Group Captain Emma Keith took to the stage to outline the RAF’s ever-adapting approach to bringing trainee officers up to speed.
“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.”
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British actor Michael Fox explains that the best directors know that the answer can come from anyone in the room.
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.”
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In a world where they don’t know ‘what it takes to win’, Fran Longstaff and More Than Equal are ‘building the road as they walk’.
Fran Longstaff, the Head of Research at More Than Equal, reminds the audience at April’s Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey that no woman has competed in a Formula 1 race since the Italian Lella Lombardi in 1976.
This is despite motorsport being one of the few mixed gender sporting domains where men and women can compete on equal footing.
“Our research rates show that females make up ten per cent of participation rates in motorsport,” adds Longstaff. “That goes down to four per cent at the elite level.”
More Than Equal’s mission is certainly bold. The organisation was founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and philanthropist Karel Komárek. The pair recognised that even the most accomplished young female drivers are behind on the development curve compared to their male peers.
Longstaff was drafted in to better “understand the problem behind the problem”. “Research and data runs through our Driver Development Programme like a stick of rock,” she tells the audience at the Royal College of Music. This approach is critical when the end point is still unknown.
The programme itself is divided into four pillars:
Their search began in karting. They trawled through the race results in a sport where it is notoriously hard for girls to take the next leap.
“That sounds like an easy task but karting race results are often stored as PDFs,” says Longstaff. “It is objectively the worst way to store data.” They also had to gender mark race results, which took time.
Additionally, more than 500 young female kart drivers heeded More Than Equal’s call to apply for their Driver Development Programme. The drivers with the most potential were invited to follow-up interviews, which extended to parents and families. “That way we could understand what activity they’d already done to enable them to get the results we were seeing on the track. This is where you could have some interesting conversations and even say the driver was over-performing their level of activity in that sport.”
Six drivers, all aged 13-14 years old at the time, made it into More Than Equal’s first cohort:
To understand the problem behind the problem, More Than Equal, produced its Inside Track report in 2023:
“There were fewer than 30 research papers on the human factors related to driver performance,” says Longstaff, who explains that they are “building the road as we walk”. Data is even more scant when it comes to female drivers or their experience behind the wheel. “We’re looking at how we can optimise and adjust cars to ensure that females can perform at their best without being hindered.” Longstaff underlines that this will not come at the cost of performance decrements to the car.
Additionally, the Driver Development Programme takes a 360 approach, taking in the physiological, psychological and technical elements of racing in an effort to better address the difficulties young girls face in karting. “We want to make that transition as seamless as possible,” says Longstaff.
There are regular coaching contact points. “We have camps every six to eight weeks where we come together as a community.” The girls recently had the opportunity to spend time with Coulthard at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. “They asked a lot of questions about his experiences and could really start to understand what it is to be an elite racing driver.”
Longstaff also explained that More Than Equal’s research is freely shared with F1 teams, which is a break with the usual secrecy that governs their interactions.
Benchmarks simply don’t exist for female F1 drivers. “We don’t know what a racing car driver should be doing and look like at 16 versus 18,” says Longstaff.
More Than Equal has commissioned two PhD students at Manchester Metropolitan University to help establish those benchmarks. “One student is going to be building physiological, psychological, cognitive training and anthropometric profiles from drivers all the way from karting to F1.”
The research into male and female differences will kick all tired and unfounded assumptions about female drivers into the long grass.
The other PhD student will research how hormones impact performance, particularly when it comes to cognitive function.
This work will help More Than Equal to build was Longstaff calls “the largest data lake on the planet on the predictors of female racing driver performance”. She adds: “All of those PDF race results get pulled into one central pool and we start to overlay that with the physiological, cognitive and psychological data. Once you have that, you can start to make predictions and we can understand who may have a greater chance of success at the next level of competition.”
It will also help to widen the talent net. “Once we have these driver profiles, we may be able to start to understand whether there are certain populations where we can spot talent.” Longstaff suggests the world of esports. “It’s a 50-50 split in terms of male-female players, so there’s a huge population we might be able to pull from.”
On top of that, digital twinning technology has the potential to enable teams to optimise how they adjust cars to the needs of their drivers with recourse to expensive testing. “You don’t necessarily need to be on the track,” says Longstaff, “but we can only do that by having all those data points in one system.”
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iBrainTech has worked with some of the biggest names in soccer, including Juventus, and now they are seeking to deliver their neurocognitive training tool to the ranks of academy soccer.
Main photo: iBrainTech
Users wear an EEG headset, which monitors brain activity and translates intention into action on the screen. The goal is to help soccer players sharpen their decision making and execution. It has been adopted by clubs in Serie A (Juventus), MLS (Orlando City SC and formerly Atlanta United), LaLiga (Real Sociedad) and the Portuguese Primeira Liga (SL Benfica). Longtime MLS star Jonathan Bornstein was an avid user.
Now, i-BrainTech is seeking to broaden its reach to academy and youth players. It’s a well-trodden path for performance tech to prove themselves with the elite before reaching the larger consumer market. But i-BrainTech has both the advantage of its inherent gamification and the challenge of making complex tech more frictionless.
“All transformative technologies should be ready and willing to become accessible, to validate the impact on the top level of performance and then to allow access of youth,” i-BrainTech Co-Founder/CEO Konstantin Sonkin said. “You need to be ready to cater your value to the young generation, and we are so lucky to be an engaging game at the end of the day.”
Sonkin has been working on this technology for 15 years to balance high signal quality with ease of use. He described a remodeled product as “a top-level, consumer-ready headset.” The goal is not only to improve the performance of younger players but also to encourage more athletic participation and unlock new revenue streams for clubs, such as with a co-branded cap or content.
“We want to drive them from Instagram back to the pitch,” Sonkin said. “Because when you exercise your mind, you’re so eager to execute in the [physical world] because your brain got so excited. It’s called neuro-priming. It has excessive, let’s say, electricity. It wants to utilize that in real-world actions, and that is the connection between their content created by clubs and then a long lifetime value.”
Michita Toda previously used i-BrainTech with rehabbing players as a physical therapist at Orlando City, where he saw value in keeping injured players mentally sharp while physically recovering. He recently joined the North Carolina Courage as its Head Athletic Trainer and is hoping to bring the product there, both for the NWSL club but also for the associated men’s USL team, North Carolina FC, as well as for the large youth academy system in the area.
“Being on the medical side of things, we talk a lot about youth sports specialization and how the more they play at a younger age, that might make them more susceptible to injury,” Toda said. “Well, using technology like this to supplement what they’re already doing, but not overdoing it physically, they still get the mental reps and get the quote-unquote ‘practice’ without having to tax their body.”
Members of the Juventus Residency Academy train with i-BrainTech. (Photo: iBrainTech)
Limited studies have shown promising results with the transfer of skill from the i-BrainTech product to the pitch. Real Sociedad B — the LaLiga club’s reserve team, which competes in the Spanish third division — completed a 15-player case study that spanned three months and 12,500 visualized actions. Those using i-BrainTech improved 12.4% in the accuracy of long kicks compared to 2.6% in the control group. Five of the eight players using i-BrainTech’s neurofeedback training also reported better concentration in matches.
“When we actually repeat all the actions on the pitch, most of the time we train our mind-body connection,” Sonkin said. “We train our muscle memory. Muscle obviously doesn’t have any memory. Memory lives in the brain.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
In the second episode of our three-part series, the AIS’s Director of National Performance Support Systems discusses how tech can be better used to deliver insights to athletes and coaches.
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“One of the things we’re trying to figure out, particularly for fresh graduates coming into high performance, is that sense of pressure to utilise technology because that’s what’s seen to be done in high performance,” she tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders John Portch.
Miranda is the Director of National Performance Support Systems at the Australian Institute of Sport and a practising physiotherapist, which made her an ideal guest on this special Teamworks Vodcast, particularly when it comes to sharing her perspective on the way the Australian sports system uses technology.
“The next step is ensuring practitioners have got the critical thinking skills to understand why I am using this and what is it adding. What is it telling me? It’s getting that ability to analyse.”
Her words bring to mind High Performance Unpacked, the Teamworks Special Report that spoke to the importance of the practitioner optimising a given tech product to the final user.
It resonated with Andrew too. “When you haven’t got a centralised mechanism for presenting and communicating data, it shines a light on how important it is to be done correctly,” he says. “The greatest dataset in the world, if not communicated correctly, is nowhere near as effective and may be detrimental.”
Elsewhere in this episode, Miranda and Andrew discuss the idea of the physio room as the heartbeat of the team; the balance between system and individual performance [29:30]; why the physiotherapist is a ‘life coach’; and bridging the evidence gap in female athlete health.
Check out Episode 1, with Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers:
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
The MyTOCA app is also helping TOCA Soccer to stay more engaged with their soccer trainees away from the practice facility.
Main photo: TOCA Football Inc
“We’ve been collecting more and more data, but there really became this gap, if you will, from a customer’s perspective,” TOCA Founder Eddie Lewis said. “We had a lot of really powerful training data, but we made it really difficult to consume and collect.”
Lewis said a clear goal emerged to make an app that was engaging, but also one that easily displayed the value of TOCA training session. He told SBJ that the entire process to build the MyTOCA app started with a complete teardown of its existing platform, which struggled to collect data. The re-engineered setup creates more personalization for players but also helps TOCA stay more engaged with their soccer trainees outside of the facility walls.
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“The ability to take a player, use the data to not only understand where they are — but also understand insights that would be very difficult to see necessarily from the naked eye unless you spent a ton of time with these players, and then attack those strengths and weaknesses from a training perspective — we think is really valuable,” Lewis said. “And not only that, we want to share that progression along the way. At the end of the day, we believe the higher the training, the higher the customer satisfaction and obviously, the longer retention.”
The app has a trophy room for players to look at their accomplishments, as well as a community leaderboard and internal booking feature. Lewis also mentioned that this is the first phase of MyTOCA, setting the stage for more rollouts like a planned TOCA Score metric.
The deployment coincided with the start of the second annual TOCA Skills Showcase, an event rolled out in partnership with the MLS that spans two months in a competition across 22 TOCA Soccer centers. TOCA Football entered a 10-year partnership with the league at the end of 2022. Lewis added that the pairing has created both “validation and certainly credibility in terms of what we’re doing from a training perspective.”
Regarding the opening of the first TOCA Social site in Dallas, Lewis said there’s no specific date to share yet. But the goal to open ahead of the 2026 World Cup remains in an effort to capitalize on the nationwide interest that will build as kickoffs get closer.
“Everyone’s going to be interested in a in a soccer-related story, or understanding what’s going on with soccer in the US,” Lewis said. “And I think if we’re not ready to step into that spotlight during that window, we miss a once-in-a-generational opportunity.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
