By John Portch

Winning is great – but at what cost?

“In Australian sport, we went through a period where we were highly successful, across numerous sports, but there were often implications for athletes’ mental health,” says Ben Robertson, the National Wellbeing Manager at Tennis Australia.

Robertson is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute about the change in thinking that came about in Australian sport.

He says: “The Australian government was looking at this and asking ‘why are we funding this? Winning titles and obtaining individual results are great, but we are potentially leaving these athletes with limited  life skills or other skills for transitioning into a life beyond sport?’ Sport has always wrestled with this, especially as it’s gone professional in the last 30 years or so.”

Robertson is joined by his colleague Nicole Kriz, Tennis Australia’s National Lead of Tours, Camps, College and Wellbeing. The duo are speaking from a camp in France where they have travelled with a group of 13 and 14-year-old players to compete in an international competition.

It is not unknown, Kriz explains, for a 24-hour trip from Melbourne to a European destination to be delayed by 12 hours or more. “And these are young kids,” she says. “Life can throw anything at them, such as travel disruption, and they need coping mechanisms. We’re not even talking about competition yet. If they don’t have the skills to deal with that then they’re really not going to cope once they’re here on the ground, and that has to have a follow-on effect on their enjoyment, being an athlete, their ability to tour, and being able to turn up and compete.”

“If they can’t find a way off-court, they’re not going to find a way on-court,” adds Robertson. To that end, Tennis Australia has committed to proactive, holistic development of its junior players through its Wellbeing and Life Skills Programs.

The latter was born from conversations between Kriz and Robertson at a time when Kriz was working with Australian Pro Tour athletes on tennis’ WTA Tour. These athletes’ performances on court and touring capacity were being affected by issues off-court.

The Life Skills Program consists of eight units: independent living, working and living with others, travel, personal development, education and career, managing money, personal health, living overseas and other cultures. These programs  seek to develop wellbeing-focused skills such as regulation and self-awareness and life skills such as cooking, doing the laundry, or buying a ticket at a railway station.

“We want to develop resilient, capable, independent kids,” says Kriz, “If we do then the parents are going to be more confident about their child’s functioning and touring capabilities as well.”

It is an ethical responsibility that Tennis Australia takes seriously. “We’re taking these kids away from their No 1 support network in their parents, friends and their school environment,” says Robertson. “It’s down to us to develop their off-court skills, and as trivial as some of those may seem, you’re developing the base for them to build on, so that when they are on the tour at 18 or even earlier, by themselves potentially, they have these skills so that it’s not foreign to them when they get there. If they have to do it later in life then the anxiety and the frustration kicks in.

“It seems really basic and a lot of it is, but it’s our responsibility on tours. We’re here to compete, we’d love to win, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the tour and we try to explain that to the kids and the parents. Winning’s great, it’s part of the process, but you spend so much more time off-court. Of 24 hours a day you probably play for two. You’ve got 22 hours left to sleep, develop relationships; the list goes on. It’s the same for any sport.”

Holistic development

Robertson observes that the narrative in sport is gradually shifting from the idea that holistic development automatically translates into competition to the view that athletes are people who just happen, in this case, to play tennis.

“I think that’s shifted in all sports because we cannot guarantee that we’re going to take a 13-year-old and, a few years later say they are going to be the No 1 in the world. But if we’re taking them away for four, five or six weeks, we’re going to give them the best experience, develop them as a person, and over time, if they go on to be a great player, fantastic.”

Both Robertson and Kriz make the point that their programs are still in their infancy, but these initiatives are indicative of that shift in wider sport, particularly with regards to wellbeing. “The analogy we have with the kids is that they all go to the gym no questions asked. They’ll do prehab; they don’t question that from a physical point of view. What we say is ‘this stuff here is prehab for your mental health and wellbeing, which allows you to perform at your best, whatever that might be’.”

The Wellbeing Program, much like the Life Skills Program, is a focal point for players and coaches who tour with Tennis Australia.

“There’s five pillars within our Wellbeing Program: ‘mindfulness’, ‘learn’, ‘giving back’, inside that is gratitude, ‘physical activity’ and ‘connection’,” says Robertson, who taken the athletes through some box breathing techniques at breakfast that morning. “The theme for this week with the under-13 and 14 girls is mindfulness. We’ve done some deliberate practice whether it be in a classroom setting or outside around ‘what is mindfulness? Why is it important? How does it translate to on-court? Why is it important as a human being? How does it tie to your mental health?’ And then there’s conversation around ‘these things are great but how do you manage it?’ So you’re not always thinking about the future and you’re not holding onto the past. You do that anyway, but how do you then quieten your mind for short periods?”

Direct observation is a useful way of assessing transference. “Some kids will practise during the game; at the change of ends they’ll sit and you’ll observe them. Two nights ago at dinner, I asked a player to name ten emotions. They could give me four and then got stuck. I said ‘right, you’ve got to come back tomorrow and give me the other six’. I asked the player ‘how did you feel?’ We tied it back to on-court; they won the match and had a bit of trouble in the second set. ‘What were you feeling? Let’s name those.’ That’s the ad hoc opportunity to teach them around emotional literacy and language and go ‘you don’t always go to the big ones – there’s little ones in between. And how do you self-regulate? What are the tools?’ They’re just ad hoc conversations but learning is ongoing the whole time.”

Kriz stresses the importance of educating the athletes to help increase their self-awareness in addition to broadening their language and understanding of stress responses. “When you are putting some language and context to it, kids can refer to that quite easily. If they’re unaware and they don’t have the language around the self-awareness, then they’re just going to react and respond and behave without thinking. So if we can put some understanding and some context around it, then they are better at identifying where they are in this and it’s not just ‘situation-respond’.”

Losing streaks stand out as an area where such tools could be useful. “What’s a ‘loss’?” asks Kriz. “We try to change the language around that. We haven’t spoken about results at all on this trip because this is a developmental tour both on and off court. We try to remove that pressure already from results.

“So if they’ve already heard that language and that education at 14, they can refer back to that at 17. It’s not black and white, win and lose or good and bad, it’s about ‘what am I learning here?’ If they’ve got that reference point they’ve got the skills moving forward to deal with it and reframe it and change their perspective on it.”

“The one thing that coaches ask is ‘did you compete?’” says Robertson. “‘Did you compete to the best of your ability? Yes and you lost. OK, you can swallow that, be proud of your efforts. Sometimes you just get beaten by a better player but you’ve got to learn from that. And if you didn’t compete to the best of your ability then why not?’ Then it’s backtracking to ‘I didn’t sleep well’, ‘I had doughnuts for breakfast’, whatever it may be. The conversation is purely around competing. You don’t want to be too content or comfortable with losing but you want to ask ‘did I compete to the best of my ability?’ Why or why not? That’s the conversation that coaches have with them and that’s where the skills come in because if we said to them go and do it all yourself and they’re overawed and they get smashed on court and off court and they say ‘I hate tennis, I’m out’.”

Both Robertson and Kriz state that this can be a challenge because tennis is ranked – a fact not lost on players, coaches or their parents. “We’re trying to change that narrative and make them feel comfortable that it’s about development,” says Robertson. As long as they’ve done the best they can it’s about learning for the next tour and then the next tour and then the next tour. And then it’s the same with the parents because the kids get off the court and they feel accountable and want to ring mum and dad to explain the result. ‘I won or I lost’. We’re still on a learning curve with a lot of our parents that this is about development on and off the court, but we’re seeing growth. By the third week, they’re comfortable with who they are, they’re talking to other international players, they’re self-managing better, so there’s a bit more energy.

“Conversely, you’ll have a player who is up and another who is down, so you’ve now got to go back and tell them ‘we need to get you through the next little bit’ and bring in some self-management tools that we’ve practised. It’s just that reassurance because they have it in their head that they need to be the best player here and then they get all the sponsors, then they go to No 1, and then they start to forecast and some of the parents do too.”

Match videos are also sent to the players’ parents and private coaches, who are mostly back in Australia, within 24 to 36 hours. It is a relatively new practice but it feeds into Tennis Australia’s aims. Kriz says: “They can work through it with their private coach and have a better conversation about what’s going on as well, not just judging it on a win-loss. So we are saying to the parents before you have a conversation with the kids or the coaches, before the private coach is having a conversation with the kid, watch the video and then let’s go through it as opposed to judging straight away on wins and losses.”

Developing life skills

Tennis Australia’s Life Skills Program, which is being mapped to adolescent development and designed alongside the Australian educational framework, combines online theory and activities with practical application in a way that is both fun and interactive.

Kriz cites an example of an online exercise. She says: “We’ve taken a screen shot of a departure board at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and one of the questions will be: ‘if your flight to Stockholm is LU378, tell me what terminal you need to be at, what time you’re departing and what time your gate is’. We’ve then put some quizzes in the back end of that. Then once we actually go to Charles de Gaulle, we’ll go to the departure board and say: ‘OK, you guys learned how to do this this week, now I want you to put it into practice. Find it for us.’”

She returns to the theme of engagement and buy-in from players for life skills. Coaches and parents are starting to view them as a priority too. “Once you have buy-in then the engagement piece becomes better. Once the kids go ‘I need to do it and I want to do it’ it’s then asking where in the schedule on a daily basis we can do it. Once you have that there’s a huge appetite from the kids because they feel better equipped and more confident about travelling and there’s a certain amount of pride they take.” On another occasion, the players were taken to a railway station and shown how to buy tickets under supervision. The group later returned to that station to check their learning. “The next time, they were very excited to know they could do it. They were the ones going ‘we’ll buy the tickets too because we know how to do it’. That’s what you want. That’s the win. Once you have those little wins it becomes easier. It might be that you say ‘that took half an hour, we missed three trains, we watched three trains go by that we could have been on’ but then the next time it’s all worthwhile once you see them really excited about it. You know if that’s in two years’ time with their family or five or ten years’ time with their partner then they’re going to be able to do it.”

All of these skills are built incrementally and developed in line with their individual assessment and tour needs. “Each week we build upon what we’re asking of them in independence. Whether it’s ‘OK kids, this week we’re going to show you how to do the laundry. Next week you’re going to find the laundry, Google it, and you’re going to show us how to do it’. We do the same thing with restaurants or meals. Then, ‘we’re going to show you how to book courts, talk to the tournament director, introduce yourself, book transport, buy balls and fill up your water – you guys are going to do that.’ Once they feel comfortable and we’re confident they can deal with it, then we continually load them up. So by the third week we’ll have them calling up and booking the courts, as opposed to us doing it for them. When they’re confident and capable of managing it, a lot of confidence comes from knowing you can do it.”

Tennis Australia’s holistic approach requires a new definition of ‘success’, because it cannot be measured solely in professional tennis careers, trophies or prize money. “If the kid has a great professional career, whatever that may be; if they are retired at 22 because of a severe injury or they didn’t quite make it and they come back in, they go to college, and they come back in as a lawyer at TA or in the media team – that’s success to us,” says Kriz. “We have a responsibility there and success can’t just be performance, we have to move beyond what success means in our sport. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re No 1 in the world – your career will stop at some point. When they are in our care we need to provide them and assist them with those developmental skills to move beyond sport.”

Robertson refers to former player Ash Barty in making his point. “She was the No 1 player in the world, won three grand slams, and left the sport at 25. That’s a success because she’s achieved what she wants and she’s left the game on her own terms and in a really good place – but that’s just one athlete. How do all players get to leave on their own terms and ready for the next chapters of life?”

By John Portch

• What traits drive your selection process?

• How do you promote accountability within your team?

• How important are EQ and IQ in your environment?

‘We will figure out who you are’

Lieutenant General John Daniel Caine of the US Air Force is the Associate Director of Military Affairs of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. Back in 2020, he spoke about Special Operations Forces [SOF] recruitment at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. At the time, while still ranked Major General, he was serving as the Director of the Special Access Program Central Office of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.

Caine walked the audience through the rigorous assessment phase, which went some way to explaining why the numbers of candidates who progress to the selection phase are low. That said, when they make it, they reach a “crucible” that can last for weeks and months and which has the express purpose of imparting basic combat skills and testing for essential character traits.

He said: “We’re seeking a war fighter first and foremost who’s humble, who’s credible, who’s approachable.” He later joked that it was akin to the search for unicorns. “I say a unicorn but not really,” he added. “This is what we seek in our recruiting efforts, this is what we measure in assessment. What we continue to strive for in selection is these traits along with many others.”

Authenticity

It is no less true of the military than any other walk of life. “We’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of examples of people who come in and just try to pretend that they are somebody who they aren’t – I’m sure that you see the same thing in athletics, right?” said Caine. “But eventually we’re all fallible and we show ourselves. We’re going to figure that out and it’s always better to own it, own who you are, than to pretend to be someone who you are not.”

Humility

Of humility, Caine said that candidates must be, “humble to the point where they do not drink their own Kool-Aid. And we’ve all seen egos in sports and there’s egos in the military as well and SOF, but is this person at their core DNA humble? Do they realise that ‘this is a chapter in my life. It may be a big chapter but it’s just a chapter in my life’?” They must embody confidence but not cockiness, and remain selfless to a fault.

Credibility

Candidates can demonstrate credibility in several forms. Caine said: “Do they take the time to self-study? Do they take the time to clean their weapons? Do they clean up team gear before they do their own gear? What is it that makes them credible with their teammates, brothers and sisters?

Approachability

Caine refers to a sense of humour paired with equanimity. He said: “What is their attitude like when ‘the suck’ is on them? Are they still approachable? Do they retreat into the corner of the team room? Do they go off by themselves or do they maintain a positive attitude?”

Collegiality

Caine said: “Believe it or not, collegiality is a big thing we look for. What is the rapport between teammates and are they collegial with each other?”

EQ and IQ

Caine explained that EQ and IQ are essential for navigating the volatile world and complex networks of an SOF operator. He said: “[We value] the ability to adapt your leadership style, take advantage of the limbic signals, the non-verbal signals that are presented in a scenario that these leaders may be facing; and then be able to take action accordingly based on what they’re seeing and observing, not just what they’re hearing.”

High absorption, low reactivity and high coping skills

How do the traits desired by SOF stack up against those desired in sports? We explored this theme with Leaders Performance Advisor Edd Vahid, who also serves as the Assistant Academy Director at English Premier League club Southampton.

What personality traits do you need to see in youngsters at a football club? What are some of the ways you can measure for those?

In recent seasons our Psychology team have been reviewing an Academy player’s ability to self-regulate and maintain task focus. Specifically, this has involved subjective assessments of a player’s ability to absorb into a task (being present), demonstrate a healthy level of reactivity (avoiding being over-reactive) and have sufficient coping skills. The optimal profile would be a player who displays high absorption, low reactivity and high coping skills. Additionally, it is important that a player demonstrates a commitment and desire to add value to the team. Feedback from a range of disciplines helps presents an insightful picture of how this manifests in reality. 

To what extent is there room for personality outliers on football pathways? Is there a safe level of risk?

A core element of our coaching philosophy is to be person-centred. Therefore, our ability to embrace a diverse group of personalities is critical. With younger players it is important we seek to understand their intent and not default to judging them solely on their actions. Ultimately, we are responsible for creating an inclusive environment that affords different personalities the opportunity to progress. Whilst there has always been an appetite to understand and support different individuals, the recent increase in ‘individual development coaches’ perhaps reflects a clear aim to be explicit with this approach.

By John Portch

• What are the good practice habits that determine your athletes’ trainability?

• How are you looking to assess decision making under pressure?

• How do your athletes think about risk?

Indications of desire to serve

Lieutenant General John Daniel Caine of the US Air Force is the Associate Director of Military Affairs of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. Back in 2020, he spoke about Special Operations Forces [SOF] recruitment at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. At the time, while still ranked Major General, he was serving as the Director of the Special Access Program Central Office of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.

SOF personnel, Caine explained, are volunteers drawn from elite units in the US Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Navy. “What we’re getting out of that, even though it’s subtle, is indications of desire. And it’s more so than indications of desire just to be, it’s indications of desire to serve,” he said.

Trainability

Trainability is the first of three basic criteria at the assessment phase. SOF will teach all candidates how to use a compass or fire a weapon regardless of their experience. “These are tactics and these are assessment techniques that are steeped in years and years of datapoints,” said Caine, much like a sports coach or music teacher who understands good practice habits. “We need you to be able to learn how to do things our way and we start with the very basics like land navigation so that when we’re teaching you how to do close quarters combat, shooting in constrained spaces, you’re trainable. We’re constantly looking in assessment for your trainability. Are you able to listen precisely?” If not, “we know that you have a trainability problem.”

Durability

The SOF training environment pushes candidates to the brink of physical and mental failure. “When you are in ‘the suck’ what are you going to do about it?” said Caine when discussing the importance of durability. “Do you turn inward or do you turn to your brother or sister next to you and figure out how to get through this together? That’s the key to success. When it sucks, and it sucks really bad; you’re sleep-deprived, it’s cold, it’s snowing on you, what are you going to do?”

Suitability

Suitability in SOF is assessed on several levels. Firstly, are you selfless or do you only look out for yourself? “We’re going to seek that out through your suitability,” said Caine. The candidate must also be able to operate under intense stress. “We seek emotional people as well but who, under fire, and in the crucibles of combat, smoke a Lucky and stay frosty. When gunshots are ringing, what is the tenor and tone of the person on the radio? Is it ‘holy shit!’ or is it ‘hey man, I’m getting shot at’? We test for that constantly.”

There are psychological evaluations for all personnel but, as Caine said, “The officers get an extra dose of love and attention during the assessment phase to determine how it is they think, how it is they understand risk, what they do when they’re faced with dilemmas that have no right answer, what is their bias for action, what is their acceptable risk?”

Assessment boards

Another element of the assessment is when candidates are summoned before a board of 30 or so people to answer questions on their performance. Caine describes it as a “free-for-all” with no limits on questions or lines of enquiry. “The goal there is mental agility, durability, sustainability,” he said. All SOF personnel, including Caine himself, are held accountable. “I make mistakes every single day,” he added. “We look in the mirror critically and it’s not about who is right but what is right.”

A view from inside the English Premier League

Service personnel have long been some of the most popular speakers at our events and we asked Leaders Performance Advisor Edd Vahid, the Assistant Academy Director at English Premier League club Southampton, what sports stand to learn from talent development in a military context.

At a football club, what can you learn from listening to or watching speakers from military discuss their pathways?

The opportunity to draw insight and inspiration from different environments is a critical feature of any organisation that has aspirations to evolve. During my time at Southampton we have had a number of interactions with former or current military personnel, which have always added value to our programme. From a pathway perspective, lessons in leadership, strategy, assessment, managing transitions, and pressure training represent a selection of topics that have resonance in a military and football setting.  

How important are trainability, durability and suitability on a football pathway? Can they always be measured?

Whilst the specific language of trainability, durability and suitability appear less frequently in a football pathway their relevance is significant. During our player audits we often discuss an individual’s capacity to learn (i.e., trainability) as a positive indicator of potential. These judgments have historically been subjective in nature. However, increasingly the use of data permits an objective insight into a player’s learning trajectory and response to training or feedback.   

Lieutenant General Caine’s acknowledgment of what can be learnt in periods of adversity is certainly relevant in football. Our aim is to design a pathway that includes deliberate and carefully planned experiences that challenge the players, in addition to supporting an individual’s ability to debrief emerging or unplanned difficult moments.

A player’s suitability to progress in the pathway is a frequent topic of discussion amongst staff. Importantly, this is often aligned with an agreed individual development plan that highlights key strengths and development areas. It is essential that we afford players a breadth and depth of experience that enhance their prospects. Given the development ethos in an Academy and the range of pathways to a successful career, it is perhaps wise to consider suitability as dynamic.

In partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our third Leaders Meet of 2022 was around the dynamics of performance pathways and how to effectively manage the transitions of the athletes throughout. We also highlight the need to ensure psychological safety, particularly the notion of learner safety within your teams and staff throughout the pathway.

Session 1: Performance Pathways Part 1: Creating Effective Transitions

Speakers:

John Alder, Head of Player Development, Welsh Rugby Union

Helen Reesby, Head of National Performance Pathway, Lawn Tennis Association

Transition experiences:

• When have you managed transitions well? When the transition is anticipated, you can prepare and make plans. When you can engage in mentoring, learn from others, and have great support. You have time to understand what you need based on your values, and understand what is right for you.
• When have you not managed a transition well? Dealing with something with that it out of your control, such as a career-ending injury.
• Biggest lesson learnt was the importance of speaking about it. We need to be able to sit, and address the issue. This might not be what you want to do, but it is essential. From an external point of view it might seem as though you have transitioned well, due to looking to what’s next and making plans. However, it is essential to not presume anything. It’s very easy to assume someone is OK based on their exterior, but you won’t truly know until you ask.
• Importance to reflect on both positive and negative and not to stray away from either, as we can take huge value out of both.
• Recognise the ending of one chapter and embracing the start of something new. And the importance of understanding our identity and how that impacts our transitions.
• The role of your support system in helping you cope with transitions. Very important to have key people to support you in processing the emotions around the transitions in order to help manage the phase effectively.

Effective transitions:

• What is a transition? Moving from junior to senior, injuries, changing position, location change, essentially an experience which stretches and requires change. The process of exiting something and entering something new or different and making this, hopefully, as seamless as possible.
• Who is going through the transition, what resources do they have, how does it fit into their learning and where are they heading? What skills are required going into it?
• Having the readiness and ability to meet the demands of the next stage.
• Two elements to a transition: performance-ready. What are the demands of that next stage, do you have the tools to be able to step up? Person-ready: have you got the personal skills, are you ready for the lifestyle change? Are you personally ready? You often see one or the other.
• We prepare them well for the anticipated change especially making them performance-ready. But often what we don’t spend enough time on is preparing them for the unanticipated transitions which inevitably will happen, and these are often the person-ready skills.
• ‘Prepare the child for the path and not the path for the child’.
• Have the athletes got the resources to deal with the new challenges or changing environment?
• Smooth transitions or not? Recognising which transitions might be used as good bumps in the road to aid in their development.
• Team sports: experience transitions together but it might feel different for each person. The importance of understanding how things impact individuals differently and the challenge of the coach to recognise what is best for each player and how they are experiencing that change (identity, curriculum, direction of travel).
• In individual sport, how do you scale? Helen believes in a person-first approach with tennis being a highly individualised sport. There is a scale of transitions – they range from large transitions to small fry. The individualised approach is so important in terms of presuming and assuming.
• Gender-specific in tennis – understanding differences in genders. Still person-first as you can’t just group the genders but what are the general differences to be aware of?
• Parent involvement – in tennis they have to be heavily involved (time and resource). It’s easy to get frustrated by this, but they have a major influence on the transition and the support of the athletes, if you can engage with them and take them on the journey with you, they can be incredibly valuable.
• Social cultural context and how that mediates transitions – what are the dynamics at play in the environment that can impact a transition? In many squad-based teams and sports, you can have 50 people including staff and athletes.
• The importance of role clarity on the field and off the field.

Session 2: Performance Pathways Part 2: The Different Stages of Psychological Safety

Speaker:

Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Psychological safety:

• “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” – Dr Amy C. Edmondson.

Why it matters:

• You want people to be able to think clearly, to make connections, share insights, bring ideas and learn.
• As a leader you want to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction.
• Google Project Aristotle: the number one determinant of team success was psychological safety.
• Wellbeing.

Social pain & the brain:

• Whilst social pain and physical pain can have similar characteristics, they are not the same experience.
• They share some of the same underlying neural substrates.
• The common experiential element is the affective component of pain – the distressing experience associated with these threats motivates individuals to terminate, or escape the negative stimulus.

Four stages of psychological safety:

• Inclusion safety: I feel valued and a sense of belonging. Safe to be myself. This is a pre-condition for the other three.
• Learner safety: I feel safe to ask questions, seek guidance ask for help, admit mistakes, and be vulnerable.
• Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas, and trusted to act on my initiative.
• Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge the status quo.

Inclusion safety – key concepts:

• What it should take to be included – two things:
• Be Human
• Be Harmless
• And yet…
• Sometimes we extend partial or conditional inclusion safety. Sometimes we revoke or withhold it.
• ‘We like to tell ourselves soothing stories to justify our sense of superiority’.

Learner safety – key concepts:

• The moral imperative to grant learner safety is to act first by encouraging and inviting the learner to learn.
• Failure isn’t the exception, it’s the expectation and the way forward.
• The most important signal in granting or withholding learner safety is the leader’s emotional response to dissent and bad news. How are your reacting, because the learner is watching us?
• The prejudiced mind is wilfully blind. Do you genuinely believe they can?
• When the environment punishes rather than teaches, whether through neglect, manipulation of coercion people become defensive, less able to self-diagnose, self-coach and self-correct. That opens people up to the risk of real failure – the failure to keep trying.

Contributor safety – key concepts:

• A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological safety before performance.
• Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team.
• Inviting people to think beyond one’s role expresses greater respect and grants greater permission to contribute.
• It’s the leader’s role to recognise the difference between dissenting and derailing behaviour and manage the boundary between the two.

Challenger safety – key concepts:

• Challenger safety democratises innovation.
• The more unknowns the leader eliminates through transparency the fewer the sources of stress for the individual.
• Nothing shuts curiosity and exploration down faster than a small dose of ridicule administered at just the right time.
• Deprive your team of challenger safety and you dedicate the team to the status quo.
• Assigning permission for dissent from the outset takes away the natural fear associated with challenging status quo.

Six ways we can increase psychological safety:

• Build trust and belonging.
• Put it on the table – discuss it.
• Model openness and honesty.
• Make it easy to speak up.
• Praise it.
• Constructively challenge fixed positions.

Model openness & honesty

• We forget how scary we are. Our power silences people.
• We don’t question our list of whose opinion counts.
• We send ‘shut up’ versus ‘speak up’ signals.
• Watch your language.

Make it easy to speak up

• Ask open questions to seek input, but make them specific e.g. What do people think we should be paying more attention to?
• Red teaming / Brains trust meetings.
• Use small groups or 1:1 conversations.

Session 3: Performance Pathways Part 3: An Insight into the FA’s Approach

Speaker:

Phil Church, Senior Coach Development Lead, The Football Association

• Individualisation: we’ve certainly moved into a landscape where individualisation is key in relation to developing coaches and players. We have what we call a talent map, where we can look at who might have potential. We have boots on the ground, they’re ‘in the trenches’, provide unconditional support and they are not just there when they’re winning. This provides a good idea of the landscape and therefore how we can influence it.
• Create a personalised and connected experience: we know the power to individualised approaches, but to elevate this to the next level, how are you connecting this to the experience players or coaches face? Individual relationships are a key component of this (who, self, how, what).
• The FA’s approach to development: the general rule of thumb for the organisation’s development approach is 70:20:10. As people involved in developing talented coaches or players, you’d expect to see our work somewhere in and around the 20 or 10 section. This is why context and experiences outside of this around important to consider.
• If we are only with them for 10-20% of their time, how can you influence and add value for them in that short space of time? You get trust in consistency and competence. How are you adding value to a player or a coach? ‘Bring a gift’ to add value to them.
• Environmental context: spend time getting a better understanding of the context of the team around the individual. An individualised approach is powerful for development, but the external environment for the individual has potential for large influence.

Attendee takeaways:

• Inclusion requires understanding of team values – learning, challenging, contributing.
• Best practice for psychological safety – new people coming in to be clear of expectations and culture, and to talk about intent around psychological safety within the induction.
• The need to formalise your transition process.
• Think about the best way to train or support psychological safety.
• The need to share the four stages of psychological safety and the six descriptions with the team.
• To have the agreed ways of working threaded through a club or organisation strategy.
• Have best practice embedded into everyday work and life.
• Reflecting on effective transitions.
• It is important to understand where failure fits into psychological safety – should we support failure at the top end of elite level performance?
• As a coach or leader, understand your own transition journey to empathise and support the athletes.
• Identifying your team’s roles and responsibilities to help build the six ways to increase psychological safety – use your super strengths well.
• Psychological safety to give awareness to development pathways.
• A way of changing best practice – at national senior team selection meetings, instead of the chair / senior selector listing their team selection and then asking the room to share theirs and justify the differences, build psychological safety in the room by ‘putting it on the table – discuss it’. All of the selection committee put their teams up simultaneously and then open the discussion.

By John Portch

• Do you understand the young athlete that has walked through your door?

• Can you meet their needs without diluting your programme?

• What steps can you take to build their resilience?

Putting the learner at the heart of the coach’s decision-making

“The idea of meeting the person where they’re at has never been more prevalent in sport – we can’t take for granted that the previous experiences have [enabled] a particular athlete to knock on the door,” said John Alder at a 2021 Keiser-sponsored Webinar titled ‘The Effectiveness of Performance Pathways for Nurturing Young Talent’. Alder, who now serves as Head of Player Development at  Welsh Rugby Union, was speaking in his previous capacity as Head of Performance Pathways at UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport [EIS]. “Based on what am I making judgements about what the learner needs next?” he added. The coach must understand what the young athlete arrived with, the experiences they will need henceforth, and the future direction of their development.

The pedagogue’s duty of care

Alder explained that UK Sport and the EIS’s focus has gradually shifted from talent ID towards development and a more rounded understanding of what constitutes ‘success’. “Only a finite group of people will ever go to an Olympic Games let alone win anything,” he said. “What’s our duty of care as custodians of our industry to ensure that those developmental experiences, if they are to be effective, not only prepare those who are able to make the long journey to an Olympic Games but they also give a really rich experience that they leave better for it and they are custodians of their sport and good citizens as well?”

He added a crucial caveat: “Yes, it is identifying what might be needed here and working backwards, but it’s not a watering down. It’s understanding how do these things manifest at different stages of the journey because it is complex and non-linear; and [we want to be] attuned to that rather than being reductive.”

Do not undervalue your pathway coaches

The depth and breadth of responsibility goes further still, as UK Sport and the EIS acknowledged in their December 2021 Performance Pathway Coaching Statement. Its purpose was to help establish UK coaching as a competitive advantage. “The genesis of it was a dissatisfaction with the undervaluing of coaches in the development domain,” said Alder. “Therefore we went to see what differentiated that domain. When you talk about redefining the pedagogical relationships, and therefore the domain-specific skills, qualities and experiences required to be effective, there’s inevitably a real emphasis on pedagogy and developmentally-appropriate ‘ologies’, so not just our more traditional sports science and disciplines and ologies we’d find in broader sport. [It is about] how those disciplines are brought to bear on the developing person and what that means for the coach, the pedagogue, in terms of making those professional judgements as to what are the needs here and ‘how do I go about designing experiences that will nourish and allow this young person to develop?’

How does your curriculum consider the development of resilience?

Resilience, as Alder explained, is merely one manifestation of a young athlete’s psycho-social development, but it is a necessary characteristic if they are to flourish in a high performance environment. At UK Sport and the EIS they feel that an athlete’s curriculum is essential in providing the necessary challenge and support. “We’re quite interested in the idea of curriculum; and curriculum being the totality of experiences that an athlete has,” said Alder, “and the role of the pedagogical relationship, the coach, and others, leaders included, in creating that curriculum; the importance of it being progressive and coherent so that it builds on what came before in equipping young athletes for the road ahead.”

By John Portch

• A holistic approach is essential if students are to have viable exit strategies.

• Self-regulated learning is better for development.

• How can you better use parents to support the work of your talent pathways?

Plan exit routes from the off

Much like aspiring athletes striving for elite level, not all students at the Royal Ballet School will forge a career in classical ballet and so it is incumbent on the school to prepare its students for that eventuality. As Christopher Powney, the school’s Artistic Director, told an audience at the 2021 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London: “We want to make sure that students have the proper education and the proper nurturing to maximise who they are as a person and that ‘success’ is actually anything they can take from the school that they can employ in their future life, whether it be in dance, or if they’re unsuccessful in getting there – because there’s no guarantee at all they will achieve that – of being able to take what they’ve learnt and take that into whatever profession they decide to go into.” The Royal Ballet School’s approach is holistic. “Success for me is that the child is OK coming out of school and they are a good human being who can maximise themselves, they feel confident, they’re curious about life, and they want to develop themselves into whatever field they want to go into,” added Powney.

Build paths towards self-regulated learning

Youngsters in sports academies – and sometimes even accomplished senior athletes – may not be fully cognisant of how to train to attain and sustain their level. It is often a similar scenario with students at the Royal Academy of Music [RCM]. “By the time they get to us they will have already accrued 10,000-15,000 hours of practice and yet some of them say that they don’t know how to [practise] effectively,” said Dr Terry Clark, a Research Fellow for Performance Science at the RCM, who spoke alongside Powney at London’s Twickenham Stadium.

The RCM offers a range of courses based on the theme of effective learning that are designed to enable students to be less teacher-dependent as they transition through the course. Clark continued: “We’re looking at how we might be able to use novel technology to support our students’ development in things like self-regulated learning.” This includes peer support models as well as the RCM’s self-regulated learning framework, which starts with planning. “Being able to identify goals that they want to achieve in a short practice session and strategies for being able to do that. Being able to monitor focus, concentration, self-evaluation in the moment, but then, post-practice, reflecting and debriefing back on that. We have a lot of courses devoted to these things but we also do a lot of one to one work with our students as well, taking them through this process.”

The mental side of training is paramount

Clark, who works at the RCM’s Centre for Performance Science, spoke of the College’s performance simulator as a practice tool. The simulator, which places students in a performance situation with features such as a stage, a backstage and, if desired, even a restless audience, helps students to develop not only their performance but their coping and regulating skills. The simulator is essential for performance reps. “Performance opportunities are not as plentiful as the student might like but they’re also high-pressure events and there may not be opportunities necessarily for our students to learn from and debrief those performances,” said Clark. “It’s a safe space, musicians can try out new things, make mistakes perhaps, but there are no repercussions from that.”

Bring the parents onboard

“The majority of the parent body are fantastic,” said Powney when acknowledging the challenges that parents may pose. Historically, the Royal Ballet School used to keep its students’ parents at arm’s length. Not anymore. “We try to teach parents what’s involved with it,” he continued. “We also encourage the parents to talk to the children and the children to talk to the parents constantly about how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, and to allow them the space to say ‘actually, I’m struggling’. And then we put in place the supporting measures we need to help them with that.”

By John Portch

• People are emotional and not necessarily rational – you need a student’s trust more than you need a 10-point plan.

• Progression is not linear so be sure to have an environment where youngsters feel safe when making mistakes.

• Life skills – resilience, collaboration, communication – should be baked into your curriculum.

Do your youngsters trust you when setbacks arrive?

The Chicago Academy of the Arts recruits some of the United States’ finest performing arts talents but, much like a gifted child entering a sports academy, their abilities may no longer stand out on campus. There is the potential for friction as teachers and coaches break down and rebuild their performance. “They might not see results today or tomorrow and we’re asking them to take that on faith that this is going to work,” said Jason Patera, the Head of School, when speaking at the 2017 Leaders Sport Performance Summit down the road at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Patera and his colleagues know how to manage bumps in the road that students inevitably encounter and that is where trust can be developed with the young person. “When we as the leaders can get out in front of [setbacks], we know it’s going to happen, when we can set up in their mind to expect that, not only can we help prepare them for that, but when it does happen, they say ‘oh yeah, [you] told me about that thing. What else can you tell me? I am ready to hear you on these other things because you called it and I believe you.’”

Are your young people ready to take a leap of faith?

Patera explained that even if a student tells him they want to be the next Steven Spielberg or a prima ballerina, he knows that deep down kids set personal limits that need breaking down. “The first thing we have to do is help them expand that conception of what it’s possible for you to do,” he said. “We have to take them from thinking about who they are – ‘I am an athlete, I am a dancer, I am a singer’ all these static things – and get them focused on ‘what can you change by the work that you do? What can you change by the training that you do?’ To help them understand that ‘where I go is related to the things that I do’.  That’s the first part. Then the second part is creating that trust. If they don’t trust you in this scary time, they’re going to cower in fear and not take that leap of faith into trying something new.”

Are you preparing your youngsters for plan B?

Chicago School for the Arts alumni includes Grammy winners, Broadway stars and world-renowned ballerinas, but it also includes computer programmers, attorneys and game designers. “There’s so much luck involved that we have to prepare them for the other thing,” said Patera, who defines ‘the other thing’ as those careers beyond the arts. “We have to think in our training of not compromising that dedication to the dream, but it would be enormously irresponsible to say we’re going to spend the next four years of your life preparing you for that Juilliard audition that you have a one in 50 chance of passing, and if you don’t make it, say ‘sorry kid, you’re kind of irrelevant.’” The school’s curriculum is designed to prepare students for plan B, especially if they realise the arts are not for them. Patera added: “When people get a sense of how to collaborate better, when they get a sense of how to lead better, when they get a sense of how to respond to failure better, not only are they going to make the team better – or in my case it’s the ensemble – not only is the main product going to be better, but they’re more useful in whatever path they go on.”

By John Portch

• The RCA’s traditional core is complemented by a disruptive edge.

• The college is proactive in seeking the right students and staff to expand their talent pool and course offerings.

• Promote casual collisions in social spaces – innovation may follow.

Tradition keeps the RCA on track, but radicalness gives them their momentum

The Royal College of Art [RCA] was founded in 1837 and its alumni include Sir Peter Blake, Tracey Emin and Alan Rickman. As its name suggests, it has received royal patronage since its inception and Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, chose to study sculpture at the college. “We’ve got lots of tradition and lots of myth – and we play on it,” Paul Thompson, the RCA’s Vice-Chancellor, told an audience at the 2018 Leaders Sport Performance Summit. “But we are also keen and very determined that, because of the forms we’re dealing with, whether it’s architecture or art or engineering, that we’ve got to be radical. We’ve got to be looking at things that are completely ahead of the pack, the curve. We have these disruptive moments where we have moments of jagged radicalness.”

The college ‘shakes the trees’ when recruiting staff

The RCA, according to Thompson, will “shake the trees” to find the right staff. The college spent five years persuading Zowie Broach, their Head of Fashion, to take the role. Thompson also explained that the college has taken the novel approach of appointing head-hunters to seek out new staff members. Allied to this proactivity, which was introduced by Thompson, is a thorough interview process (“a junior tutor’s role will be interviewed by my deputy”). On top of that, 70 per cent of the faculty work part-time as the RCA do not want too many career academics. “We need to have people there as the anchor men and women, but we also bring in people who are part-time faculty,” said Thompson. He cites J Mays, the former Group Vice President of Global Design and Chief Creative Officer at Ford Motor Company and current Chief Design Officer at Whirlpool, who is an RCA visiting professor. Thompson added: “We bring visiting professors in whenever we can, wherever we can – and we don’t pay them a lot of money because we don’t have a lot of money – but they get a kick out of working with the next generation of design leaders. And being in London, you can always find somebody interesting who’s got a stopover.”

They work to expand their talent pool through scouting

Just as the RCA spend time and resource recruiting the right staff, it adopts a similar mindset when it comes to students. At the time of the session, the College was recruiting from 70 different nations. “We’ve always been international and that’s always been one of our USPs,” said Thompson. “As long as you grow the talent pool as you grow your student body, and you make sure the talent pool in which you’re hunting and scouting grows faster than your student body.” He shared one example. “We are scouting now for students in territories we never used to go to. We’re scouting for very particular people in very particular territories – we like Chilean architects at the moment. We’re spending a lot of time going to Chile, looking for undergraduate students, finding scholarships for them to bring them over to London so that they don’t just go straight up to North America.”

The college promotes chance encounters

The RCA decided to put its fashion and architecture students on the same open plan floor. “It drove some of them crazy because the architects didn’t like the sound of the steam irons,” said Thompson. Similarly, they put their computer science students next to their ceramicists. “We hope that something will rub off between the two of them. We make sure that the social spaces we have a very strategically situated so that you can get those chance encounters; the happenstance. ‘Oh my god, I met this guy who was a jeweller, he was telling me about this piece of equipment they’ve got in the metal working space. I really want to go and use that and try to experiment with that.’ We try to set up these chance encounters and it’s quite easy to do if you’re small.”

By John Portch

• The way we feel is the biggest variable in performance – we need to better understand the power of feelings when designing learning and development experiences.

• Consider: what is it about your experiences that makes you experienced?

• Look to create uncertainty, learn from performance limitations, begin to bridge those gaps.

Why experiences matter

“All experiences are transformative – they change people and allow them to adapt,” Glenn Hunter, a performance innovation consultant formerly at the English Institute of Sport, told an audience at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. “The challenge in high-performance sport is to keep designing new experiences that can engage athletes and coaches, turning ordinary into great.”

How we feel – one of the biggest variables in sport

Hunter, whose role involves the assessment of training strategies, believes that understanding how athletes feel, as a consequence of their experiences, is essential. “I will be bold enough to say: that in my research over the years, looking for the big step in performance, this is up there as a contender,” he said. “Our experience changes how we feel, how that changes how we act, and how that changes how we perform. The inconsistency in performance plots very closely to variation in how people feel and the experiences they are having.

“If we could understand this a bit better, make it a discipline that’s central to performance, and do this a little bit better through our understanding, to create better human and performance experiences, I think that would be a really good thing.”

What is it that makes you ‘experienced’?

Defining experience by years on the job is not enough. “The thing we’re talking about here are these two critical aspects of performance that are missed in day to language: something that happens to you that affects how you feel and the way something that happens to you and affects how you feel. To express this a different way: you’re all experienced, but what is it about the experiences you’ve had that makes you experienced? Focusing on that means the end-product, the experience you have, becomes more vivid, fruitful, therefore more rich and valuable.

Authentic experiences that appeal to people’s values

Central to better human and performance experiences are the need for uncertainty, which sits in contradiction to our desire for certainty. “As human beings, we’re most relaxed and comfortable when we have what I might call the ‘illusion of certainty’,” said Hunter, who cited both science and religion in making his point. “Ironically, when we’re most alive as human beings is when we’re in situations of uncertainty.” This is an evolutionary trait in people. “In essence, uncertainty is part of performance.”

Designing meaningful experiences does not necessarily mean happy or joyous moments. Hunter continued: “It can be a failure – meaningful moments are things that move you on, that make you who you are, that you learn from and makes you better even though the experience at the time might not be a great one.”

But it’s not just learning from failures or setbacks. “How might you design your next game? How do you enjoy an experience when you’re in it, and having had the experience, how might you look back on it, learn from it quickly, so that you change the next experience into a better one? The point being that it’s not just when things go wrong, it’s how we can design and shift ordinary into great?” It is much like a designer and a successful design process understands its audience and listens to their world.

“In the dynamic environment of sport, you must continue improvising to create performance experiences that are authentic and appeal to the values of different people. By doing this, you are helping those people to stay ahead of the competition and be true to who they are.”

“There’s a tension there that exists between knowing what you’re going to cover and responding to the humans that are in front of you,” said Iain Brunnschweiler, the Head of Technical Development at English Premier League club Southampton FC.

“We’ve tried to evolve a curriculum, a player development framework, that manages that tension. We want to cover specific topics and we also want to coach the player that’s in front of us.”

Brunnschweiler was speaking onstage at Leaders Meet: Coach & Player Development on the 24 March at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, where he was joined by England Netball Head Coach Jess Thirlby to discuss the progress being made in coach and player development.

During the session, which was moderated by Dan Clements, the Performance Coach Manager at Wales Rugby Union, the duo discussed:

• Why curriculums need to be carefully implemented [3:00];
• The value in playbooks and the implications for creativity [12:00];
• The most meaningful learning experiences they provide [16:00];
• Finding work-life balance [24:00].

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

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