they’ve got that respect level,” adds Pountney.

He is more confident, however, when it comes to the support Breaking GB can provide around fitness and lifestyles. There have been tangible results. In November 2022, the European Breaking Championships took place in Manchester, England, with Derby’s Karam Singh winning a silver medal for Great Britain. A month earlier, Breaking GB sent a team to the Breaking World Championships in Seoul, South Korea.

“We’ve got a lot of feedback from that we can then relay to the breakers,” Pountney tells the Leaders Performance Institute. He picks up on the importance of psychological support. “When you can see a breaker that’s having issues with their confidence or if they’re too affected by their own lack of performance on the day it’s important that they don’t let that show through because, at the end of the day, they are performing and judges are scoring them and what might be visible to them in terms of mistakes isn’t always very visible to an audience, to a judge; and so I think it’s really important that they keep that positive mindset all of the time when they’re competing.”

On the competition front, Singh, whose stage name is Kid Karam, has indicated that his aim is to not only qualify but win a medal in Paris and he is one of a series of British hopefuls competing for just 32 slots at the Olympics (16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will enter a knockout competition) and he and his peers will have several opportunities to qualify ahead of the event, including the European Games in Kraków-Małopolska, Poland, which take place across June and July.

Pountney explains onstage that having those back-to-back championships in 2022 showed British breakers that Breaking GB offers a transparent and results-driven selection process. It also demonstrated that the best breakers will have access to funding and travel expenses. That said, there is the challenge of identifying and developing the next generation from a talent pool numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

It is a slightly wider pool in competition climbing, but Brown suggests that Breaking GB could seek to inherit athletes from other disciplines. “A lot of our athletes come from other sports,” she says. “They’ve already been in other sports, they migrate to climbing because of the culture, it’s not as competitive, it’s a bit more free-spirited, and if I look in our current team we’ve got gymnasts, swimmers, we’ve got people in athletics who have come to our sport. How do we still provide an outlet for athletes to try something different?” To be fair, there are already British breakers who have gone down that path, such as Stirling’s Emma Houston, AKA Shortbread, who gave up playing football for Falkirk to concentrate on her breaking career.

All in all, Pountney is optimistic for 2023. “The big opportunity in the year ahead is definitely qualification,” he says. “It will make a massive difference, the legacy of somebody competing at the Olympic Games will massively raise the profile in Britain of breaking as a sport. From a grassroots perspective, it’s a chance to look at how we can grow the participation levels and inclusion in breaking across the country, access to the school networks, the development of facilities and the provision of training spaces across the country.”

By John Portch

Joe Montemurro, the Head Coach of Juventus Women, explains that the team’s President, Andrea Agnelli, wishes he had done things differently with the team.

“I remember going to a dinner with the owners and sponsors and I was sitting on the same table as Mr Agnelli, and we had a chat,” Montemurro tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“He said that one regret he has in life is that he didn’t start the women’s team earlier because he thinks Juventus is a little behind the top teams because he didn’t start five or six years earlier. That probably gives you an understanding of where the club sits in the landscape.”

The hope of both Agnelli and Montemurro is to see Juventus Women match the success and reputation of the men’s team. Since entering Serie A in 2017, the club has won the scudetto in five consecutive seasons and the aim for the future is to sustain that success and build a team that can compete regularly for the Uefa Women’s Champions League.

“There’s a saying at Juventus – ‘fino alla fine’ – which means ‘go to the end’ or ‘fight to the end’,” says Montemurro. “There’s another one: ‘vincere non è importante e l’unica cosa che conta’, which means ‘winning isn’t important, it’s the only thing’.”

The latter was uttered by former Juventus striker and second-highest scorer in the history of the men’s team, Giampiero Boniperti, at the inauguration of the Juventus Stadium in Turin in 2011.

Such thinking explains why Juventus Women turned to Montemurro in the summer of 2021. He has more than 20 years’ experience as a coach, In 2019, he led Arsenal Women to their first Women’s Super League title in seven years and, before that, claimed back-to-back W-League championships with Melbourne City Women in his native Australia.

“Part of the club’s growth and development was to bring in someone who has a bit of experience in Europe who can take the club to the next level,” says Montemurro. “We’ve instilled a methodology of play, which is mine. I have moulded it with some good things here in Italy and if you watch the game you’ll see a very identifiable style of mine. There’s been no real handbook that says ‘this is the Juventus style’ but it’s about representing the club in the right way with the values it has; the level of class with which it struts around in Italy and Europe.

“You feel Juventus, you feel the history, you feel the weight of wearing this jumper and that’s a great thing. It’s where you want to be in football and I love it.”

Montemurro is also driven by the desire to “educate” the women’s football landscape in Italy. “It’s not behind but women’s football in Italy still has a long way to go to find its place.” The 2022-23 season will be the first that Serie A Women is fully professional. “I want to create something that a lot of clubs can use as a template to say ‘this is how we will grow and get better so the game grows’.”

He has been afforded the space to innovate as there has been buy-in to his ideas across the board. “Everything I’ve brought forward or we’ve brought forward as a group to get better and better and better, we discuss it and look at it, and most of the time it’s actually ‘hey, I think that’s a good idea, we could do that’. And we’re sometimes talking about little things. Travelling two days before instead of one day before. The ability to innovate, and they’re so open to being this global brand that they’re looking at being the best and being creative. I really like that because it gets my mind ticking to be better and better and better. How can I be better? How can my staff be better? How can everyone around us be better because the club will give you that support but they’ll also say ‘look, it’s not the right time to do this because of this or that’. There’s never anything discounted.”

The Juventus Women senior team and academy are closely aligned, as one might expect, but there is also alignment between the women’s team and the Juventus men’s under-23s. “We work very closely together and follow similar processes to the senior men’s team,” says Montemurro, who likes his multidisciplinary team to be football-driven.

“The first thing, and I did it at Arsenal and I did it at Juventus, is to make sure that football is at the core of everything that we do because that’s what we’re judged on. It’s funny, because in the word ‘football’ the latter part of the word is ‘all’ so I flash that word up and say ‘it’s all of us’.

“I can then give the base to the medical staff to say, ‘OK, we’re playing X amount of games, we play this way, we know that we need players who are very good in small areas, they can recover because we play a short passing game’ – I’m using a very broad example – ‘so we need to focus on those things and get players who need to get aerobically fit as part of the game’. They can look at that. The sports science department or the S&C department then look at the football as the base of everything we do. So all of our warm-ups are based on the methodology of the football.

“This whole idea of ‘footb-all’ is as corny and clichéd as it comes, but it’s important. In the end, I’m just trying to create a football culture. All the other stuff is irrelevant. And I think you get buy-in. When the methodology is clear, when the way you want to play is clear, then the doctors understand, the nutritionists understand, and everyone understands what we’re trying to achieve in the long run.”

Montemurro also encourages his staff to prioritise their CPD with one request. “One of the things I tell each department is to stick within the football. CPD is very important, but make yours the best department in the world. Make it the best medical department in the world, make it the best analytics department. It’s your baby, make it you. I’m here to help you, obviously we’ve got certain pre-requisites week-in week-out that we need to do, but if you’ve got the opportunity to go and watch a game or watch some training and bring something back and do something, absolutely.”

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Montemurro about the biggest changes he has observed in football coaching in recent years. His answer is informed by his work at Juventus. “The top coaches are able to ascertain a level of hierarchy and respect, but also have a more human aspect. The head coach isn’t that far away from everything that’s happened. I think it’s becoming more, I don’t know if this is the right word, but more human in terms of the understanding of the player-staff-head coach connection and ascertaining the end goal. Everyone’s more in it together.

“I think coaches are still just starting to understand that ultimately they have to make decisions but the decisions are more informed through processes. Obviously our scope of work is broader now. We are involved in every aspect of the game. I don’t think it can be left to say ‘I’m just going to go on the park and Sunday’s my day or game day’s my day’; now it’s really important that everyone’s involved in that. The staff and everyone is involved in how we go forward but obviously with your eye on top of it. I think there’s just been a more human factor and I think that the top coaches are usually empathetic to the wellness and wellbeing of their staff and players. I think that’s been a big change. It’s not just a job any more – it’s a lifestyle. You’re spending so much time here and you have to make it the best place it can be, and I think we as head coaches – or I am anyway – are more concerned about the welfare and wellbeing of your staff and players. That results in performance.”

What of the coach of the next ten years? “I think the coach of the future is one that will need to understand the sports science, S&C, sports medicine. I just think it’s going that way and I think we need to have a broader understanding of every little bit because, ultimately, if you’re not involved in the market, I know you’ve got scouts and analytics, the scouting and analysis departments do a lot of that work for you, but if you don’t understand the background of the player you’re investing in or the staff that you’re investing in, then how do you deal with them when they’re going forward? They may have had a bad experience at a club and they’re coming into another situation. How do you deal with that?

“I think the coach of the future will be more educated and understanding of all the other disciplines involved and I think with that will come a new wave of innovation in how we see the game and how we approach the game tactically. It’s already happening with a lot of clubs; the Brentfords and their ‘Moneyball’ approach. [Bayern Munich men’s Head Coach] Julian Nagelsmann with the big screen next to his training pitch. The level of coaching is going to be so high because everyone’s going to have a great understanding of the discipline that innovation is just going to go to the next level.

“The coach of the future is very exciting,” Montemurro concludes.

“I won’t see it because I’m an old man, but definitely I’ll watch this space from the beach in my holiday home, wherever it is.”

By John Portch

• Fail fast and learn quickly.

• Analyse, decide, commit.

• Balance hard work with recovery time for your people.

1. McLaren will run towards a problem

McLaren took part in the UK government’s VentilatorChallengeUK project when the F1 season was halted in early 2020. A consortium of teams and major industrial organisations, including Siemens and Airbus, helped to deliver 13,437 ventilators to the British National Health Service in just 10 weeks.

“We’re not ventilator experts but we’re pretty comfortable at running towards a problem, whatever it is, and breaking it down to find the issue, fix it, and move on,” Piers Thynne, the Executive Director, Operations at McLaren Racing, told an online audience at 2020’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance.

“Once we have a plan, we’re running at stuff really aggressively,” added Mark Mathieson, the Director of Innovation at McLaren Applied Technologies. “You don’t know what’s coming next and you need to be able to respond to that. I think we brought a lot of that from McLaren and the other Formula 1 teams and blew people away with what could be done so quickly and challenge the paradigms of conventional industry.”

2. They empowered their people to run

Mathieson explained that it was important that staff members felt empowered in their roles. He said: “We found that, again, like in our day jobs really, you’ve got to empower those people to run the challenges and make their own decisions locally and escalate when they need to ask for help and support. You can just cover so much ground so quickly when you let people run like that. And if they get things wrong, you’ve got to support them as well; we learn so much from failure. You’ve got to dig in and get through it, but the leader’s job in that situation is looking ahead, work out what’s coming next, and trying to clear the path and put the right resources in at the right time. It was a very formative phase; I wouldn’t say we had a hard and fast plan; we had a target for production and it was a real journey of discovery for everyone.”

3. There is no time for pontification

McLaren’s philosophy and team culture served them well. “Formula 1 is a pretty agile and time-bound sport although, in the operational side of it, time is probably our biggest currency,” said Thynne. “We don’t have time to stop or pontificate, we have to analyse, decide and move on. That philosophy applied quite appropriately to this project; it was a bit different because it wasn’t a transmission component or a suspension component or a systems component, it was a specific part of a subsystem in a ventilator.”

4. They kept the main thing the main thing

McLaren maintained clarity with a daily 7am meeting. “When you’ve got that delegated empowerment of the teams, they run at the challenges day-on-day,” Mathieson said. “Every day you have a success and when you’ve got that you keep the energy high. ‘What got shipped last night? Everyone’s focused on the number; how many ventilators went out last night on shipment? And everyone is just trying to make that happen. Right, now face forward, what have we got to do today? What is the constraint or what are the constraints? Who’s dealing with it and how are we going to clear those? Let’s get on with it.’ You had that near-term focus and those successes as you’re moving forward; it’s really important that the team gets energised by that.”

5. Downtime was built in

Rest was essential in keeping the team and consortium focused and fresh. “You can’t go at it relentlessly,” said Mathieson. “We found that that five or six weeks in, we’d all been working very long hours, seven days a week, 21 hours a day, and we start to see people getting grouchy at that time and decisions are perhaps not the best decisions. We started to impose some days off and people had to go and do something different for a day and then come back to it a bit fresher. We always had cover from the leadership team and, again, shared the load out, so that we managed our teams appropriately over the whole seven days every week.”

By John Portch

Ken Lynch, the National Performance Pathway Manager at Australian Sailing, is explaining to the Leaders Performance Institute why long-term thinking is a relatively new concept in sport.

“Previously, annual or short-term funding for sports largely disabled longer term thinking,” says Lynch. “In tandem with short-term funding there were short-term targets. And while many understood and believed more strategic, longer term thinking and approaches were required, the reality was that the focus remained on the ‘now’ for the most part.”

As investment models have evolved so has the thinking around high performance strategies. “More balanced approaches to investment and the value placed on sustainability has unlocked more strategic thinking and promoted longer term planning,” continues Lynch. “The announcement of Olympic and Paralympic Games locations further in advance has also been a contributing factor to a more serious look to the future in terms of sport systems.”

Lynch, a former schoolteacher, has worked at a number of sports organisations, eight years at High Performance Sport New Zealand and five years at the Irish Institute of Sport where he served as Team Manager for triathlon.

In the first of two instalments exploring the space given to talent pathways in sport, Lynch hones in on the importance of integrating long-term and short-term planning as well as learning through evidence-based practice.

Ken, what are some of the factors that can hinder forward thinking in high performance systems?

KL: My sense is that we are still organising ourselves in blocks of time as opposed to perceiving the movement of athletes, coaches and staff into and through systems as constant ‘flow’. After all, people aren’t born every four years! The embedding of longer term thinking into strategic plans and working across two or three concurrent timelines is a sign of system maturity. The complexity can be navigated in the design and structure of the organisation and work. One temptation I have learned to avoid is using Olympic and Paralympic locations as end points of strategies. People tend to work towards that point in time with many not thinking beyond it – not the type of thinking we want to promote. Perpetual motion in advanced planning and that concept of flow through multiple horizons is, in my view, the healthiest view to have in promoting forward thinking.

How can performance systems look to develop that ‘flow’?

KL: Building platforms to support the flow of people underpinned by good process is key to better enabling sustainable, repeatable performance. The value of good quality systems and processes, while some people view them as onerous, is that once complete, they free people up to concentrate on performance. Well-constructed process can be actioned simply and easily and not add clutter to valuable work. Getting clear and accurate on targets, gap analysis and planning a logical sequence of moves to execute a robust, well thought out plan gives people and organisations the confidence to drive forward and minimise the distraction a lack of clarity can present. Identifying what it will take to win, being clear on what is required to deliver that, for example, certain types of athletes and coaches, generates focus and efficiency. Often people or sports that are not clear have large numbers of people involved in the system for fear they may miss somebody. This can dilute resources and remove some of the edge required to deliver world class performance. You need to be accurate, identify clear targets and simplify action and process. These are conditions for success but also enable effective tracking, reporting and support of performance, current and future potential.

Can you think of examples when organisations have found that balance?

KL: When I worked at High Performance Sport New Zealand, when establishing the performance pathway pillar, the future became embedded in the system. It can’t go away, it becomes a constant and that flow becomes a constant. Investment meetings, reviews and decisions are based less on retrospective performance and more on potential performance, which makes more sense. ‘We’re going to invest in you for how you do in the future not just reward you for how you’ve done in the past’. I think that shifts the dial and the thinking around how investment is executed while noting that the ability to demonstrate you can deliver performance is still an important ingredient.

Earlier you mentioned gap analyses. What is the best process for identifying those gaps?  

KL: You have to ask: how many athletes and coaches do you need capable of delivering what and at what stage of the pathway? Where have you got gaps, how do you fill them and ensure the system minimises the chances of gaps appearing in the future? Have you established what it will take to win this cycle and the following two? This can be easier to track in more measurable sports, with team or more strategic sports, it is critical to understand the direction the discipline or game is going and creating a clear view of what approach will be most likely to beat key competitors in the future. Aligning recruitment and development to that intelligence while probing to check and challenge the theory is essential. The closer we get to targets the more clarity we gain and can tweak accordingly.

With that check and challenge comes learning. How significant is that?

KL: An ability for a system to learn and understand – that is a real string to their bow because it shifts away from anecdotal thinking; and a small country like New Zealand may be more likely to be able to do it because the population is smaller and it is more manageable to capture and see everybody. A system learning from itself is important to support the check and challenge strategy that planning requires. Applying that learning quickly and effectively is vital to optimal system evolution. If the right amount of rigour was applied to the development of strategic and operational plans, these learnings should just result in tweaks to approaches or plans. Learning and moving on; learning faster than key competitors can be the difference between delivering performance and not. Smaller countries with the ability to be agile and move quickly have a distinct advantage here. If set up well they can move on learnings quickly, adapt and look for new opportunities. This learning can take many forms beyond tracking progression, for example learning from and responding to athlete feedback.

This approach sets the foundations for evidence-based development.

KL: It must be linked to evidence. The rigour applied and understanding behind identifying what it will take to win in the future provides you with a significant amount of evidence and enables you to chart a course to performance. This chart along with the type of regression modelling mentioned earlier provides a program with milestone markers that enable reporting back on progression from individual athlete tracking through to an aggregated program view. Again, this is an important step in enabling a program or organisation to give confidence to stakeholders that the gap to performance or repeatable success is closing. In centimetres, grams, seconds (CGS) or more measured sports this type of progression mapping may be easier to achieve. Other sports, like sailing, rely on more subjective assessments of progression in tandem with results data. Having the right people around the table to give credibility to those processes is an important factor in ensuring accuracy but also to promoting confidence for stakeholders.

It also enables teams to focus on the now while casting an eye towards the future.

KL: A big challenge for the next wave or generation of athletes and coaches is remaining visible and staying integrated with the parts of the system above and, to a degree, below. There can often be a gap between what could be labelled High-Performance (HP) and High-Performance Development (HPD). This can grow or shrink depending on a combination of factors, with strategy and operation being two of those. Time of cycle can create opportunities to either widen or close that gap. Intense focus on the ‘now’ athletes and programs can cause constriction for the future side of the business with either a reduction in resourcing or attention, or potentially both, come the run into pinnacle events. In some sports, the utilisation of integration to create valuable internal competition, effective critical mass and learning opportunities for future athletes and coaches in understanding and experiencing the lead into pinnacle performance is valuable. It’s important too that that exposure and experience is debriefed and translated into applied learning.

By John Portch

“High performance doesn’t end with the players,” says Max Lankheit.

The San Jose Earthquakes’ Director of High Performance, who took the role in January this year having previously served as the team’s Head of Athletic Performance, is discussing his thoughts on where ‘high performance’ starts and ends with the Leaders Performance Institute.

“That was one of the things I wanted to change the moment I took charge of a department,” he continues. “High performance affects the entire organisation and it’s something we need to instil – not only in the high-performance department – because I think it’s a misconception that high performance only affects what’s happening on the field and the front office absorbs this just by association.”

The idea of holistic high performance is what drives our conversation around the usefulness of objectives and key results as a goal-setting framework for a sports organisation. “OKRs originated from Intel and Andy Grove (in its original form ‘output-based management’) and the concept was further developed into OKRs by John Doer with Google,” says Lankheit, who has piqued our interest through his work at San Jose.

For over an hour he describes the processes he has introduced to enable effective performance reviews across his high-performance team. His account is detailed, personal and laced with conviction but comes with a caveat.

“It’s important to understand that you cannot just do OKRs,” he says. “I’ve tried it twice in the past and both times I’ve failed miserably. It’s not to say that someone else couldn’t do it the first time but nobody I know has done an OKR implementation right the first time they do it; and I think you need to make those mistakes to understand what you could have done differently.”

Here, we delve further into Lankheit’s approach to performance reviews and the rationale behind his approach.

Results

Lankheit states that measuring staff performance and impact is difficult, but his efforts at San Jose are guided by five “imperatives”. “They are: clear vision, targets and commitments – individually as well as group-based – transparency, meaningful marketing, which translated into our environment means a player-centric approach and, finally, performance-oriented management.”

With those imperatives as the starting point, Lankheit explains that the objectives of an organisation are necessarily influenced by its vision but are not necessarily cascading down into the objectives of each department. He says: “Your department objective may change every 4-6 months, and for us right now, it’s ‘establish a seamlessly integrated player-care system’. This means that for this objective, every individual has certain key results that they need to hit. ‘Individuals’ in this case meaning the staff members of my department.”

Lankheit begins to illustrate his point with the hypothetical target of treatments administered per day by his staff (“a silly example but easy to comprehend”).

“At the beginning we sit together and say, ‘OK, we mutually agree that the result for you is to deliver ten treatments each day’. That’s the key result the staff member is committed to achieve and that’s going to be put into our management system so it can be tracked. It’s tangible and it’s quantitative – not qualitative – the qualitative aspect is the department objective, but the quantitative aspect is what each individual can provide because that is measurable. That’s important to me because either you achieve it or you don’t. You have a direct influence on that that nobody else has.”

The last point about the individual’s agency in delivering upon a key result is important. “Before I took over this department, bonuses were only connected to player availability,” adds Lankheit. “Now, you and I both know that player availability depends on so many factors that it’s out of our hands as a department.” A common enough example is a player selected to play a match against the recommendation of the high-performance department. “That’s why it’s important to me that we find performance measurements that are directly under the sole influence of that individual or department.”

Those measurements also provide the basis for review conversations that should take place in pre-determined timeframes, informally and formally. “And it’s not a perfect world because I currently underdeliver on this,” he admits. “I just had some performance reviews with my staff, and then you talk about, ‘OK. These were the deliverables and did you or did you not get there? If yes, awesome. Maybe the performance goal wasn’t hard enough, so maybe you should have delivered 15 treatments each day’. OK. Does it make sense to raise that or are you like, ‘actually, it didn’t have the impact that we expected, and I think we should focus on something else’?”

Lankheit then further breaks down key results into ‘commit’, ‘target’, and ‘stretch’. Ten treatments per day could be the commit and 12 could be the target. “I could say ‘this commit is the least I expect from you and if you don’t deliver on this then we’re going to have a very hard conversation about it because you committed because you had the resources, you thought hard enough, it can’t be on our end.’

“If you’re able to do the commit goal, the target is what you actually want to achieve but knowing that if you didn’t hit this you can say to me ‘this was the goal but I was unable to do it. I hit the commit but I didn’t do the target because I didn’t have enough resources from you. Or if we had another table, no problem, but the tables were always full’. Now they can come back to me and say there was a problem, which helps me to raise the bar as well.”

He continues: “The stretch goal is kind of a grey area where everything needs to fall into place for you to be able to do 15 treatments, for example”. Stretch goals are beyond an individual’s control. So then if you hit 15, we say ‘this is fantastic, you had a fantastic quarter, but I don’t expect it and the person also doesn’t expect it to happen.’ A coach might say ‘I wasn’t able to deliver more than those 12 treatments because we trained twice a day and there was a gym session in between, so there was no time for me in those two hours to do that’. So you need to change the whole structure to achieve that. Or ‘we had so many injured players that we had to focus on those guys. I couldn’t do treatments for injury prevention’. “Consequently, while ‘commit goals’ are under the sole influence of each individual, ‘target goals’, and ‘stretch goals’ might need contributions from co-workers, disciplines, or even departments.” Hence, by doing so Lankheit embeds cross-functional, interdisciplinary collaboration into his people and performance management.

“That offers me the opportunity to go outside of the department and go, ‘OK, this is what we need to do as an organisation. We have a structure problem here. If we really want to do better then we have to do this’. That helps me to manage upwards and outside of the department.”

Values and traits

Under Lankheit’s Leadership San Jose’s Performance Department also lives by certain values and he assesses how his staff deliver on those values. “Was it ‘sometimes’, was it ‘consistently’, was it ‘most of the time’ or was it ‘always’? I don’t have to give an example for ‘always’ or ‘most of the time’ because then a person knows if they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “But the moment it is just ‘sometimes’ or ‘consistently’ then I will have to give examples where I’ll say ‘look, this is where you didn’t deliver when you had the chance to, but you didn’t’. Or ‘we have six core values in our department and you didn’t deliver on this one’. One aspect is the pure performance side and another is how culturally the person delivered on the promise of ‘this is what we stand for’ from a personal or overall cultural perspective.

Lankheit will also assess his staff based on four traits: problem-solving, execution, thought leadership, and emerging leadership. He says: “It’s the same with the values – ‘never demonstrate it’, ‘sometimes demonstrate it’, ‘consistently demonstrate it’ and so on – that way you do that development right there as people will say ‘this is a companion area I need to improve on’.

“We can say, for example, ‘in this performance review we identified that you are a thought leader but you are not showing emerging leadership skills, meaning you’re a fantastic individual contributor but it’s now on you to lead others’. Two different things. ‘People come to you because they know you’re the best at what you do, but you have to proactively go out there because you are a subject matter expert. Then you need to reach out to others to ask how what I do can make you do your job better?’ That comes from those reviews and then we work on that.

“We essentially take one main goal out of what we identified of those four traits that is the most important to work on in the next four months. It may also be the following four months as well, but that’s how we balance it out to personal development. Now, if emerging leadership is the one thing we want to work on in the next four months, that means I need you to take part ownership of someone else’s results. Now you need to demonstrate that you can support that person.”

At that stage, the conversation may return to commit goals and target goals. “Values and traits work hand in hand with goal setting. That’s also why the constant communication of meeting once a day, even for two minutes, to say something like ‘there was a chance where you could have done that – does it make sense to you? ‘Yes’. ‘Perfect. Next time I want you to jump in on that.’ I am always encouraging my staff to take responsibility. I would like them to do everything they do without me being there. They should be thinking ‘what is Max’s job here anyways?’

“We also have 360 reviews. I get the feedback from my employees. The employees each get one from me and also get to nominate one or two people, depending on how big the department is, that they want to be evaluated by, peer to peer. I don’t like the fact that I, as manager choose a person to evaluate you – I think it’s more helpful if that person nominates somebody that they want to evaluate them. Obviously, if they nominate their brother and I say ‘I don’t want your brother to evaluate you’, they understand, but generally, at least in our department, they would choose somebody who’s not necessarily their closest peer because they want that feedback.”

Removing subjectivity

In concluding his thoughts on how he is working to make staff assessments more effective, Lankheit once again emphasises the value in setting tangible goals. “It takes the subjectivity out of it,” he says. “If there’s tangible goals, I have nothing to argue. If you’ve delivered on a certain result, behaviour, or trait, you did it, so you deserve your bonus. We in pro sport live in a result-driven world. If someone doesn’t reach it the person has to tell me why. There might be a explanation that’s reasonable, but otherwise it’s just me saying ‘I think you should have done more or I think you didn’t deliver on that.’ It leaves room for this discontentment and resentment in your staff because they could always say ‘it’s because you don’t like me’ or ‘it’s just your perception. You never spend time with me, you’re always in the gym or at training. You only see me once a week so how does that make you the judge of the other 200 times I’m in contact with the player?’ With that embedded objectivity you take it out.

“The other thing, the cultural component, is subjective, which is why I need to bring examples. If I don’t bring examples, then there’s no point in me bringing it up in the first place. It also helps to create that feedback loop mindset in your employees as well because they’re doing the exact same thing. They’re not setting me targets but they’re evaluating me as well, so they understand it.”

Lankheit also ensures that staff members are given a copy of their review a day or two ahead of their appointment. “I give them my review 24 to 48 hours beforehand so that they have time to digest and think about my feedback instead of getting it on the fly and potentially reacting out of emotion. They have time to blow off steam if they don’t agree, they have time to reflect and come up with objective objections, if they disagree.”

It is not, however, intended as an exercise in micromanagement. “Everyone’s had micromanagers in the past,” he says with disdain. “It is important to get out of people’s ways and let them do their best work. When something is on my table, there has to be a good reason it ends up there otherwise I trust the fact that you’ll do the best job you can, you’re committed to your key results, so now you execute on them. Then we can have a conversation if you didn’t meet them and then I can jump in if you feel you need help from me. Otherwise, go and do the best job. I hated the micromanagement aspect of it when I was in certain roles and I think that’s why I am trying to be hands off.”

If anyone would like to discuss Max’s approach to OKRs and performance reviews, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

• Are you asking the right questions of candidates? What do you really need to know?

• Do you fully understand the demands placed on the role for which you are hiring?

• Personality traits and potential compatibility are increasingly important.

San Francisco took an agnostic approach

In early 2017, Marathe and the 49ers installed John Lynch as GM and Kyle Shanahan as Head Coach as they sought to return their franchise to prominence. Their approach was unconventional, such as the long-listing of 22 candidates, and they didn’t rush. “We were 26 days in and we hadn’t announced anything,” Marathe told an audience at the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Chicago. “Fans were getting impatient.” San Francisco had adopted what Marathe called an “agnostic” approach and eschewed the usual questions one might ask an aspiring GM or head coach. “We didn’t ask any of those questions because we figured if you’re at that stage where you’re interviewing for a GM or a head coach, you have a successful process that got you to where you are – we want to know what kind of leader you are,” he continues. “What’s your vision? Who are your mentors? How do you respond to failure? How do you deal with accountability? How do you hold yourself accountable? How do you hold your staff accountable? How do you think about the big picture?”

They recognised how demands on GMs and coaches are evolving

The questions the 49ers posed above are still more readily found in a job interview at a Fortune 500 company than in sports, but Marathe argued that the roles of the GM and head coach require different skillsets in the modern era. He said: “In today’s NFL, it’s no longer just about coaching the team or living in a Motel 6 in West Virginia and scouting players for 15 years – it’s about actually being a CEO on the field, a CEO off the field. That’s what running an NFL franchise is all about, so we were very focused on the process about looking for people who are leaders, who have leadership qualities, who hold themselves accountable, who have a certain amount of humility.”

In John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan they sought a partnership of equals

San Francisco prioritised a partnership, with neither GM nor head coach seen as the senior figure but more of a duo. “A lot of times this is an insular industry where people get threatened by one another,” said Marathe. “So we wanted to go in and find a head coach and a GM that were on the same sort of life cycle in their careers.” The hiring group acknowledged that a particular head coach candidate may work better with a subset of GM candidates. “We tried to find the right match that together brought out the best personality traits for the organisation and together had the right vision for leadership and accountability.”

They tested the personalities of their candidates

San Francisco gradually realised that Lynch and Shanahan would potentially be a good match. Such personality insights were delivered through some of the activities they asked their candidates to complete. One included a list of ten skills or responsibilities for a GM. They produced the same lists for a head coach. “For a head coach it might be designing a game plan or coaching your coaches or evaluating your players,” said Marathe, “and we asked them to rank them, one to ten, in terms of not how important they are but how good they are at each one. They had to be the best at something and they had to be the worst at something. And the same with the GM. It was actually interesting, going through these interviews, that some candidates couldn’t make themselves No1o at something. That teaches you something about them. In some of those exercises we did we really felt that John and Kyle would be very complementary working together.”

By John Portch

There is a common perception in football that if you finish lower in the table than you did the previous season then you have failed.

The truth is not always so simple. Women’s Super League [WSL] side Brighton & Hove Albion finished sixth in 2020-21 and followed that with a seventh-place finish in 2021-22. Last season was their fourth as a WSL team, having received a top-tier licence in 2017, and the first where they were unable to match or better their previous position.

It is a source of frustration for Manager Hope Powell, who shares the view that outcomes are not everything. She says: “We were really disappointed because we should have finished sixth, but it was still a really successful season because of some of the performances we had. The way the team performed, the way the staff performed – we put things in place and we delivered in lots of areas. It’s been a successful season for us and, for me, success is defined in so many different ways on and off the pitch.”

Powell, who also admits that she “cannot ignore the league table”, describes the challenge of taking on the WSL’s wealthier clubs as Brighton’s “greatest opportunity”. “From a football perspective, challenging those bigger, more established clubs that have been in the high end of the game for so many more years than we have is a daily challenge for Brighton, in a good way,” she continues.

The Seagulls are looking to meet that challenge both on and off the field, with Powell discussing player development in the second part of her interview with the Leaders Performance Institute. In the third and final instalment, she reflects on the culture at Brighton and the steps she and her team are taking to develop a high performance environment conducive to challenging for the top four in the WSL. “That’s where we want to be and we have to strive to be better than they are [the clubs who make up the current top four], to shift our club from where we are now to where we want to be.”

A nimble approach

Powell explains that at the end of the WSL season, the team generally holds a review, which is a process led by her psychologist [Beth Yeoman was appointed as Senior Psychologist for Women and Girls in May 2022]. “It’s standard stuff,” says Powell. “What went well, what we want to keep doing, what we want to let go and what new things we want to introduce.”

The most important thing, she continues, is the weekly conversations between Powell and her staff about the environment and the culture. “Is it working? What do we need to do now? What’s important? What isn’t important? I find that to be a weekly conversation so that we don’t just say ‘all the way through the season we’re going to do this’ and then at the end of the season decide if it’s been good or bad. I think it’s just about conversations and setting the tone of where you’d like the environment of the people you’re working with to be. I don’t think it’s too onerous.”

The Leaders Performance Institute suggests to Powell that it sounds like cultural mapping. “You can call it that,” she replies, “I think it’s just about having open and honest conversations. Certainly for me and my team. How does the environment feel? How are the players? What do we need to change? How do we need to engage them more? What about their voices? Is it too much? Too little? If that’s called ‘cultural mapping’ I don’t know, but that’s what we do on a regular basis.”

Powell has learned, during the course of her coaching career, to trust her gut. It served her well in the 15 years she spent as Manager of the England women’s senior team between 1998 and 2013 and so far during her five years at Brighton.

“I really believe that coaches have a gut feeling,” she says. “‘How does this feel today?’ Or during the week I’ll ask myself ‘how is training?’ Maybe it didn’t feel or look right. ‘What’s going on?’ Or, ‘this feels good – what happened? The players seem happy’. It’s those conversations and I get those feelings and so I like to challenge those feelings. ‘Am I missing something? It doesn’t feel right’. Generally my gut tells me ‘stick to it, Hope’ and every time I don’t, it doesn’t quite work out.”

Adding value

Powell speaks fondly of her coaching staff. “I believe I have the right people,” she says. “The most important thing is providing the opportunity for the team to say ‘this is what I think we should do next’. I am not precious about what we do as long as it adds value. If we think that it will work and we try it, that’s where the constant conversation is important. ‘It doesn’t [work]? Well we’ve tried it. I want the staff and, more importantly, the players to own it, be engaged, to have some pride in what they do and add value.

“It’s a chance for the multidisciplinary team to go, ‘this was really good, I didn’t think this worked, I think we need to change it, I don’t think it’s right, Hope.’ ‘What do you think then?’ I’m very much ‘what do you think?’ because even though I’m the leader, I’m not – we’re all leading it, they’re all experts. I manage it and I make the overall decision because if it doesn’t work, I lose my job. I get the input of everybody. My favourite words are ‘what do you think? What are your thoughts?’ That’s how I work. If you can’t trust your team or the people you’re working with then they’re not the right people.”

There is occasional turnover of staff and Powell will pay more attention to the work of new staff. “And then those conversations become less and less,” she says. “‘Just tell me what you are doing so I know’. ‘Is this OK?’ ‘ Yeah, go for it. Let me know when it’s done.’

She also senses when new staff members are keen to make a good impression. “They come in, and try to make an impression, as people do, and I have to say to them ‘don’t just say something because you feel that you have to. You’re not going to be judged because you don’t say something – say something only when you can add value. If there’s nothing to say then you don’t need to say anything’, but people want to make an impression. You make impressions in other ways, don’t you, it’s not all about having the last word. It’s not always copying in everyone in an email, which absolutely drives me crazy. Why do people do that? Because they’re trying to look good. That’s really sad, actually. That’s the world in which we live. I’m just not like that.”

CPD and mentorship

Powell is a big believer in keeping herself fresh and current through presentations, seminars, podcasts and conversations with other coaches. “When you have been on a journey as I have been, everyone thinks that you stop learning,” says Powell, who also serves as a coaching mentor with Fifa, Uefa, the Premier League and the Football Association. “The younger coaches come through and they want to absorb all of the information and quite often forget that you are still on a journey and you are still learning yourself. I think it’s really important as older coaches that we have that capacity and we have the will to do that.”

Of her own mentors, Powell recalls a former coach who, in his day job, was a senior manager at BT. “A lot of people reported into him and that really helped me when I went into management,” she continues. “It wasn’t about football, it was about managing groups of people, having a strategy, having a plan, how you communicate to groups of people, how you share your vision with your team and all of those sorts of things. I think if you can get a mentor outside of your sport, that is really powerful.” What about mentors within football? “I also value the people I talk to and the mentors I had in the sport because they understand it from the sporting context. If you can get a balance of both it’s really helpful.”

Brighton will provide and finance regular CPD opportunities both internally and externally for staff members. “The staff, or ‘coaches’ as we call everybody, have a responsibility to deliver CPD so that it enhances their knowledge, their learning and their development. I think it’s really important,” says Powell. “So all my staff have to deliver whether they’re a junior therapist or a senior practitioner. It’s very important that everyone gets the opportunity to deliver and to lead. It’s not just about the most experienced person in the room giving all the information.”

Diversity as a competitive edge

Powell is a pioneer in English football. She was the youngest-ever Manager of England when she was appointed, aged 31, in 1998. She was also the first woman and first black person to take the position.

Her role at Brighton affords her the opportunity to directly impact the diversity of her staff. “I guess I’m in a good position as I have the responsibility of recruiting and hiring staff,” she says. “You try to get the best players and the best staff possible. I quite like an equal split of male and female.” She points to the fact that she has a female assistant manager [Amy Merricks] and a male goalkeeping coach [Alex Penny].

“I think it’s important to have a diverse group. We have people who are from abroad as well, not just English. We’re down by the south coast and the demographic is very white and middle-class. I’m very happy to recruit from closer to London – I live in London – and I’m quite aware and mindful of that, to make sure the group is diverse, because then you get diverse thought. Otherwise you get everything that’s exactly the same and that just doesn’t work.”

Powell actively tries to provide employment opportunities for women because they are all too often lacking in English football. “I want the best person but I’m also mindful of the diversity in the group and, if I’m honest, I’m a bit biased because of opportunities for women in the game. If there’s a good female, I look at the female first if I think they’re good enough. They’re more likely to get the job simply because the opportunities for women aren’t afforded as much as they are for men, especially in football.”

She prides herself in her honesty but also in her support for her staff. “I think if you were to ask any member of staff if they feel supported they’d all say ‘yes’,” she says, reflecting on  Brighton’s progress on her watch. “Everyone believes in what you’re trying to achieve and everyone is prepared to work together.”

By John Portch

• Combine physical, mental and tactical aims

• What can you ask athletes to do in the ‘other 22 hours’?

• Load manipulation is the last resort

Representative training design

The international footballing environment, as Bryce Cavanagh explained, inevitably limits the amount of time coaches and staff can spend with athletes. With this in mind, Cavanagh, who serves as the Head of Performance at the Football Association, told an audience at 2020’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance that efficiency can be found in representative training design. “Firstly, we look at areas that stretch us on the field,” said Cavanagh, who works primarily with the England men’s senior team. “We tend to look at those denser periods, those peak periods, and we feel they tend to be represented by three things commonly. One is the intensity; generally the intensity goes up during those periods, so you’ve got a physical construct or a physical risk around fatigue; or an opportunity. Clarity, so players needing better decision making, performing under pressure and whatnot. And the other one is execution; execution of skills. That’s where they either break down or you execute them correctly. So there’s a physical, psychological and a tactical, technical construct there.”

Psychological stress under fatigue

Cavanagh recommends recreating the stressful conditions of match play to the greatest possible extent in training drills at both youth and senior levels. “We’re really careful to look at those peak periods and look at those three constructs [intensity, clarity and execution] and try to create opportunities in training where we’re hitting two or three of those in what we call ‘mutualism’ or mutual benefit between them,” he said. “An example might be something that’s got a technical or tactical outcome but we’re doing it under physical stress that you would find in those peak periods in the game. We can obviously feed back live and feed back GPS metrics around what some of those look like from the rolling average research that many practitioners do these days.”

In some ways, such sessions can serve as talent ID opportunities. “All the way down the pathway it’s important for us because we get such limited time with players; and coaches get limited time to assess the players,” Cavanagh continued. “Having more and more representative training is almost like having a talent ID tour in a way because you’re seeing how the players stand up in a game-like situation. If you haven’t seen a lot of a guy who’s come into an England camp, you can get a better indication of how he’s going to perform when he gets to the business end.”

The ‘other 22 hours’

Players arrive at international camps in different physical states. This necessitates an assessment that eschews traditional methods of gap analysis – “we have not got the luxury of 52 weeks of unlimited datasets”. There is, however, good communication with the English Premier League clubs that supply the bulk of England players, which enables the sharing of some metrics, such as GPS data. There is also a lot of relationship-building with the players that come into the squads.

Cavanagh and his colleagues also understand that every activity in training or during a match comes at a cost and, if the gap is too large, it may see a player miss training or even a match, the first thought goes to what can be achieved away from training. “We try to look at other areas to offset that set of scales,” he added, referring to the “other 22 hours”. “So if the cost is X, what can we do to offset that cost? Chronically, you increase the capability of the player and more capable players recover better, handle the cost better, but the more acute stuff we’ve gone after really hard. We’ve got a camp, we’ve got a captive audience, we’ve got them 24-7, so we’ve gone after the sleep, nutrition and recovery stuff.

“What can we do there to offset that cost acutely before the last resort being the load manipulation or training manipulation?”