By John Portch

We are living in the first era to have five generations in the workplace.

This fact sits at the centre of Rebecca Robins’ book Five Generations at Work: How we win together, for good in which she argues through detailed case studies of organisations as diverse as LMVH, Mars and Samsung that leaders can turn this generational mix into a competitive advantage.

“What a melting pot and crucible of knowledge, expertise, experience, skills and perspective we have in these five generations,” she said as she took to the stage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

The five generations discussed in Robins’ book are:

• Silents: age 80-97
• Boomers: age 61-79
• Generation X: age 45-60
• Millennials: age 29-46
• Generation Z: age 13-28

“What I find profoundly exciting is we are living through that history,” she continued. “It’s a transformative shift that is already having profound implications, ramifications and, crucially, untold opportunity for us all.”

If one extends Robins’ lens to sport, many teams and programmes are home to six generations, as members of Generation Alpha (generally anyone under the age of 16) fill talent pathways across the globe (although no one is seriously suggesting these children are workers).

What Robins can speak to, however, is the inter-generational tensions, most often between athlete and coach, that have long been part of sport.

Below, we use Robins’ presentation to pose four questions designed to encourage reflection in those working on talent development pathways in particular.

1. Do you interpret generational difference: through judgement or curiosity?

Young athletes aren’t the problem; and for Robins, generational difference is something to be embraced rather than corrected.

“Yes, there is difference, but difference doesn’t mean conflict. It doesn’t mean negativity. It doesn’t mean stereotype,” she said while lamenting perceptions of younger people as sullen, easily distracted or lacking resilience.

“We would all hope through our lives that we have been young and old, right? It’s something that bonds and blinds us. This is why I get so impassioned when we get into this divisive stereotype discourse.”

Robins’ solution lies in “how we’re fostering curiosity in each other, across generations, and valuing each other – who we are – and valuing that difference.”

A team adopting this approach, she argued, is moving from a “multi-generational” approach (the default) to something more “inter-generational” (where there’s genuine collaboration between generations).

2. If your young athletes and staff members are disengaged, what is your environment doing… or failing to do?

When someone disengages, Robins believes it is often the environment that is responsible, not the individual. “The first question shouldn’t be about them, it should be about what we’ve created,” she said.

“There’s a ‘say-do’ gap. Collaboration looks great on the walls and in the annual report, but what are we doing on the day‑to‑day?”

In a comment that will have piqued the interest of the academy coaches in the room, she pondered whether collaboration might sometimes be confused for mere silent compliance. “Effective collaboration isn’t easy, which means we have to have safe spaces for polarised thought.” Translated to an academy context, coaches need their young athletes to feel able to speak up.

Consider: if your young athletes are disengaged, perhaps the problem isn’t their motivation or attitude, but your system design.

3. Which elements of your system are designed with young athletes and staff and which are designed for them?

“How are we setting the conditions for young people to collaborate effectively?” asked Robins before quickly answering her own question. “We’re not: we’re set up for failure.”

She is an advocate for co-creation, as the input of those on the “front line” is essential to the sustainability of any high-performance programme.

Robins’ research was clear. “Organisations who seek to co‑create much more of what they’re doing are succeeding,” she said. “How do we look at policies and programmes for that expanding demographic of five generations if we’re not seeking opinion across our organisation?”

It follows that young pathway athletes must have a say in shaping those environments. “It has to be about raising the stories from the shop floor” because “fundamentally, great brands, great organisations are created and sustained with great people; and that will still be true as long as people are running down running tracks or playing on football pitches.”

Robins posed the audience questions of her own: “How does collaboration show up? How do we foster and nurture that in the day-to-day?”

4. What are the environmental signals that truly matter to your young athletes and people?

Much like anyone else, young athletes, coaches and performance practitioners, Robins argued, benefit from clarity and consistency, particularly in sport’s complex performance environments. Yes, there is a temptation to introduce new initiatives (which may be well-intentioned), but she preached restraint.

“This is about doing fewer things but doing them well,” she said. “To be deeply intentional about doing fewer things well – investing in them and sustaining them – is mission critical.”

Robins argued there is no alternative. “You don’t need more resources [to do this]; this should be a throughline through your business. If this isn’t hardwired to your strategy, you don’t have a strategy.”

What to read next

How the Royal Academy of Dance Is Meeting the Challenge of Teaching the Next Generation

By John Portch

Alexander Campbell, the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, does not expect his organisation’s teachers to have all the answers.

“The reality is that not any one teacher is going to know, if you’ve got ten people in front of them, what’s best for each individual person in that class,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey last year.

“It’s about having that humility or that understanding that it’s OK not to know that definitively, for it to be a work in progress.”

Campbell, who spent 19 years at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies, retired in 2024 to take up his current role, which gives him responsibility for the academy’s teaching across more than 80 countries.

It’s a position that grants him insights into the expectations, motivations and development needs of the next generation of dancers; and, as a self-proclaimed “sports tragic”, he was delighted to address an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at the Royal College of Music in London.

The Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music in London where we hosted Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey in April 2025.

Below, we explore, through the lens of Campbell’s own ballet career, his approach to meeting that challenge head-on with the RAD.

Meet students halfway

Campbell’s teaching mindset has been influenced by his underwhelming student experience at the Royal Ballet School, which he attended on a scholarship between 2003 and 2005.

The main problems were the teachers and the environment. “I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.

He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.

“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.

As Campbell explained in a 2017 interview with the Daily Telegraph, “we weren’t encouraged to ask too many questions. I think it took me too long to learn that, because I was naturally inquisitive, and wanted to know why we were doing certain things.”

When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”

His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’

Promote early sampling

Campbell followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandparents, Valma Briggs and Mario Desva, who had both danced with Ballet Rambert in London.

By the early 1990s, Briggs was teaching at Academy Ballet in Sydney; Campbell’s mother worked in the same school as a manager. He began dancing at the school at the age of five.

He played grade cricket too. If his dancing talent was no surprise then nor was his cricketing ability as his father Alan was a professional player.

Campbell might have gone down that path himself had circumstances been different, but there was no pressure from his parents to choose one over the other; his teachers at Academy Ballet were similarly minded.

Of his cricket and school studies (he was homeschooled from the age of eight), Campbell said, “my parents were keen for me to remain interested in other things so that I was ‘Alexander, a person with various interests’ rather than just ‘Alexander, the ballet dancer’.”

Much like the world of sport, the performing arts has increasingly moved away from the idea of early specialisation. On Campbell’s watch, the RAD promotes the type of holistic development he enjoyed; and he is not alone. “Thinking about and knowing certain conservatoires, thinking about their talent pathways and their talent identification, how they train people is being reconsidered.”

The shift towards co-creation

As Campbell explained, RAD teachers must be able to adapt to a generation of students that desire agency in their own development.

“As educators and teachers, it’s really easy to go, ‘OK, I have to have this knowledge and I have to demonstrate to them that I know how best to get from A to B’,” he said.

That isn’t true, of course, but it requires humility on the part of the educators; and much of Campbell’s focus is on equipping dance RAD teachers with the “understanding that it’s OK not to know things definitively, for it to be a work in progress, and that it is going to be different, not just for each individual, but for each year [grade] at the school.”

Campbell’s decision to persist with ballet beyond his experience at the Royal Ballet School was influenced by his “opportunities to work with other coaches and have different experiences” at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. When he joined the company in 2005, it enabled him to see “a different environment and different way of operating that felt much more aligned to the sort of experience that I’d hoped for and wanted to have.”

Campbell demonstrates a plié for an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members, who imitate his movements with varying success despite his words of encouragement.

Care is a baseline expectation

We know that wellbeing is a performance enabler; younger generations sense it too.

Campbell wants RAD staff to be role models of wellbeing. He said: “Educating our teachers on that and the importance of looking after themselves could have the most impact in a fairly short period of time.” It must start with him as Artistic Director; a fact of which he is “acutely aware”.

The RAD has also made efforts to improve safeguarding in its schools and increase the accessibility of its courses, particularly for students and participants with additional support needs. “We’ve got teachers who have parents saying ‘my child has additional needs but they love dance, they really want to be part of it; is that something you can do?’ And a lot of our teachers will find a way or have found a way, but a number of them feel nervous about the responsibility that entails. They don’t want to get it wrong.”

Campbell and the RAD are working to provide those teachers with the right tools. “We give them the support so they can say ‘this is how you go about it or if you want to find out more this is where you would go’. I think this is giving us the best opportunity to broaden our participation in ballet and dance.”

A broader definition of success

Campbell admitted that all his “Plan As” came off in his professional life. He is a prime example of talent meeting opportunity.

However, as he said, “my self-worth and my personality were not determined by whether I was successful in that pursuit.”

He makes sure this is reflected across the RAD’s curricula. “I don’t want to just provide for those people who want to get to the top level and be the very best.” Rather, he also wants to support the career aspirations of students who say, “I enjoy this, I’m quite good at it, but actually I don’t have that real drive to pursue this one very narrow thing.”

Their love of the art form might lead to a career in dance teaching or one of the industry’s that surround the performing arts such as lighting, set design or even physiotherapy with a specialism in dance. The RAD will support those aspirations. “It’s understanding that there are more opportunities than just being the dancer on the stage.”

What to read next

‘Ultimately, Skill Is Technique Performed Under Pressure’

By John Portch

In mid-March performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler led a virtual roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members on the topic of talent pathways.

For all the experience in the virtual room – members that have spent decades working with youth athletes – each struggles to balance the elements that help young athletes to realise their potential.

“You’ll never solve it,” says Brunnschweiler, who has worked on successful talent pathways in both football and cricket. “The interesting part is how we make decisions and deliver on a strategic approach that’s appropriate for the context of the athlete.”

For the benefit of the virtual table, he outlined five common tensions that he has encountered on talent pathways:

The list is not exhaustive, but it is representative.

“The headline feedback from everyone at the roundtable is that probably they’re weaving down that ‘versus’ line in the middle when they’re doing this well,” adds Brunnschweiler.

He explains each tension in turn:

1. Group/Team learning vs Individual development

“Within your programme, how much time are you spending on team tactics, team interconnectivity, team culture, etc. versus identifying individual work-ons, individualised practices, individual focused development, individual prioritisation?”

2. Process focus vs Outcome/Match focus

“This is very similar to the first in many ways but, in my mind, is distinctly different. How much are you focusing on the process versus the outcome? And this is really around how you’re monitoring development. So if there’s a pathway lead or an academy director: are you looking at whether teams are winning when it comes to competition or are you looking at tracking progress against process markers that are embedded either within training or within the game?”

3. MDT staff input driving decisions vs Coaching/Technical staff driving decisions

“This is about athlete programming. How much of your emphasis is put on the ologists, multidisciplinary staff, the scientists versus coaching and technical staff? Who’s making the final call? How are you looking to integrate? What are the processes or systems that allow those two things to collide effectively? This was certainly one of the tensions that strongly resonated with the group.”

4. Holistic development of well‑rounded humans vs Targeted development of ruthless performers

“There’s been a massive growth in talent pathways around understanding the holistic nature of development and the growth in player care, support, psychology support, performance, wellbeing, and education off the pitch. The common question is ‘how do we develop well‑rounded humans?’ And the tension is someone saying ‘but surely it’s just about game performers can we spend all of our time targeting development of that ruthless in‑game performance?’”

5. Staff‑led teaching and guiding vs Player‑led discovery

“There’s a perception that it’s slower to do the player‑led, but it might be deeper; whereas it’s quicker and can feel more rewarding to do the staff‑led. ‘Let me tell you, here’s some guidance. Let me solve the problem for you.’”

Brunnschweiler then reflected on some of the available support mechanisms:

1. Consider if the athlete’s experience of a programme matches your teams’ intent. Much will depend on the athlete’s prior experiences, plus how and when they came to your programme.

“There’s a lot of insight generated around young athletes in all sports now and it’s like, well, how do you harness that background information as well as that current information you’re getting on them in order to make decisions around their programming?”

It requires a shared mental model between the different disciplines.

“There were some good examples at the roundtable where team culture means people’s view are respected, taken onboard and valued. And that’s utilised as a part of a decision-making approach.”

2. Retain coaches with age-specific expertise. Too little value is placed on age-group coaches, which can lead to those individuals seeking employment with more mature athletes.

“If I’m the first team coach, there’s a perception I’m better than the under-12s coach; whereas they’re equally challenging in different ways. Someone who’s brilliant at working with 10 to 12 year olds may end up working with older athletes because they get paid more.”

They may or may not be equipped to make that transition but he argues that teams can make it less of a problem by asking:

“Can you manipulate your wage structure to ensure these academy coaches stay valued within the role they’re best deployed in?”

3. Remember: well-rounded athlete can still possess an edge. While there is a desire to ensure holistic approaches that promote well-rounded development, there is a risk in taking it too far.

“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways; and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”

4. Development support for coaches. There is a time when a coach needs to be instructional and clear as well as a time when they need to skilfully draw a decision from an athlete.

“How do we provide learning and development support for coaches and other members of the MDT in this space so they can be skilful at learning design and skilful at knowing when to provide which approach based on the context and the athlete?”

5. Give the young athlete a sense of agency. Let young athletes speak in conversations around their IDPs and help them understand why things may feel challenging.

“I’ve seen people saying we want to put on sessions that look slick. That may or may not be the objective. It might also be that we’re really clear as a club that we think the deep learning and progress occurs in messy sessions where it’s clunky and we’re allowing players to play and solve problems. As coaches, we should be the best problem-setters.”

What to read next

10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes

By John Portch

Dr Áine MacNamara touches upon a perennial challenge in talent ID and development, a field in which her research is extensive.

“Early success does not always equal later success,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but, in some ways, our pathways drive early success to get into the pathway, get funding and get competition opportunities.”

It presents a challenge to pathway coaches and environments, but MacNamara, an Associate Professor in Elite Performance and co-lead of the Coaching and Expertise Lab (Co|Ex Lab) in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University explains where the balance must be struck.

“There’s a bandwidth of performance early that drives both motivation, technical and tactical coaching opportunities,” she continues, “and all of those development factors will propel athletes towards success. That means that at the start of the pathway, coaches and systems need to look beyond just what makes someone good now towards consideration of those factors that support later development.”

These factors are influenced by an athlete’s proximity to performance (this is how urgently an individual athlete needs to deliver performance based on their stage in the pathway and current demands).

Then there is the question of temporality. Rather than simply the linear progression of time, temporality “is inherently fluid”, as MacNamara and her co-authors Ger Barry and Jamie Taylor wrote in their recent research paper.

“Temporality”, they wrote, “varies across individuals, shaped by unique personal experiences and subjective perspectives” and, rather than isolated moments, it is “a continuous flow where each experience is shaped by both past events and future expectations.” So one young athlete may be ready for senior competition at 17 years old; another may not.

In either case, “temporality can create a series of temporal reference points for coaches to help them coach for development and performance as required.”

MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute that the balance comes back to the coach’s intentions. “A coach must ask themselves what was I planning for that session, in this block, this season for the athlete or the team? How did I go about it? How did I review it? How does the athlete experience it?”

With all this in mind, we asked MacNamara to reflect on the characteristics of good pathway environments. We highlight ten that cover system prerequisites, environmental features, and day-to-day practice.

1. Multiple entry and exit points

Talent identification and development is not predictable. It is dynamic, non-linear and individual. “Because a 14-year-old swimmer isn’t just a 14-year-old swimmer,” says MacNamara. “They come with a range of individual factors and experiences.”

High quality pathways, she explains, are designed with multiple entry and exit routes that take into account that young athlete’s proximity to performance. “If I go and pick the best 14-year-olds for my pathway I’m probably going to include people who look good now but without the potential to be good later,” she continues, “and I’m at risk of excluding people who don’t look good now but have the potential to develop later.”

As for exit points, it may be that attrition rates are close to 99% but that is to be expected. “Conversion is a pretty poor metric to evaluate a talent development pathway,” she says of a topic that has long been at the heart of her research. “Even in the best environments there’s only finite space for athletes to develop into.”

Nevertheless, good pathway programmes equip young athletes with the “developmental constructs to be successful elsewhere”.

2. Firm understanding of an athlete’s ‘priors’

If coaches are to meet the demands of such a complex environment, they must develop both horizontal and vertical knowledge across their system’s curriculum.

“In a coaching context, horizontal curriculum knowledge informs what experiences might be desirable for athletes at specific stages of development, ensuring these experiences align with broader developmental goals,” write Barry, MacNamara and Taylor. “Vertical curriculum knowledge equips coaches to understand an athlete’s previous experience and anticipate the steps required to achieve desired future performance.”

Coaches generally possess strong horizontal knowledge but can lack that vertical understanding of an athlete’s “priors”, which is defined by Barry, MacNamara and Taylor as the experiences, beliefs, expectations and habits the athlete brings into the learning environment.

An athlete’s priors shape how they interpret coaching, respond to challenge and adapt over time and so, as MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “coaches with a broad understanding of everything that’s happening across the pathway and a high level understanding of what they’re delivering” are best-placed to meet the development and performance needs of their young athletes.

“The ultimate job of a talent pathway is to develop players for the future,” she adds. “That future isn’t yet defined, so we need to develop a breadth of skills – adaptability, robustness, resilience, as well as a range of technical and tactical skills – that will allow them to evolve towards that ultimate aim.”

3. Specialist coaches

Youth coaching requires specialists – it is not just a stepping stone to senior coaching. “Lots of systems now recognise the importance of that development coaching population being supported and developed themselves,” says MacNamara.

“The young athlete is a mixing bowl of inputs and outputs. They’re in school, they might be in an academy, they might be on a national pathway or at a club. So, in a way, coaching a developmental athlete is more complex than coaching an elite athlete; and the better a young athlete gets, the more people they accumulate.”

4. Equity not equality

An athlete’s priors, proximity to performance and temporality require adroit handling. “There’s almost like an orchestration from the coach’s perspective that’s recognising what the individual athlete needs at this moment in time and how to organise the environment to do that,” says MacNamara.

The coach needs to know how an athlete will respond to, say, entering a competition above their current capability, training with a new group, or being coached in a certain way. “There’s a triangulation of asking what is this athlete bringing into the environment? How do they cope with this? And, after reflection, what’s next? It’s almost like giving them the water wings to survive the turbulent thing that’s going to happen next.”

This, MacNamara suggests, is why the best environments offer equity rather than equality. “No one gets the same experience, but they get the type of experience that is required, that promotes their development at that time.”

5. Athlete agency is essential

Young athletes should be considered agents in their own development. “It’s pretty condescending to think on a pathway we’re just doing things to them,” says MacNamara.

She uses the example of an early maturer who suddenly finds themselves in a difficult academy environment. “Unless they understand why this feels uncomfortable and unless they’ve been given a toolbox of skills to be able to cope with that then retention on a pathway is going to be difficult because why would you stay if you didn’t know why what was happening was happening? High quality systems and environments integrate the athlete into their conversations and individual development plans.”

6. A shared mental model of development

The best way to ensure coaches, athletes and other staff are on the same page is alignment between three distinct curricula:

• The planned curriculum (the intentions, goals and structure of what coaches and the wider system intend to happen);
• The enacted curriculum (the behaviours, methods, activities and interactions that the coach delivers on the ground);
• The experienced curriculum (how the athlete perceives, interprets and responds to what is delivered).

“The alignment between the three is often broken because people don’t understand why what’s happening is happening,” says MacNamara.

“What we should be looking at is the experienced curriculum; what’s actually happening on the ground between different domains. So this idea of being interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary. How do sports scientists, doctors, biomechanists, physiologists, coaches and other staff work together to ensure the experienced curriculum is what we intend it to be?”

7. Successfully managed expectations

Athlete experience is also shaped by how success is framed and celebrated. MacNamara jokes that she has spent her career warning about the perils of early athlete success, but there’s no inherent harm in an athlete winning early in their development providing it is interpreted correctly and fully understood by the athlete and their coach.

“Being successful is both a motivational and strategically useful outcome at a younger age” says MacNamara. “Pathways need to manage those social expectations and how that success is experienced by the athlete and the people around them.”

8. Equip athletes with psycho-behavioural skills

Generally, it is not social rewards but challenges that inspire growth. “When we look at those athletes that successfully navigate the pathway, often they have relative disadvantages early on,” says MacNamara. However, by the time they become a senior athlete, having faced a wealth of challenging experiences, they have acquired a range of developmental skills and mechanisms that have allowed them to progress through each stage of the pathway. “Those psycho-behavioural skills are part of a toolbox that allows them to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of development.”

By contrast, the early physical developer who has had access to high quality coaching and environments may steal a march on their peers, but if they lack those psycho-behavioural tools then there’s a risk, as MacNamara explains, that their early lustre will be exposed as “fool’s gold”.

9. Coaches that balance fluency and learning

Coaches must know how to balance their levels of challenge and support. MacNamara says: “Being able to slide that dial for different people in a session is a real hallmark of quality coaching. We don’t coach to the mean – we recognise the range of experiences that athletes are having at that time and adjust towards that. With young athletes, there’s often a tendency for us to do a lot for them, provide them with positive experiences, because we want them to be good, we want them to enjoy it, we want them to get that feeling, but we also should want to create desirable difficulties.”

In training, that might mean balancing the provision of fluency sessions, which are often fun and easy on the eye, with error-strewn learning sessions. Yet too often, onlookers rush to judgement on a disjointed learning session.

“I can’t judge whether that’s a good session unless I know what you’re trying to achieve. What’s your intention?” says MacNamara. “If you want the kids to look good, feel great and boost their confidence, then your fluency session is a good idea. If you said we’re dialling up the challenge tonight because we’re working on certain technical aspects or for a motivational intention then a messier learning session is a better idea. And it’s not just the session. The intention and debrief at the end are critical too.”

10. A continuous cycle of reviewing, debriefing and reflection

That debrief needs to occur at both a micro and macro level. “The coach does not just make decisions on a daily basis, they will be within a session,” says MacNamara. “It’s the reaction to what is happening in those day-to-day, minute to minute interactions of a coaching session, and a recognition that the environment is everything that happens to the athlete, and how they’re reacting to things.”

This goes hand in hand with regular reviews of systems, processes and athlete individual development plans. “Ten years is definitely a long time for a 13-year-old at the first stages of a pathway,” says MacNamara of the latter. “So actually reviewing plans is critically important, and integrating people into that review is key as well.”

What to read next

How Do you Track Resilience in Academy Football Players?

By John Portch

“When you think about player development and the modern-day athlete, what is it you’re experiencing, seeing, hearing? What do they want? What’s the feedback you’re receiving?”

With those questions ruminating in Leaders Performance Institute members’ minds, Luke Whitworth, our Sport Performance Team Lead, set the scene for a discussion of current trends in athlete development at youth level.

The group highlighted both trends and their attendant challenges, yet there was a sense that these also represent opportunities to refine how coaches and practitioners approach talent development.

These are the five main trends that stood out from the conversation, as well as some ideas that have served members well in their roles.

1. The provision of holistic development is a baseline expectation

“We’ve been growing when it comes to holistic development,” said a coach from a Middle Eastern academy, “not only the focus on the technical, tactical part, but also performance in the physical area, the psychological support, the educational programmes.”

It’s a situation that extends well beyond that region and it is not just the athletes but their parents who demand more rounded support.

“It is very important to be on the pitch with the players and in the dressing rooms, the lecture rooms, because it’s important to work directly with them and support them,” the coach added.

Opportunity

A psychologist based in the Australian system shared her approach:

“We have dedicated programmes and an evidence-based curriculum that teaches those skills of resilience, coping, receiving feedback and the soft skills.”

2. Earlier professionalisation

Young athletes in team sports increasingly come with their own performance entourage in tow – physios, S&Cs, psychologists – and it’s led a shift towards a “more professional mindset and approach”, as a coach based at a British university describes it.

“We’re now working in performance, not development,” said another. This expanded menu of support services is not a bad thing in isolation.

“From a coaching point of view, the influence they have on feedback that the player gives you is not necessarily aligned with what we’re trying to implement as coaches; and that can be frustrating,” said a coach at an AFL club.

Those influences include third parties, such as agents. “We actually have services that are professional organisations that just provide services for athletes who are on their way up and they cherry-pick them,” said a performance director of the Indian sporting landscape where he plies his trade. “They give them a psychologist, a physio, a strength & conditioning person and everything else they need as soon as they get a whiff that they might be talented.”

Opportunity

Compromise and clarity are essential, as the India-based performance director explained:

“As an academy we have to make agreements, establish roles and responsibilities, who should take care of this, who should take care of that, while we’re managing that professional approach.”

3. Many young people are priced out

As the price of attending both training and competitions year after year continues to rise, those from less affluent demographics are falling away.

“How can we get people who maybe can’t afford to get into these sports to stand in front of us?” said a head of youth coaching at a major English football club. “Our academy car park is amazing. It’s like a first-team car park. The days of kids coming on trains and buses to training have almost gone now.”

Opportunity

In Australia, some sporting bodies support and subsidise athletes; and if a child in a remote region requires online assistance to make it work, then that’s what they’ll receive. The aforementioned psychologist said:

“We’re very conscious of setting up a pathway that players can access equitably. We don’t charge to come on a talent camp… and we’ve just sent a player off for an MRI. We’ll pay for that. We pay for their accommodation and their food, which is probably not common across pathway sport or teenage sport in Australia.”

4. Changing athlete psychology and social needs

This is related to No 1. Today’s young athletes are often more technically skilled than previous generations, but they require more psycho-social and emotional support.

For one, young athletes today are more extrinsically motivated, as the head of youth coaching in English football observed.

“They really care about what people think of them, the perception piece, whether that’s social media, but they really care what people think about them. So being part of a group is quite important for them,” he said.

On that final point, the same scenario is playing out in Australia. “The one thing I’m sensing now is the expectation of a player that’s been at the club for a while or just coming in is that they feel connected to the environment,” said the AFL coach. “So if that doesn’t happen, we’re seeing more player movement than ever before.”

Opportunity

Players are taking more care in their choices rather than pledging blind loyalty to a club – and the smartest teams have noticed. “We’re actually seeing the greatest successes in terms of who wins the premiership or the championship from teams that do that well compared to ones that don’t,” he said before adding:

“The athlete is putting a lot of time into making decisions about their careers. I think we’ve got to step up in this space and not be walked over by the athlete, but understand what their motivations are and tailor it to the individual as much as anything. I know the social skill part is an ongoing challenge. I’ve already had older players come up to me and going ‘he’s not fitting in well socially’. So we’ve got to go to work on that.”

5. This all means that staff members must change

As the conversation neared its conclusion, Whitworth posed another pertinent question: “We’ve talked a lot about how the athlete is evolving, but in turn, how do we have to evolve as well? And what additional skills are we going to need?”

Communication, as ever, was high in the group’s thoughts. “Everyone’s gone digital first,” said a sports nutritionist based at a British university. “I probably do 80% of my work with athletes online.”

His colleague, a coach, concurred. “When there’s clarity then there’s clean execution from different disciplines. When it’s muddy, things don’t get done.”

Opportunity

The performance director based in India went further based on his experience:

“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”

What to read next

Talent ID and Development: The Race to Deliver Formula 1’s First Female World Champion

By John Portch

When it comes to considering self-awareness as a leadership quality, Emma Keith is ambivalent.

“A lot of people hold up self-awareness as the holy grail. ‘I’m really self-aware.’ Brilliant. But it’s a complete waste of your time if you do nothing with that knowledge,” she said.

“Just imagine that I’m the kind of boss that says: ‘When I’m under pressure I can get really stressed and yell’ – I don’t think I am but let’s say that I am – it doesn’t help my team at all that I have that knowledge. What helps them is that I do something about that, which is the hard part.”

Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.

A decade later, she stepped onto the stage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit to run through her organisation’s strategies for effective learning.

The Leaders Performance Institute picked five that stand out.

1. The RAF promotes self-leadership

For the RAF, learning is not just about “absorbing information”, as Keith put it, but in establishing the right habits that enable learning. Self-leadership is at the forefront of their approach. It combines that aforementioned self-awareness with self-management. It also feeds into the idea that everyone in the RAF is a leader in their own right.

“Leadership at all levels really matters,” said Keith, who believes it would be all too easy for personnel in non-command positions to absolve themselves of responsibility. “I really don’t like the term ‘follower’. It needs a word in front of it; an engaged follower, a respected or intelligent follower. Nobody just follows, or at least they shouldn’t, and I don’t want someone in my organisation who isn’t a thinking follower. What we’re really talking about is a leader who’s leading themselves with followership skills.”

Character is critical too. “You can teach skills more easily than you can teach character,” said Keith, who is less interested in what a person has done than how they have approached their opportunities.

“For example, if somebody has an amazing profile but they were dropped off at every fixture at school; they were picked up and everything was handed to them, it’s not to take it away from them but I want to see more from that person. But the kid who got on a bus and travelled 40 minutes under their own steam to make hockey practice – that shows me something about their character.”

Emma Keith in conversation with Alex Stacey at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

2. The service positions its values as the ‘carrot’ rather than the ‘stick’

The RAF has a document entitled ‘Air Publication One’. “It’s not a very sexy name, I’m afraid,” said Keith. “Welcome to the military.”

Prosaic title aside, it sets out the RAF’s values of ‘respect’, ‘integrity’, ‘service’ and ‘excellence’. There’s nothing unique in those four – you probably have something similar within your teams – but the devil is in the detail.

Air Publication One is updated from time to time, with the last occasion being in 2019.

“Those updates covered more inclusive imagery and language,” Keith continued. “Thinking about my organisation, that’s probably not that surprising. But another major change that I made to that document, which came from my experience of running officer training, was to shift this from being the stick to the carrot.”

This shift was critical because too often the document was used to browbeat good people. “Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Everyone in the service is asked what these values mean to them. “Even the word ‘discipline’ means something different to me and a 17-year-old who’s just joined up. So, if they feel that they’ve been heard and listened and talked to, I think that’s really important.”

Air Publication One is currently undergoing further revision.

3. They use peer to peer storytelling

As Keith explained, she and her team produced an anthology and a series of videos detailing the stories of RAF personnel. These are not just nice-to-haves but critical learning resources.

She illustrated her point by referring to the ineffectiveness of a top-down approach with a recruit. “With the best will in the world, if I stand up there and tell them all the things they should do, they’re going to look at me and go, ‘thanks very much, Group Captain, you do not live my world, you do not know me and I’m going to switch off. Your lived reality is different to mine’.”

Instead, “if their corporal stands up and says it, someone who’s only a couple years ahead of them, that really is powerful. Who in your organisation can you help sell that message for you?”

4. They accept that learning never ends

The RAF used to approach leadership development for its aspiring officers as something to be taught in one hit. Today, the service adheres to a four-step pathway:

“We’re changing ‘lead teams’ to ‘lead others’ because not everybody has a team, but you lead by role model and example,” said Keith, who also highlighted the pathway’s non-linear nature. “The reality is you will be doing all of these things all of the time. The Chief of the Air Staff is still leading himself. You never stop that.”

She also encourages challenge from younger generations. “It’s about having humility on both sides to have those conversations. That’s where things like mentoring and reverse mentoring can be so powerful. It’s an exchange of ideas that can be so helpful. I mentor a lot of people and, honestly, every time I put the phone down or put the coffee cup down, I’ve learned as much as they have, if not more, I am absolutely sure.”

5. They leave the ‘how’ to their learners

Nestled at the heart of the RAF’s guiding principles is ‘mission command’, which refers to the empowerment of mission leaders.

“In simple terms this is the idea that the leader or whoever’s in charge of the task is set the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, but we really try and keep out of the ‘how’,” said Keith. “What you’re trying to give is as much freedom of manoeuvre for people on the ‘how’ as you can.”

If she needs a team to cross a river to rendezvous with someone on the other side, for example, she will let them decide the ‘how’ so that they are not reliant on returning to her for instruction should things go wrong.

“It allows a speed of decision-making, empowerment for that person. It operates on trust and it crucially frees up headspace for the person in charge. Another wonderful gift you get from that technique is innovation and creativity, because they will probably do things differently to you, which is potentially uncomfortable for you, but also probably helpful.”

More on effective learning strategies

‘If the Speed of Learning Isn’t Fast Enough, the Moment Is Gone.’ Five Challenges in Creating More Effective Learning Environments and their Potential Solutions

When it Comes to Learning, the Coach Must Create the Right Environment, But the Athlete Must Want to Step into it

By John Portch

“From assessing the mental models inside the sport or the system, you can tell if it is a learning organisation or not.”

So says a coach developer who has worked across the North American, European and Australasian systems during their career.

“Even how they conduct performance reviews, induct, exit – all of that tells you about their speed of learning.”

When we asked the sports performance community to speak to us about the factors that affect the quality of leadership in their organisations, the most common answer was ‘learning & development’.

Its prevalence as a topic in our Trend Report has obvious roots: the speed of learning, as this coach developer put it, can enable you to outthink your otherwise well-matched peers.

Last week, Rachel Vickery, a high-performance specialist helping teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure, led a virtual roundtable entitled ‘How are we making learning effective?’

The importance of the environment came up time and again, as did the athlete-coach relationship and coach education practices. The group also spoke about AI’s role in learning.

Here, we outline five common challenges and run through a list of potential solutions.

1. When the front office and coach are on different wavelengths

“I asked coaches in my community of practice to bring their current work frustrations. I expected a percentage of challenges and opportunities related to athletes but, without exception, every single frustration was system-related or management-related.”

This head coach, with extensive experience of team sports in Australia, perfectly captures the common misalignment between coaches and senior management. Often when it comes to learning – be it coach development or athlete-facing – everyone has different expectations and, therefore, support can be found wanting.

“We see it all the time in complex sporting environments: the overabundance of surveillance and support in the athlete community,” said one member of their experience working in the US Olympic and Paralympic system. “But if we were to look at that as being applied to the coach, we would very rarely see a similar level of support structure around them.”

Potential solutions:

• Stop thinking about competencies and start thinking about the demands of the coaching environment – you can only aid a coach’s development if you’re addressing their real-life challenges.
• Front office workshops. For some teams, voluntary workshops that teach non-performance staff how to work with coaches have been oversubscribed, such is their popularity and the perceived need.
• IDPs for executives? This suggestion won’t be for all organisations but could work in smaller, startup-like environments.

2. Learning does not always stick nor is it always relevant

“Coaching moments are critical. If the speed of learning isn’t fast enough, the moment is gone.”

These are the words of a coach developer who has worked across the globe and witnessed different ideas of how people learn. Coaches tend to prefer organic learning over structured IDPs, which is often at odds with the “business minds” in the front office. “Communicating up is definitely a different language than communicating with our coaches,” said a coach developer working in US baseball. “The language of our coaches is non-linear. They want their learning to be organic and they want a relationship with the coach developer.”

And it is not just coach development. Some teams are overwhelmed by data that doesn’t help them to answer key questions. Without that ability to parse the data for insights, it is difficult to learn.

Potential solutions:

• There must be space for both formal and informal learning. “The informal makes it happen,” said the coach developer above. “The formal means you can track change and pay attention to history.”
• Clarify your problems, implement your solutions and learn from the outcomes. This coach developer also devised a ‘speed of learning’ model based on these principles.
• Use tech tools, such as GoPro or microphones. “The coach has been able to reflect and go, ‘I didn’t notice that cue from an athlete’,” said a high performance manager who has witnessed the use of GoPro in Australian rules football.

3. The enduring generational gap between athletes and their coaches

“I feel like in elite sport, we’re so far behind modern pedagogy in high school environments. Coaches are struggling with getting their ideas across.”

It’s a line that says it all when it comes to the learning of younger athletes. It has an attendant impact on coach development. “Coaches are just not developing the way that we think they should at the rate that they should,” said the aforementioned high performance manager.

Potential solutions:

• Meet athletes where they’re at. Literally. It could be the training pitch, the dining room, other communal areas.
• Provide online learning modules. These are easily accessible anywhere, anytime – perfect for the ‘YouTube generation’.
• Use TikTok, Instagram etc. Short and snappy wins the day for coaches willing to step away from the traditional.
• Use older athletes as role models. They’ve been there, done that, and younger athletes will listen.
• Try to gamify performance. Let athletes see their data, let them challenge themselves and, if appropriate, enable them to compete with their peers.
• Promote athlete agency. One coach developer based in the US endorsed an athlete-led TEDx-style series.
• Trial shorter meetings. Reduce an hour-long session to 30 minutes; and make sure those sessions are interactive.

4. The limitations of current AI models

“AI should be used to support the growth and creativity of staff as opposed to being used for shortcuts where people become lazy.”

This is an issue that likely warrants its own roundtable discussion.

Overreliance on AI, as this coach pointed out above, can stifle creativity. The table also highlighted the shortcomings of current large language models:

• The difficulty of transcribing and analysing multi-speaker environments where current AI tools struggle for accuracy.
• Intellectual property protection can be lacking, while it can be hard to choose the appropriate platform for a specific task.
• The inherent biases in AI-generated results.

Potential solutions:

• Establish clear parameters, regardless of what platform you use. This is fundamental to a good outcome.
• Crosscheck across two or more platforms. “Take that conversation and throw it into another AI tool – you are now responsible for creating that intellectual tension,” as one coach said.
• Ask the AI engine to provide three to five counterarguments. Don’t accept the first answer at face value.
• Ask the AI engine to keep track of patterns over time. “This,” as one coach put it, “eliminates a lot of the fluff”.

5. Confusion in coach development practices

“A coach developer is a curriculum director, a teacher, a consultant. But I don’t think there’s been a standard that’s been applied that captures all of the different ways in which the coach developer works.”

The issue described by this high performance manager illustrates how complex the role the coach developer has become. “On the top of them are the organisational goals and desires, and on the bottom the coach’s individual disposition,” they added.

Potential solutions:

• Map the demands of the role prior to the development programme. “Sometimes the learning is separate to the demands of the environment,” said a coach developer currently based in the New Zealand system.
• Provide clear job descriptions for coach developers. Of the balanced needs of the organisation and the individual, the high performance manager above said: “It’s up to the coach developer to determine the learning strategies that we’re going to deploy to help this individual coach navigate the complexity of those two environments.”
• But also be aware of the developing coaching landscape. Few insights illustrate the complexity of coach development as well as this observation from the coach developer working in baseball. “The role diversifies as the relationships increase,” they said. “Coach developers want it to be organic, and they want the relationship.”

What to read next

How Do you Develop the Most Expert Coaching Workforce in World Football?

By John Portch

“We know that learning has to be important because if you’re out-learning your competitors, you’re probably going to be outperforming them too.”

So says Edd Vahid, the Premier League’s Head of Academy Football Operations.

The numbers as revealed in our Trend Report back him up. Almost one in five practitioners who completed our survey felt that learning and development had a direct impact on the quality of leadership in their teams.

“It has to come from senior leaders, it must be role-modelled from the top,” Vahid adds. “Role models are crucial in setting the tone for organisational learning.”

When it comes to teaching and learning, he has advice for coaches and athletes alike.

For coaches

Create the right environment…

The skill of the teacher, coach or trainer is to create an environment where you’ve got the capacity to learn, to receive feedback, and for it not to be immediately critical.

That means creating opportunities…

If you’re learning and you’re able to apply it, you’re going to see progress. You need the opportunity to because therein lies the application of knowledge.

You must also work to understand how people learn…

I think we could probably spend more time on this as an industry. To support an individual, you need to understand an individual, to understand an individual, you need to invest time in them. People learn where there’s been care, an attentiveness, and an investment in the person. The coach needs to understand what makes someone tick beyond the superficial level. What are their influences? What is creating an impact on them when turning up to do a session? What’s going on at home? Such considerations are crucial.

Also ask yourself: what are you trying to achieve?

What outcome are you trying to achieve? That will determine the approach, timing and future support. If you simply use feedback as an opportunity to offload, especially when a learner hasn’t done well, it may serve your benefit because you’ve been able to get rid of some of your frustrations. But that’s not right. To help them, you have to offer them something they haven’t seen themselves or it’s going to drive them further down.

Enable good feedback loops…

It starts with an expectation. The feedback is specific to that expectation. Then identify what the development opportunities are. So how do you avoid or improve a certain situation in the future? Then there’s the monitoring.

Inviting people to share their feedback on the process is an important part of the feedback loop. The best coaches plan but they’re also responding to emerging themes and the needs of players within a particular session. It goes back to understanding the player’s needs and considering those in session design. We probably don’t seek their feedback often enough. Ask simple questions: how is this working for you? What’s landing? What influences that? Are you progressing?

For the athlete

And learners must be adaptive…

We each have our learning preferences – others will be better equipped to talk about the myths that surround learning styles and other elements – but you have to find a way to respond to the stimulus in the environment. If you haven’t had opportunities how are you going to accelerate your learning without the chance to compete?

That means there has to be personal responsibility…

You see it all the time: the highest performers, whether implicitly or explicitly, go out of their way to make sure they’re ready to learn. There has to be personal responsibility when it comes to how you turn up to learn, how prepared you are to absorb the information that’s available in the environment, whether that’s through players, coaches or other ways. You must be prepared to learn.

What to read next

From the Practice Room to the World Stage: How the Royal College of Music Prepares its Students for Careers as Musicians

By John Portch

As both a musician and a teacher, Ashley Solomon says “I must put my neck on the block” and be willing to perform for the students whom he tutors.

Solomon is the Chair and Head of Historical Performance at the Royal College of Music – the capacity in which he took to the college’s stage at April’s Leaders Meet: the Talent Journey – but he is also a world-renowned flautist and Director of an award-winning ensemble named Florilegium.

When Florilegium were booked to perform at central London’s Wigmore Hall in March, it was the perfect opportunity for Solomon to show his students how it’s done.

“I managed to persuade the hall to offer some under-35s £5 tickets and I said to my students ‘it costs you more to buy a pint in the pub, so if I’m not worth more than that I’m very upset’,” he says.

“As a result, 30 of them came, which was wonderful for the hall, because it tends to be full of white-haired people of a certain age. They could see me and my colleagues try to promote what we teach them to do. Part of my job here is to try and inspire the next generation to be better than me.”

Solomon tells the audience that he tutors a range of bachelors, masters and PhD students but, as he explains, “it’s no good having the theory without being able to do the practice.”

Here, in his own words, Solomon explains how the Royal College of Music prepares gifted students for careers as musicians.

It is best to spot the talent when it’s not fully formed… The Royal College of Music is one of the greatest institutions in the world, so we rarely have people apply who don’t think they have a chance of getting in, but we have hundreds apply for a small number of places. You have to spot their potential during the audition phase.

If they have passions beyond their music, I’m not interested… The last question I like to ask undergraduate candidates is usually the most telling: ‘is there anything else that you’re passionate about?’ I lose interest in those that give me a list of other things. We’re training elite athletes and you have to be so single-minded and you have to make so many sacrifices to be absolutely the top of your game emotionally, physically and mentally. If they’re distracted, then I’m not sure this is the right place for them.

Where the talent is not exceptional, there must be a glimmer of excitement when they play… You hear it in a sound, in a music shape, in the passion, the moment when the hairs on your arms stand on end. It might not be the best playing in the room but there’s been something that touched you.

Students from more deprived areas are the most interesting… Most of those who come at undergraduate level have either been to specialist music schools or their parents have paid for private instrumental lessons. They know their talent and you can see those who walk into the building from a music school. They have confidence – I wouldn’t use the word ‘arrogance’ – and feel comfortable here. Students from our Tri-Borough Hubs [government-funded music schools in the west London area], on the other hand, are desperate to impress and there’s a different energy about them. We might think a little differently about those students when they apply if they’re not quite achieving the highest level because you see the potential and the fire in their eyes. That’s worth much more than being able to do it all – if you can do it all you’re actually quite hard to teach.

An ego is a healthy thing… I tell my students that I have a healthy ego. Otherwise why would I want to stand in front of 2,000 people and play? That’s to be embraced. There’s no point in being falsely modest about it if you’re really good and you’ve done years of training. You should know you have the skill to deliver in your back pocket. How do you feed off an audience who are fidgeting? Many of you here today will have seen our performance simulator. We show students what it’s like to be in the green room before the concert, to walk onto the stage to the applause, to cope with the silence before you play. We have students here who delight in all those areas and who have the healthy ego required to develop those skillsets.

As a teacher, it’s important to know what not to say… I’ve spent a lot of lessons saying to myself ‘that won’t flick the switch on if I make that comment’. You need to look for that kernel of words that will draw out of that person exactly what you want without being too explicit. Like all of you, I carry with me things that don’t work and know not to repeat those.

We try to replicate the profession while they are students… the best way of seeing how musicians cope is to take them on tour. Every two years we take a group of students to perform at a festival in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon. We tell them it’s an eight-hour coach journey, followed by a two-hour rehearsal and the show. You’ve got to drink plenty of water and eat sensibly because musicians need to know when to release the right energy for you to deliver the goods. We don’t wait until the last minute to push them over the edge and say ‘sink or swim’.

We support all graduates for the first five years of their careers… We can’t just say ‘thank you, now off you go’. We have a careers advice department and help them to make connections in the industry.

What to read next

Drama Lesson: How an Actor’s Creativity Flows when the Director Relinquishes Control

By John Portch

It is common for athletes to spend much of their time trying to please the coach.

While not a bad thing per se, if the athlete is overly focused on doing what their coach may see as the ‘right’ thing, they’re not focused on performing to the best of their ability. Performance can be suboptimal if the coach imposes a creative straitjacket.

There are parallels between the athlete-coach relationship and the actor-director dynamic in the performing arts, as British actor Michael Fox explains onstage at the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“It’s about quality listening,” he says. “The director’s role is to lead, to steer the ship, but the frustrating thing is that you can lose answers if the actors are not able to voice their opinion and put it out into the room.

“It’s good to be heard, and the director can do what they want with it, but if you’re allowed to voice it then you can let it go. You can lose people’s creative instincts if they’re not able to voice their opinion.”

Fox, who is best known for his work on Downton Abbey and Dunkirk, has also appeared in numerous theatre productions and voiced characters in several video games since graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

On occasion in his subsequent career, he has encountered directors who see themselves as “gurus”. “You can make people really shrink around you,” he says of such characters. “Am I just an instrument for you to share with the world how amazing you are?”

Fox’s observations struck a chord with the coaches in the room at the Kia Oval and raised several questions:

Does the responsibility sit solely with the director?

No. In fact, as Fox says, “you have to still value the things that you need to do to make sure that you’re at the top of your game.” His routine includes yoga and meditation and, since he “spends a lot of time unemployed” he must do whatever it takes to ensure he is ready to go following a successful audition.

It sounds quite insular. How does that translate to a company setting?

“You do the work separately and then come and be crafted,” says Fox. “You’re taking the edges off to push in the right direction. You don’t want the director to do all the work.”

Speaking of directors, surely no two are alike?

Not at all. “That first week we just don’t know what we’re expecting,” says Fox. “You have to adapt to their way of working.” He appeared at the summit during the London production of The Fear of 13, which was unique in its genesis. “We were up on the first day and we nearly staged the front half of the play, which is madness, but it was amazing. But most directors talk over a coffee for the first few days.”

What qualities define the best directors, in Fox’s opinion?

“The directors I like working with are the ones that come into the first day of rehearsals and say ‘I don’t have all the answers – we’ll find them together’,” says Fox. “I respond better to that sort of mentality because I think it’s more honest. We don’t have all the answers. The best idea can come from anywhere in the room.”

However, it is still common practice, as he explains, for film call sheets to rank actors by importance on any given day. “That kills creativity, personal agency and instinct,” adds Fox. “They feel like their voice is less important.”

Therefore, “the best directors can give trust and individual agency to the actor over what they’re doing, their artistry, then you feel like you’re growing as an individual.” Critically, “in the moments where you need to be instinctive onstage you’re not thinking about getting it right for them or making a mistake.”

How might this look in practice?

A good example is Sinéad Rushe’s 2023 production of Shakespeare’s Othello in which Fox played the character of Iago.

It was notable for the fact that three actors played Iago onstage at the same time and Othello was given a more prominent role than in traditional stagings.

“We wanted to take Iago’s complicity with the audience away and put Othello much more at the centre of that play,” Fox told The Uncensored Critic Podcast earlier this year. Iago’s famous soliloquys became dialogues between the three aspects of his character rather than the usual series of knowing asides to the audience.

Rushe, who also taught Fox at Central, facilitated creative discussions from the off. “We’ve had two periods of development just of ten days each just to begin to workshop this idea of three actors playing Iago,” Rushe told The Theatre Audience Podcast on the eve of the second preview.

She also wanted to protect actor Martins Imhangbe in the titular role. “There’s a racial dynamic there that’s very problematic and there are these very interesting histories of actors who’ve played Othello over the years of finding it actually quite a distressing experience of feeling like the entire audience is laughing at them through the vehicle of Iago.”

Imhangbe himself also spoke at the time of the company’s work “dismantling” and “reconstructing” the play. “We’re trying to do something different with it, so it means we have to see it with fresh eyes,” he told The Rendition. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between what was written and how it’s relevant today.”

Rushe added that the production provided “a feeling of kindred spirits and people up for working in a collaborative and ensemble way.”

Fox agrees. “It was an unusual take but actually it meant that people could hear the play anew. And I loved it.”

What to read next

How to Transform an Underperforming Environment into a Thriving Hub