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

“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.

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

By John Portch

“Our mission is simple: to find and develop the world’s first female F1 champion within ten years.”

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:

1. Identify

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:

2. Monitor

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.

3. Compare

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.

4. Predict

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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‘Some Skills of Adaptive Leadership Are Obvious, But That Doesn’t Make them Easier to Learn’

By John Portch

“You say I’ve got decades of experience, whereas I’d say I’ve got decades of bias.”

Don Barrell, the Head of Regional Academies at the Rugby Football Union [RFU], is a former player who was already coaching academy players before he retired. Yet for all his years of experience working in Talent ID and development, he is still all ears when it comes to addressing performance questions.

“Diversity is a real superpower in performance,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “The more diverse you can make a conversation the better. You cannot work effectively unless you have independent people who can come in and challenge your thinking. If you’re having a talent ID review or selection meeting, I’d suggest you need every department in there providing their view of a player, otherwise you risk dropping into echo chambers. The broader the opinion in the room, the better it becomes. Subjectivity, done regularly, becomes objective. We need to be comfortable with that being a good thing, that’s the tension you have to hold as a system.”

Barrell, who previously shared six fundamentals to consider when establishing a talent pathway, turns his attention in the second instalment of our interview to the question of academy decision-making and the importance of diverse voices in multidisciplinary environments.

“The performance and development space should be a cross-department collaborative process,” he continues. “An oversimplification, but coaches can get upset when they do not win, which is an unavoidable reality. At that point, they shouldn’t be making decisions or giving feedback because they will not necessarily be tied to the athletes’ long-term objectives. If, as an organisation, you have a document that details what success in one year looks like and really clear, simple principles tied to multidisciplinary objectives, then better decisions can be made and feedback given in line with the long term in mind.”

“The big principle of any talent system is the end point and I’ll always talk about having the ‘end in mind’,” says Barrell. “If the end point is England Head Coach Eddie Jones using his criteria to select at that point, then we need to deliver towards that moment, understanding that the top of the game has so many influences. That’s the principle and purpose.”

Barrell oversees a gently graduated national programme that is supported by the Regional Academy club programmes across England. It is a multi-stakeholder process with each academy aligned to principles and guidance set down by the RFU.

“We want to see people really invested in their players at every stage of the programme – loving it, caring about it, and making it better. Then we need to accept that at any point in a transition in or out of a game selection, team or pathway; that a pathway coach is going to be really passionate, care about the person and may lose their objectivity – that’s fine too – and that’s why we bring in independence to provide that.”

Finding and embracing the paradoxes

What is more important: passion or objectivity? “You want both,” says Barrell, adding, “The whole talent space is full of paradoxes. Do you need to care or do you need to be standoffish and objective? Well, you need to be both. Do you want to win the game on Saturday or win the one in six years? Both. All these things, until we address them, can be roadblocks. You’ve got to find the paradoxes and then you’ve got to embrace them, the answers lie in there.”

The RFU has an essential role in ensuring England’s Regional Academy programmes are aligning in their working principles. “We constantly stay in the conversation and ensure there are clear decision-making frameworks. The reality is that some of the decisions made will be right, some of the decisions made will be wrong, but at least it’s clear.

“What can derail talent pathways is lack of clarity on decision-making; waiting to get a lot of stuff out onto the table in a room and people leaving unclear. Sometimes there isn’t an answer and you just need to commit to a direction. Then we’ll assess the decisions made. ‘Did that work? Yes’. ‘Did that work? No’. To be able to do that successfully, you need qualified practitioners, time, aligned stakeholders and a shared common understanding of a plan and direction. To achieve that at a club, your academy staff need enough autonomy to operate and enough freedom, space and independence to go and move things and enough time to implement them.”

Good intentions

“The best and the worst thing about systems is the people,” says Barrell. “Those human elements are ultimately what makes sport so exciting, so involving, and it’s why we’re all here, for all its idiosyncrasies, but they’re also the bits that can derail it.”

Nevertheless, he is certain that no one ever approaches talent pathway questions with anything other than good intentions, as he has come to learn in recent years. “Early in my career, I probably did what lots of people do, which is I thought people who worked at the top of the game were wrong in their view of developing young players, they’d only worked in one part of the game, but actually, that’s just their reality and it’s not wrong,” he says, “this is my reality and it’s not wrong. What we know is not the same.

“So how do you become very good at joining up two stories, two views of the world that are and need to be different? I’ll always try and work out what someone’s intent is and I’ve never found someone who’s not done something with good personal intent, despite the fact that I might completely disagree. Ultimately, there are not any ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decisions.”

It comes back to clarity in principles and decision making. “At some point, someone’s got to make a decision and you have to trust that their intent is good. The conversation is probably around what were you aiming for and why. You can sabotage yourself in thinking someone has an ulterior motive and if you don’t understand people’s decisions that can be tough in this world.

“As an academy manager you have to be cognisant of that. What do I want people in service of? Where do I want them to go? Those sort of behavioural nudges are critical or you’ll lose people along the way and never be as effective.”

Leadership and people skills are essential. “If academy managers are not able to align people from all levels; boards, directors of rugby, head coaches, parents, players or, in football, your technical directors and managers and owners; if they’re not able to align those I don’t think they’d be able to make progress.

All of our new academy managers that now come on board, large amounts of their time is devoted to people management. We already know they can do all the rugby stuff and so we spend time with them, we give them business mentors and other resources because their programmes will fail off the back of them not having those skillsets – it’s more important than the sports stuff. They’ve got to be good at running multidisciplinary teams and maintaining independence. Outside, diverse views can be critical success factors for these programmes.”

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