By John Portch

In a coach-led environment, 20% of the job of the coach is actual coaching, while 80% is managing people, the environment and recruitment.

That is according to Mark Jarram, the Head of Coaching and Performance Development at Loughborough University.

“There’s such a huge chunk of the coach’s role that takes them away from the on-court or on-pitch coaching,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2023.

However, as he explained, “most of their passion is in the 20%” because the majority “do the job because they like making a difference, they like having a lifetime impact; but, at the end of the day, they also do it because they enjoy competing and winning. Sometimes that creates a lot of friction. You have the element of winning today versus development for tomorrow.”

Where a leader sits on that spectrum between performance outcome and performance growth will depend on the individual. It is worth asking:

• Where does your organisation over-index today?
• What have you prioritised at the expense of something else?

There are four further elements where leaders can begin to strike a balance.

1. Clarity

Clarity is essential when addressing the tension between outcomes and growth.

When England Head Coach John Mitchell spoke at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, he did so having just helped the Red Roses win the Women’s Rugby World Cup for the first time in 11 years.

For Mitchell, who took the coaching reins in 2023, it began with a “compelling vision”. “We were very visual about where we wanted to go,” he said. He also shared the three questions he continues to pose to his playing group. “What will earn the right [to retain the World Cup in 2029]? What will we keep and take forward with us? And then, thirdly, is what will we need to start again?”

Never before had their ambition and targets been so clearly articulated, as World Cup-winning centre Emily Scarratt explained onstage with Mitchell. She had lifted the World Cup with the Roses in 2014 but had experienced a series of near-misses in the subsequent decade.

“I think it has to come from the leadership and how important they perceive it to be,” said Scarratt, who has since joined Mitchell’s coaching ticket. “In previous campaigns that hasn’t been the case and therefore inevitably could get a little bit sidetracked or lost along the way.”

Ask yourselves:

• What are you currently not saying clearly because it might create pressure or accountability?
• If your ambition were made brutally explicit tomorrow, who in your organisation would feel uncomfortable and why?

2. Behaviours

When a leader has identified what’s missing, the collective must ensure their values and behaviours enable them to bridge that gap.

This is not easy, as Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain and Commandant of the RAF’s Tedder Academy of Leadership, explained at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

She believes the RAF is good at training to execute tasks, but “less good at [managing] the tension between when we need discipline versus ‘I want your diversity of thought, I want you to challenge, and I want you to ask’. I don’t think we’re as good at helping people navigate the nuance of those spaces.”

Keith is trying to address this imbalance; and it begins with setting standards. “They really matter, but what’s important is making sure it’s not the petty ones, the silly ones. If you’re doubling down on standards, it’s because they matter and if you let them go, it will erode performance. It will impact your environment,” she said, adding that “the standard you walk past is the standard that you accept.”

The RAF has a communal document, the prosaically titled Air Document One, which sets out the service’s values and behavioural standards. Crucially, at Keith’s behest, its contents have been shaped by the organisation as a whole. “I really wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe it, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of,” she continued. “We know from all of the different behavioural models of change that actually it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Ask yourselves:

• Are you rewarding the behaviours you say matter or just the outcomes that look good?
• Where in your environment has ‘freedom’ become a lack of accountability or ‘discipline’ become a fear of speaking up?

3. People

Focus too heavily on the outcome and you risk burnout; focus too heavily on growth and you risk losing accountability or results.

“It seems really simple, but we’re judged by winning bike races ultimately,” Dr Scott Drawer, the Performance Director of the Netcompany-Ineos Cycling Team, told the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

In March 2024, he rejoined a team who had enjoyed their greatest successes as Team Sky in the previous decade. The Ineos Grenadiers (as they were then called) were at a low ebb.

“It’s very much an ongoing sensemaking process of just understanding this environment, this sport, this team, the people within it,” said Drawer. “It’s also knowing that there’s this tremendous legacy behind us of what the team had done as a disruptor, but we were no longer there and it was always ‘how do you get back into that mix?’”

Everyone needs to step up, but Drawer recognised that psychological safety was crucial. “We’ll set ourselves up next year in some ways ideally with less constraints and a lot more freedom for our riders to feel like they can just go and race,” he continued. “This is more of an entrepreneurial time for us, the startup mentality. Let’s try stuff. If it doesn’t work, what’s the worst that can happen really?”

Ask yourselves:

• Who is being held back by your expectations or impatience?
• Are your people performers who occasionally learn or learners who are expected to perform?

4. Systems

Systems provide the structure for balancing outcomes and growth.

“Systemisation allows the opportunity to ask: how can I contribute? What are my deliverables? To therefore have some form of accountability,” Jarram told the Leaders Performance Institute. “I’ve seen it benefit in indicating what it actually takes to win. Systemising helps us to confront brutal facts.”

When something is tracked, it usually gets done. “Are we making a difference? Are we focusing on the right things?” he added “[The answers] can determine opportunities to create collaborative conversations.”

He echoes Keith in stating that a system “should be a living, breathing thing that gets reviewed rather than saying ‘we’re going to create this document, it’s going to be signed off, and then it’s going to sit on the shelf’. It should be co-created by all members of staff; ‘this is what we’re trying to achieve, this is how we’re going to do it, this is how you’re going to contribute to that’; so therefore it should dictate ‘what am I doing today?’ and what you’re doing today should impact winning and performance.”

Ask yourselves:

• Have your systems been designed deliberately or been born from habit and urgency?
• Where are you relying on heroics instead of process?

What to read next

How to Spot the Need for Change and to Respond Effectively

By John Portch

“There are no sides”

So said RC Buford, the CEO of the San Antonio Spurs, when recently asked how the NBA team reconciles the commercial and basketball branches of their organisation.

“We’re all on one side,” he added for emphasis.

It is true of the Spurs, where in addition to serving as Spurs CEO, Buford also serves as President of the team’s parent company Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

“There are basketball units that are part of a team and there are business units that are part of a team; and if they’re not working together, neither is going to work.”

It is true of the NBA and the wider sporting world beyond as denser competition schedules, rising commercial pressure and increased performance expectations dissolve the boundaries between business and performance.

Not that all teams have got a handle on this (the Spurs themselves say they have some way to go), which is why the Leaders Performance Institute recently hosted a virtual roundtable for members to identify the common tensions in this area, the biggest opportunities, and the initiatives that have promoted greater alignment and collaboration.

The member comments below have all been lifted from the Slido interactive questionnaire that accompanied the virtual discussion.

Four common sources for the tensions that exist between business and performance

1. The perception of competing agendas

The idea persists that commercial success and performance success are not only mutually exclusive, but actively competing.

‘Is this taking them away from the day job?’ – it’s a common question posed by coaches when their athletes are engaged in commercially focused activities.

The same contributor spoke of the battle for use of facility space by highlighting the ever-present dichotomy of ‘commercial vs performance’.

Another attendee pointed to ‘incentive misalignment’ while another cited a common concern: ‘Do I or my programme get that money or is it going elsewhere in the organisation?’

2. Limited exposure to other units

Business and performance units too often work in silos.

‘They do not understand each other or do not prioritise time to understand each other,’ wrote one attendee, capturing the experience of most practitioners and coaches at the virtual table. ‘Sometimes there may be a lack of understanding of each other’s priorities or needs,’ added another.

Nor does it help that ‘people are often changing organisations and working at larger scale or stakes than previously experienced’.

3. The idea that people don’t necessarily resist alignment, they simply don’t understand what it entails

Since ‘there’s a lack of communication or understanding on what the priority really is’,  as one member suggested, it is not surprising that there is a ‘lack of awareness of opportunities to engage or collaborate’.

Inevitably, ‘sometimes one interest is given precedent over the other’ and, on a daily basis, stakeholders are left asking ‘what’s for external and what’s for internal?’ when it comes to business practices.

4. Individual roles that become ambiguous at cross-department level

There is too often a ‘lack of clarity on individuals’ roles with regards to performance or the organisation’ and that aforementioned tension between external and internal interests has given rise to the perception that ‘business is outward‑facing and performance inward‑facing’.

Four opportunities for increased collaboration

1. Be ahead of the game

Collaboration tends to be an afterthought; and this inertia comes at a cost, as one attendee noted:

‘Some of our best work [in both business and performance] is done with paying clients and externals vs doing it for ourselves – that’s wrong and needs to shift.’

‘Involve performance earlier in the process,’ wrote one member; ‘build shared metrics so both sides are measuring success the same way,’ added another.

2. Find ways to better leverage your team’s efforts

Units are invariably working for the collective good, but this is not always recognised or celebrated collectively.

‘There needs to be better capture of the actual activity that’s going on to use in multiple ways,’ said one member with both commercial and performance interests in mind.

Such a collective approach ‘would also help impact awareness, understanding and people being able to use comms and talk about it more effectively.’

3. Promote decision clarity (and discourage ‘heroes’)

It is best for all if stakeholders can ‘clarify decision rights’, as there tends to be one person who is best-placed to make a judgement in each of a team’s units.

This need not undermine efforts at cross-collaboration. As one member noted, stakeholders must ‘focus on the “80%” and providing consistent delivery’.

Nor should people over-extend themselves to plug gaps. ‘Hero behaviour during tentpole moments creates panic,’ wrote another member.

4. Understand that relationships come first

‘Take time to build the relationships and trust first,’ wrote one attendee. This can help create a ‘greater sense of community beyond the organisation,’ added another.

One member suggested that teams ask themselves: ‘How can our communication be clear and consistent?’

Three approaches that have worked:

1. The creation of cross-functional teams

The table noted the value in having:

• ‘Embedded individuals and the pairing of roles across functions’
• ‘Performance folk always visible in operational and business stand‑up meetings’
• ‘Cross‑department working groups, communities of practice and think tanks’

2. Shared ownership and accountability

One member wrote that commercial and performance operations can flourish ‘when everyone sees the value of what’s being done’.

There should be ‘joint ownership of outcomes and metrics between both sides’.

3. A continuous effort to maintain alignment

No one has fully cracked this and it is incumbent on all to make an effort.

A member recommended ‘genuine and honest perspective-taking of other departments’ before adding that we need to ‘be careful of biases and assumptions’.

Another suggested using ‘tools like SWOT to help people understand what to protect, address, leverage and manage’.

What to read next

Business or Basketball? Here’s Why the San Antonio Spurs See Little Distinction

By John Portch

“In high-performance organisations, we rarely lose because we lack expertise – we lose when that expertise isn’t effectively integrated.”

With these words Dr Robin Thorpe, who has worked across multiple elite high-performance environments, kicked off his recent virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members. The theme of the day was how teams and organisations can overcome silos born of structural issues with fresh skills and a new mindset.

“We tend to think of the human factors first,” Thorpe tells the Leaders Performance Institute off the back of his presentation, “but once you start to analyse the situation more deeply and begin to reflect, there are likely to be structural factors within an organisation.”

“Across my roles,” he continues, “the most effective environments weren’t necessarily those with the most expertise, but those where systems were deliberately designed to integrate that expertise.”

In rare high-performance environments where excellence is paired with humility, collaboration emerges naturally, as individuals are both confident in their expertise and open to the perspectives of others. This reflects principles from social psychology where low ego threat and high psychological safety enable collective intelligence to outperform individual capability.

So a leader in sport may encounter defensive or withdrawing behaviours, but their roots are often linked to underlying structural factors.

Below, aided by Thorpe’s reflections from a career spanning nearly two decades in both European and North American sport, we run through three of the most common structural factors behind the formation of silos and some of the steps that organisations can take before they become damaging.

1. Specialisation and silos

Outcome:

In the late 2000s, as Thorpe explains, there was an acceleration across the world of sport in the emergence of different performance departments, from sports science and physiotherapy to medical and psychology. In numerous settings, “it led to dichotomy-type frameworks, such as ‘performance and training’, ‘medical and rehab’ or ‘injured and non-injured’. These were structural in nature and encouraged departments to each add their own KPIs, language and processes.” It ultimately led to misaligned and fragmented outcomes, which were often in competition.

Insight:

Specialisation improves expertise but also increases the need for deliberate integration. Therefore, it is important to be clear on the shared outcomes/priorities. How do you ‘nest’ short‑term priorities within longer‑term objectives ? Thorpe says: “We have to be clear on our objective and purpose. What are we here to do? For example, are we here to improve athlete education around certain topics? Is there a more psychological outcome? Is there a technical skill priority? And it doesn’t mean that these priorities are isolated, it just means that maybe a certain member of the team takes more of a lead in ensuring that everything fits together and the greater team work toward a shared outcome.” When done well, this doesn’t just improve collaboration, it directly enhances decision-making quality and performance outcomes.

In practice, this requires leaders to actively design how disciplines connect, rather than assuming collaboration will occur naturally.

This can lead to a much more nuanced (but outcome-focused) approach. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example: if a high-performance team is looking to stimulate quad hypertrophy in an athlete, it will certainly involve the S&C specialist and dietitian, but if the athlete is experiencing challenges with their eating behaviours, there will be opportunity for the psychologist or a mental performance/health specialist to integrate, considering the success of the outcome is heavily influenced by increasing certain nutrient intake. Shared outcomes enable that interdisciplinary conversation. “It can influence outcomes in ways not immediately apparent when viewing the performance challenge in isolation.”

Review your setbacks. “It’s really important to regularly review situations where outcomes weren’t aligned or why an outcome wasn’t achieved or there might have been a communication issue.” The first port of call should not be the human at the foundational layer.

Repeat your purpose. It sounds simple but it is critical to be “very deliberate and very repetitive in a positive, coaching way in reminding staff how to architect collaboration. Consistently discussing purpose, priorities and outcomes for athlete results, whether informally or sometimes more formally in team meetings, can be effective”.

Provide open spaces. “I think we should start to really think about facility architecture and ensuring that we’re creating and positively manipulating traffic footfall and healthy collisions within a space to help reduce silo-forming.” Thorpe admits the best-designed building won’t solve every performance issue, “but it can play a role in minimising some of the downstream effects”

2. Authority-centred structures

Outcome:

Expertise is present but true influence depends on the hierarchy.

Thorpe recalls an experience from earlier in his career. “It was a highly coach-led, centralised structure,” he says. “We could put in place strong systems and processes, but ultimately, they needed to align with the direction and philosophy of the key stakeholder. This is not unique to that environment. In these settings, ensuring that all perspectives are heard and integrated can be challenging, and individuals or departments may naturally gravitate towards protecting their areas of expertise.”

Insight:

Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions. Teams should consider establishing…

Clear decision-making rights. Thorpe suggests that a high-performance team creates a mechanism that integrates interdisciplinary input before it reaches the coach or key stakeholders. He speaks of the “decision-making engine” that operates beneath leadership level.

He says: “Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”

When this is happening 24/7, “More information feeds into this decision-making engine,” he continues, using the example of a health and performance leader reporting on an athlete. “It allows them to communicate clearly, concisely and with confidence to key stakeholders.” These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.

The role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.

3. Misaligned incentives

Outcome:

Departments optimise locally rather than collectively.

This often creates more problems. “Increasing volumes of data, when not clearly aligned to purpose, can unintentionally contribute to siloed thinking.” says Thorpe, adding that it can lead to opinion-selected data points that increases the risk of emotions trumping objectivity.

The highest-performing environments align incentives in a way that balances risk, performance, and availability, rather than allowing one metric to dominate.

It reminds him of Charles Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. The renowned English economist may not have had sports science in mind when he uttered those words, but they resonated with the virtual roundtable when Thorpe shared them.

When incentives are misaligned, collaboration becomes negotiation. The solution lies in…

Shared KPIs. This is linked to the shared outcomes discussed above. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example of a medical team delivering on player availability. He says: “If the team availability percentage is the North Star then it risks bringing about a more conservative approach to solely keeping players available.”

It raises both a moral quandary and a performance issue. “Performance departments tend to want to push players and to maximise human performance. In doing so, you acknowledge that there may be some potential collateral damage and injuries along the way. Medical teams often use player availability as a key indicator of success, while performance teams focus on driving adaptation and physical development, highlighting the importance of aligning these perspectives around shared outcomes specific to the collective objectives of the team or players.”

Intentional system design. It comes back to the ‘decision-making engine’ and clear decision-making rights. “It creates a shared language using correct, up-to-date, appropriate objectivity. Using appropriate data collection measures often reduces the influence of opinions and subjective inputs.”

Ultimately, organisations that address these structural barriers see improvements not just in collaboration, but in decision speed, clarity, and performance outcomes.

As high-performance environments continue to evolve, the challenge is not removing silos, but designing systems that integrate expertise to consistently deliver performance.

To wrap up proceedings, Thorpe posed four questions that practitioners can ask themselves:

What to read next

Breaking Silos: Why the Answer Lies in Creating a Sense of Shared Ownership in Performance

By John Portch

Nico O’Reilly’s remarkable season at Manchester City went up a level with his winning goals in last month’s Carabao Cup final at Wembley.

The City defender-midfielder’s brace capped a perfect birthday weekend (he turned 21 on the eve of the final) and secured his club the first silverware of the English season, with a domestic treble still to play for.

Post-match, O’Reilly was asked if City’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal was a significant blow to the team with whom they continue to vie for the Premier League and FA Cup.

“100 percent. It is a blow for them and we need to build on it and get some momentum from this win now,” he said having received his first (but almost certainly not last) winner’s medal in City colours.

“As soon as the international break is over we need to kick on and fight hard. We have a game in hand in the Premier League, we have to play them at our place, we are still in the FA Cup. Liverpool is a tough tie [in the FA Cup quarter-finals] and we know that so we need to do everything we can to keep going.”

O’Reilly’s rise since breaking into the Manchester City team in 2024 represents another triumph for the club’s exceptional academy. His bullishness displays the drive and determination required to thrive in the elite game.

It calls to mind a late-March virtual roundtable hosted by Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler, who has worked on talent pathways in both English football and cricket.

When discussing the tensions that exist on talent pathways (Brunnschweiler highlighted five), he spoke of the need to develop well-rounded individuals and those with the ruthlessness required to succeed.

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

It was just one of a series of talking points during a month where performance environments, strategies and alignment were top of the agenda. Read on for a complete round-up.

Quote of the month:

The athlete is undoubtedly a stakeholder with agency in their own development, but as one practitioner working in the British sports system observed during a virtual roundtable focused on performance environments, the athlete’s ever-growing involvement raises some questions:

“We’ve definitely found that when you give that space to the athletes, they then can take it a little bit too far. Sometimes they complain about everything. ‘We want to fix this, we want to fix that’. It’s not super constructive… how do we create those boundaries and expectations on what that looks like; and how can we keep it productive to the goals of the environment and what we want to do?”

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full report here.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Insight of the month:

Former New Zealand All Blacks General Manager Darren Shand delivered a presentation where he explained how the team brought the concept of alignment to life in their weekly work.

He said:

“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.

“As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.

“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”

Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.

(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Good to know:

Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions.

That is according to Leaders Performance Adviser Dr Robin Thorpe, who led a virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the question of silos.

Thorpe argues that teams should consider establishing clear decision-making rights, as the role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.

“Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”

These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.

(Photo by Patrick Khachfe/Getty Images)

From the archives:

The Brisbane Lions have won back to back AFL premierships, but that wasn’t the environment Senior Coach Chris Fagan encountered in his first days on the job in 2017.

“I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there.”

He told the story of the team’s transformation on his watch at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full story here.

(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

What’s coming up for members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

In 2019, the San Antonio Spurs’ General Manager, RC Buford, transitioned to a dual role as CEO of the team and President of its parent company, Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

Six years on, he is uniquely placed to discuss the continuing convergence of performance and business in a world of denser competition schedules, rising commercial pressures and heightened performance expectations.

What is his view having seen it from both sides?

“There are no sides,” Buford tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams. “We’re all on one side.” He speaks with a conviction that it could never be any other way.

“There are basketball units that are part of a team and there are business units that are part of a team; and if they’re not working together, neither is going to work,” he continues.

“It’s a dynamic that we’ve seen come closer together over the years,” says Phil Cullen, the Spurs’ Senior Director of Organizational Development & Basketball Operations, who joins Buford on the call.

The conversation takes place just weeks after Forbes valued the Spurs franchise at $4.4 billion, which is a 14% increase in just 12 months. According to the Forbes report, the franchise’s revenue in 2025 was $401 million and their operating income was $151 million.

While these figures are healthy for a US mid-market franchise, Cullen and his colleagues are perennially aware of the NBA’s debt-capacity rules, which influence investment in basketball operations.

“That debt capacity could impact how you build your roster,” he says before going on to outline how the Spurs’ basketball units can also support their business efforts. “We try to get ahead of things as much as we can.”

They try to capture media requests in the pre-season, which, as Cullen explains, allows the team to focus on their basketball when it matters most. Any other outcome is unthinkable for Buford.

He says: “We’re all one team and it becomes siloed when we differentiate ourselves.”

An aligned overall strategy is a necessity. “For us to be successful, we have to be focused on championship teams, impact in the community, and financial strength,” Buford adds. Each unit at the Spurs will have its own key initiatives, which he calls “big bets”. “We’ve all got to entertain those big bets to find success in our units”.

We spend the next 30 minutes with Buford and Cullen discussing what gives these big bets their greatest chance of success.

One team, one strategy

Of his transition to Spurs CEO, Buford says that while he doesn’t claim to know much about business, “I hope I know a thing or two about building teams”.

“I oversee business and basketball – I don’t oversee just one – and I try to be a resource to the people, the experts in those fields,” he says.

These experts sit in cross-functional teams. “You build collaborative teams that have impact and influence on the operation of the organisation.” When partnership deals are negotiated, for example, the partnership team includes representatives from the brand, impact and basketball units. “Through all the partnerships we’re building, the goal is to include each of these areas in a way that they can all be successful.”

Cullen illustrates the point further by offering the example of technology partners, which are needed by both basketball and business units. He says: “A lot of our conversations have been more inclusive of saying, ‘how can we maximise this opportunity with this partner?’ And part of that is the onboarding piece with those partners. It comes from creating these cross-functional teams to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to have a voice into how to maximise these partnerships.”

“But that doesn’t mean everybody in the whole place has to use a partner,” adds Buford. “It doesn’t mean everybody’s required to use it if it doesn’t fit the form or fashion that people need to do their work.”

Put the right people in place

In 2023, the Spurs hired Kaleb Thornhill as VP of Player Development & Organizational Growth.

“He also sits on the partnership team,” says Cullen of Thornhill, who is tasked with supporting player development away from the court. His role is about “understanding their interests; understanding how they want to show up in the community; the things they want to get behind. That was a strategic hire within the last five years that is probably different than most teams.”

Collectively, the Spurs will facilitate media requests during suitable periods and work with the players to deliver on their community-focused efforts such as visiting schools, community hubs and other public spaces.

Player partnerships are another focus, particularly with a playing cohort that invests time and money in their personal brand in a manner that was an anathema to Spurs players of an earlier generation such as Tim Duncan, who resolutely guarded his privacy.

“I can’t speak to others, but in our group there are people branding themselves differently than they did in the past; and they may want more engagement; but it’s not keeping them from any kind of partner relationship, it’s protecting their time,” says Buford. “You have to have a voice that understands what their time is and they must be engaged in the strategy behind the recruitment of partners.”

Cultivate relationships

The Spurs’ Victory Capital Performance Centre (also known as ‘The Rock at La Cantera’) opened its doors in 2023 as the Spurs’ new practice facility and new home of the team’s basketball operations. (Cullen is also heavily involved in Project Marvel, which will see the Spurs move to a new arena in downtown San Antonio in 2032.)

At The Rock at La Cantera, one of the chief architectural considerations, as Cullen explains, was to design an environment that promoted professional relationships.

“The communication piece has to be built on connection and the casual conversations, casual collisions, that we have throughout our workday, whether it’s at our training facility or down at the arena,” he says.

“It’s really important that you develop that sense of relationship, that others can bounce ideas off you and there’s a good, shared understanding of the starting point.”

While the business and basketball ops units work in different locations (“you don’t want everybody in everybody’s business,” says Buford), all units will come together at various times for strategic planning.

“A lot of sessions happen in August and September for the next season, but our sponsorship renewals are actually happening now,” Cullen adds. “We’ve been brought in on the front office to speak in engagements to get ahead and be included in these conversations and some of those pitches.”

The reasons are obvious. “Get the people in partnerships to understand that just because somebody will pay to be a part of an organisation, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for player health,” says Buford. “Just because we can sell an energy drink or sell something doesn’t mean we’re going to do it. So it’s getting them to understand by communicating that.”

“Our organisation has put a lot of resources around our players, their wellbeing and their sense of belonging,” says Cullen. “But we’re also being super careful with the people we’re putting around our players as well.”

As the conversation draws to a close, both Buford and Cullen underline the fact that the Spurs have not solved the conundrum of cross-functional alignment.

Nevertheless, they clearly have a lesson or two to deliver of their own. The Leaders Performance Institute asks Buford what leaders seeking to bring together performance and business operations should be asking themselves.

His reply is instant: “How can I be helpful for you to accomplish what you want? Because, ultimately, if you do well, we’ll all do well.”

What to read next

People in Sport Often Roll their Eyes at the Word ‘Strategy’, but I’ve Found that Planning Provides Direction, Connection and Continuity in a Pressured and Volatile World

By John Portch

“I knew it was a mountain,” said Johann van Graan, “but I didn’t know it was Everest.”

The South African, then with Munster, had agreed to become the Head Coach at struggling Bath in December 2021.

A few days later, he switched on the TV only to see Bath go 0-28 down after just 25 minutes of their Champions Cup tie with Leinster.

It prompted the Everest comment, as Van Graan told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“My oldest boy was worried,” he said onstage. “He almost broke into tears and he said ‘no, we can’t go to Bath’.”

Van Graan took the reins at Bath’s Recreation Ground six months later on 11 July 2022 and, over the next three years, led one of the most remarkable transformations in English rugby history.

By the end of the 2024-25 season, Bath had lifted three trophies: the European Challenge Cup, Premiership and Premiership Rugby Cup.

Here, we explore their ascendancy under Van Graan through the lens of transformational leadership theory, which was made popular in the mid-1980s by American scholar Bernard M Bass, an expert in leadership and organisational behaviour.

Transformational leadership theory has gained traction in the world of high performance in the subsequent four decades and, here, we take the four core dimensions of Bass’ model of transformational leadership (‘the four I’s’) and ponder how they define Van Graan’s work at Bath.

The four I’s of Bernard M Bass

1. Idealised influence

The transformational leader is admired for ‘walking the walk’. They embody qualities their followers want in their team.

In several respects, Van Graan is the embodiment of Bass’ idealised influence. He strives to be a role model of authenticity, fairness and purpose. By the same token, he is not merely a charismatic leader and does not see himself as a hero, even if he told himself at the start of his coaching career in 2023 to “back yourself because no one else will”.

“There’s a quote by Pep Guardiola,” said Van Graan. “‘This beast called football will eat you alive if you’re not always, always, always yourself’.”

Onstage, Van Graan repeatedly returns to the idea of authenticity; his views are sincerely held and he hints at the vulnerability expressed by the Manchester City Manager.

“It took me many years to figure out who I am first and then to become comfortable with that,” he continued.

This attitude has served Van Graan well in his nine years as a head coach working abroad, whether it was getting to grips with St Stephen’s Day rugby in Munster (“in South Africa on 26 December it’s the summer and you go on holiday”) or bracing himself to deal with Bath’s dire situation (“firstly, I had to understand the club’s issues”).

2. Inspirational motivation

Transformational leaders have the ability to inspire and motivate followers through fashioning and presenting a vision.

On his first day at Bath, Van Graan pinned a picture of the Allianz Stadium on the dressing room wall and said, “There’s no date attached to this, but we will get there”.

“I’m in,” said Bath hooker Tom Dunn in response, “but I’m not sure how we’re going to get there.”

It set the expectations suitably high and represented a compelling vision into which any rugby player could buy, not least a group with such raw potential.

For his part, Van Graan knew that performances and, later, the trophies would come when his team was bound by “connection, clarity and commitment”.

“One of the things we underestimate is what alignment truly looks like,” he continued. “I think we as coaches are sometimes scared of that word. We can never communicate enough. Do we really let people know what the standards look like? What the boundaries actually are? What are we actually going to attack?”

He also posed a question to the team’s leadership. “I asked ‘what does the club stand for?’ and nobody would give me an answer. I picked three words: ‘tough to beat’.” They made sense for a team at a low ebb.

“In a rugby context, most of us coaches go after the sexy stuff, but I think you have to go after the important stuff first. That’s defence, set pieces and managing your kicking game; ultimately, it’s a game where you have to go backwards to go forwards.”

Fast-forward three years, following that successful 2024-25 season, Van Graan turned to Dunn and said “we did this together”.

3. Intellectual stimulation

Transformational leaders challenge followers to be innovative, creative and open to new ideas.

Van Graan invited his players to challenge his thinking from day one.

With one player in particular, he played a game of ‘20 questions’. “I didn’t quite know how that was going to go,” he said. It led to a critique of the style Van Graan employed at Munster.

“His first question was ‘why did you kick so much at Munster?’ and I said ‘because we had the best lineout in the world’.”

Additionally, Van Graan runs an open-door policy. “You can make an appointment or knock on my door, come in, close the door, and in that way you can tell me anything. I won’t always agree with you but I will tell you exactly what I think.”

He will also listen. “We’ve all got two ears and one mouth,” he said, underlining the point.

“It’s very easy as a leader, specifically in a successful time, that you think it’s you. It’s not you. It’s the sum of all the others around you.”

Van Graan told the audience he has six mentors, one of whom is Frans Ludeke, whose coaching staff he joined in the mid-2000s at the Pretoria-based Bulls. In 2017, Van Graan flew to Tokyo to meet Ludeke and show him the presentation with which he hoped to win over the management at Munster where he had just applied to be head coach.

“Frans just said ‘you’re not going to get this job’. I asked why and he said ‘because it’s not you. You wrote on here what you think they want to hear. You’re not being yourself’.” Van Graan took the next 24 hours to rework his presentation and was ultimately successful in his candidacy. “I’m not saying it’s because of my presentation but Frans is someone who’s spoken into my life.”

4.Individualised consideration

Transformational leaders demonstrate concern for the needs and feelings of followers and help them fulfil their potential. They establish strong relationships and act as a supportive resource.

Van Graan, who recited a series of quotes during his time onstage, delivers a line from German philosopher Albert Schopenhauer: “talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

“I’m in no way saying I’m a genius,” said Van Graan. “The point I want to make is people want to dream, people want to belong, so you’ve got to give people hope, whether it’s players or staff, you’ve got to be able to see something first and then bring people along with you.”

He hoped to pursue that dream by co-creating a “new culture” at Bath. “‘Culture’ is a word that gets used by so many people. For me, it’s embracing everybody in the group, setting clear boundaries as to what you want and who you are. I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you speak, the colour of your skin: everybody’s welcome at our club.”

This is particularly important when delivering bad news, such as telling a player their contract will not be renewed. In the past, he would make small talk. “Now, I walk in, shake your hand and say: ‘unfortunately, this will be your final season at the club’. I’ve become comfortable with the silence; and people respect that a lot more than not telling them.”

As part of Bath’s collective sense of trust, belonging and psychological safety, Van Graan encourages his players to take perspective. They led Northampton 21-18 with five minutes to go in the 2024 Premiership final and went on to lose 25-21. “We were six minutes from tasting greatness.” They walked out of Twickenham with their heads held high and, 12 months later, defeated Leicester Tigers 23-21 to win the 2025 final.

“We actually played a lot better in the final we lost than the final we won,” said Van Graan. “We haven’t reviewed the previous final at all. We spoke about how close we were but just moved on. The next journey had started.”

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Four Building Blocks of a Great Performance Environment

By John Portch

Strategy is the bridge between ambition and execution.

That is according to performance specialist Darren Shand, who made that very point during his presentation at a recent virtual roundtable.

“We’re all shooting for the stars, we’re all shooting for the trophies,” he said. “Ambition is very common to all in our environments, but execution is rare. Not everybody succeeds. Execution is where the magic is found.”

The New Zealand All Blacks, for whom Shand served as General Manager between 2004 and 2023, found that ‘magic’ more often than most. They won back-to-back World Cups in 2011 and 2015; they also spent ten years in that period as the top-ranked team in the world.

For opponents, the All Blacks were the benchmark; the most prized scalp in rugby union. As for the All Blacks themselves, their ambitions were so obvious that there was little need to spell them out in a nation where, as Shand explained, rugby is part of the “fabric”.

“That wasn’t the challenge for us,” he continued. “The challenge was that bridge; and I propose that strategy is the bridge between ambition and execution.”

The All Blacks’ strategy was rooted in their day-to-day actions, standards and habits; in other words, their behaviours. This was where their ambition truly mattered.

“Ambition is meaningless unless it changes behaviour; and strategy actually lives in behaviour, it doesn’t live in documents.”

Shand went on to share his three key principles for building an effective performance strategy.

1. Learning

Your strategy should evolve with your execution or, as Shand put it, “the question is not ‘is our strategy right?’ But ‘is our strategy still relevant?’”

“An effective performance strategy,” he argued, “should invest in the pillars that will move the needle the most.”

To illustrate his point, Shand described a hypothetical environment that promotes sleep as an important part of recovery as being more valuable than a “shiny new sleep gadget”.

He said: “Let’s build some non-negotiable recovery protocols across our group that we all buy into and that we build together. Let’s think about where we stay; we can have facilities onsite so that it’s really easy to create lots of options for people to participate in recovery; and let’s educate, let’s get players to understand the science behind it rather than just slapping something on someone to gather a whole lot of data.”

2. Alignment

While Shand was working with the All Blacks, alignment wasn’t an abstract concept, it was built into how the team worked week to week.

He described a typical example where coaches would lead the program in the days after a match and then, as the next match approached, the players would gradually assume control. It was a strategy that served them well.

“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering,” said Shand. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.”

Then the balance begins to tip the other way. “As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.”

It makes sense: it is the players on the field who will need to make decisions in the heat of the moment and so the coaches need to provide the environment for the players to test themselves.

“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”

Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.

3. Belonging

This is not a ‘soft’ cultural element but a key performance driver.

“Strategy only works when people feel they belong,” said Shand. “People protect what they feel they’re part of; people give more when they feel connected; people are willing to sacrifice when identity is shared.”

These ideas mirror the work of lawyer-turned-performance specialist Owen Eastwood, the author of the renowned book Belonging.

The team deliberately set out to understand their legacy, connecting every single player to all those who have represented the All Blacks since 1903. The players felt accountable to the past, present and the future. This influenced how they set about their work and, just as significantly, when the moment called for discipline, the playing group policed itself without recourse to coach intervention.

As Shand put it: “The group’s sense of belonging drove the behaviour; and behaviour delivered the strategy.”

He went on to explain that this will look different at senior level and at different stages of a talent pathway. “You don’t want them to be the same,” he added, “you want your young athletes heading towards your ambition, but you want to promote behaviours appropriate to that level and that stage of readiness.”

To do otherwise risks “taking away some of the belonging and identity that those teams need”.

In any case, it comes back to learning.

“Learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage,” said Shand.

The act of learning makes alignment possible and informs an individual’s sense of belonging to a collective.

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Too Often, the Person Is a Sticking Plaster for a Lack of Robust Systems and Processes

By John Portch

“I know we have good people,” said Ayao Komatsu. “It’s a matter of putting it together, giving them clear direction, and an organisational structure that promotes – forces – communication.”

The Haas F1 Team Principal spoke onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London about his team’s efforts to compete with better resourced and more illustrious teams.

“If we cannot work together, if you’re not supporting each other, if you’re not aligned, we’ve got zero chance against organisations minimum three times our size.”

Komatsu’s words set the scene for a virtual roundtable in late February, where Institute members reflected on what makes a performance environment great.

They set out the barriers they face before discussing how they would approach those barriers if given a clean slate.

Off the back of that, we’ve identified four building blocks of great performance environments for your consideration.

Building block 1: psychological safety (the enabler)

When people feel psychologically safe they are better able to contribute to the collective. It also promotes shared ownership and breeds alignment.

A head of culture from the world of English rugby union said:

“One of the most important elements of a great culture is to be a place where people can be themselves and be comfortable being the type of people they are.”

Job security is a critical element. A coach at an English Premier League academy said:

“Once you’ve got your key people, the people that want to be on the bus, in their roles then it’s just trying to keep them in those roles and develop them to better influence environment and the athletes.”

As for the athletes, a practitioner working in the British sports system observed their growing participation as stakeholders:

“We’re seeing a big shift in environments where athletes have much bigger voice and are involved in a lot more decisions, conversations. They don’t want to be told what to do anymore. They want to feel involved; know why what’s happening is happening.”

She then explained that the athletes need to be met halfway so that the dressing room does not turn into a “complaints forum”:

“We’ve definitely found that when you give that space to the athletes, they then can take it a little bit too far. Sometimes they complain about everything. ‘We want to fix this, we want to fix that’. It’s not super constructive… how do we create those boundaries and expectations on what that looks like; and how can we keep it productive to the goals of the environment and what we want to do?”

Building block 2: empathetic leadership (the primary lever)

When leaders are attuned to their people and consistent in their conduct, it helps to create an environment in which psychological safety, ambition and learning can flourish.

This begins with the everyday signals leaders send; what they are prepared to tolerate and the elements they choose to reinforce. The head of culture working in English rugby union said:

“Make sure that the sort of organisation you want to be is mirrored by the behaviours you accept. So it’s all good and well talking about having a good place to be and a good culture, but if you accept behaviours that are not aligned with that place you want to be, it’s disingenuous and people see through it.”

Leaders also shape the environment through the stability they create. In certain sports, this is a rare commodity. As a coach working in the notoriously trigger‑happy world of elite football pointed out:

“Where there’s lots of turnover, people become naturally less and less inclined to think about long-term growth and development.”

Yet this long‑term lens is essential staff and athletes alike. The same coach added:

“When you’re dealing with a 21-year-old high potential player who arguably hasn’t had some of the development they should have at a younger age, there’s probably loads of room for growth in those players if you can foster the right environment. You should be looking for the corners and the spaces around the programme where development is achievable.”

Building block 3: opportunities for growth (the operational prerequisite)

The trick is in providing athletes, coaches and staff with opportunities to develop under your stewardship.

A mental performance coach working in youth tennis in the US highlighted the problem that academy coaches (and their players) may encounter in this regard:

“It’s always a balance: how we can help the athletes improve, whether through coaches or what we call ‘free play’ so they can learn skills and have fun while doing it. But also, we live in a culture where the parents or whomever just want to see results right away and maybe that’s not the best for long-term success and the athlete’s career. You can be good at 12 years old and winning a lot of tournaments and matches, but how you’re doing it right now might not be better suited down the line.”

In the face of short‑term pressure, leaders must give people clarity in direction, expectations and the team’s priorities. A head of health and wellbeing from the world of motorsport spoke of their experience of the value in having “mission clarity”:

“You can then make sure that you’re really clear on the ambition of where you want to get to, then build back from there.”

Building block 4: systems & processes (the delivery mechanism)

When you have safety and clarity, one can then put in place the necessary processes to deliver high performance.

The head of health and wellbeing in motorsport spoke of an environment where leaders emphasise the importance of structured, backward‑planned systems. He said:

“Where are we currently? Look at the gap; and then how do we go about setting some really clear priorities and a strategy that we can deliver that gets us closer to it?”

Elsewhere, a member working in the military highlighted how intentional routines and reflective spaces help his teams stay aligned:

“There is value in being very deliberate in thinking about our infrastructure. We have a couple of offsites each year to drill down and make sure we’re getting these things right; to find the right answer. I’ve been a part of a few different teams and the ones that function the best find a way to do that.”

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Too Often, the Person Is a Sticking Plaster for a Lack of Robust Systems and Processes

By John Portch

Andy Burns tells the Leaders Performance Institute an old story of a strength & conditioning coach who was betrayed by his own siloed thinking.

“He came up to me and said: ‘I think I should be promoted’,” says Burns, who today is a High Performance Manager with the New South Wales Institute of Sport.

At the time, which was several Olympic cycles ago, he oversaw the sports science and sports medicine programmes at a different organisation.

“I said: ‘Why do you think you should be promoted?’ He replied: ‘Well, because I can measure and articulate to you that the athletes are stronger, faster and fitter than they have ever been’.” The S&C coach quickly warmed to his theme. “‘The psychologist just sits and talks to them. How can they be a senior practitioner when I can clearly demonstrate that I’ve made them stronger?’”

Burns had a ready reply. “I said: ‘Let me ask you a question then. If we get to the Games and everybody hits a PB in the gym the week before we leave but everybody then goes out in the first round of the Games, have you done your job?’ His answer was ‘yes’. I said: ‘That’s the reason you’re not a senior – because you don’t understand how your part contributes to the whole’.”

In the intervening period, Burns has conducted extensive research on the topic of silos in sport and his work with the NSW Institute of Sport includes tackling those silos head on with a range of teams and sports.

Below, with Burns’ help, we explore the origins of silos and some practical steps teams can take to remove them.

What are some of the enduring barriers to interdisciplinary work?

Burns points to four common barriers in particular:

1. Worldview

Naturally, people approach challenges with different priorities. He says: “The worldviews of coaches, physiotherapists and psychologists are based on how they were trained, how they were developed; their education system.”

2. Language

Different disciplines have completely different terminology. Despite progress in bringing linguistic unity to this area, “we’re all still talking across each other to some degree,” says Burns.

3. Methods of communication

Burns’ work has highlighted tensions between, say, a coach who often prefers their information “quick and dirty” compared to a sports scientist who takes their time to produce a shiny (and not overly succinct) PowerPoint report. As he points out, a coach can rightly say: ‘if we run a test on Thursday night and you get back to me by Monday, I’ve already taken four more sessions and your information is out of date’.

4. Personal KPIs

“KPIs are a massive challenge as well,” says Burns. “How do we move everyone to an interdisciplinary way of working if everybody’s objectives are just in their single discipline?”

What does it take to get everyone pulling in the same direction?

Shared ownership of the outcome, which includes both the successes and the ‘pain’ of performance.

Burns is preparing a paper that focuses on the characteristics of cross-functional teams and spoke to 12 performance directors as part of that process.

Some of their responses were to be expected, but one performance director spoke of the idea that ‘shared hardship forges teams’. Burns asked him to expand. The PD cited the example of a six-week cricket tour where players, coaches and staff are away from their friends and families.

“As a leader, that makes you think: what environments can I create where people are going to have to endure difficult moments as a team and share some of that hardship?” says Burns in reflection.

It’s not an easy question to answer because, as he points out, it’s generally the coach’s head on the chopping block if things go wrong. Coaches also tend to take a more “24/7 approach” than most practitioners. (“This is one thing that coaches told me that stuck with me and I don’t yet have an answer for how they might meet in the middle,” says Burns).

Moreover, if a coach is sacked, “there might only be two or three more jobs in that country at that level. They might have to move country and they can’t really jump from being a soccer coach to a rugby coach either.”

How can leaders work towards shared accountability?

For Burns, it starts with a programme’s over-arching KPIs and its ‘what it takes to win’.

“You have to clearly articulate the performance requirement of the sport, map your athlete cohort against that, and then the coach’s idea of how they interpret what it takes to win,” he says. When the coach is clear in their philosophy and the performance team understand what contributes to performance and what is a discriminator, they can start to share the workload.

“You have all these activities that are linked to the coach’s philosophy and the KPIs.” From there, the team can determine who needs to take the lead in a project and when. So when an athlete is injured, for example, the first lead would be the doctor, who would eventually pass the athlete to the physio, followed by the S&C coach, then, finally, the head coach.

Shared personal KPIs can also help to address the performance need, particularly as they are so much more powerful than KPIs that sit within a single discipline.

Burns explains his rationale using the example of a collective KPI for an S&C coach and a dietitian. “They need to understand the project around tapering for performance while maintaining lean muscle mass,” he says. “Now we’re talking about interdisciplinary practice rather than multidisciplinary; and then you’re in a position where you’re opening up those silos and getting people to think collaboratively.”

Coaches can have very different philosophies on what it takes to win. How should those differences be taken into account?

“For performance support staff, influence starts with understanding the coach”, says Burns. “Different head coaches value different disciplines in different ways.” For example, one coach may want their psychologist on hand each day, while another coach may not prioritise psychology. Burns likens it to the “layers of an onion”. “A coach needs to know who’s in their core team and who can be brought in as and when needed.”

Whatever the case, “you’ve got to cater to the individual sport, the individual programme, preferences of the coach and needs of the athlete cohort.” That means the practitioner must “learn their preferences, pressures and language, even if it’s not how you would ideally work. Credibility is built by solving real performance problems first. Once you’ve demonstrated value and earned trust, you can help shape broader planning and strategy. In high-performance environments, impact comes before influence.”

Burns then recalls a workshop he ran for an Archery team. “The coach and I wrote the name of an athlete on a whiteboard, wrote the score they needed to hit, and then the coach wasn’t allowed to speak for 30 minutes.”

Over the course of that half-hour, the other staff members wrote on the board how they would help that archer bridge their current gap between winning a medal or not.

“At the end, the coach turns to me and says, ‘I had no idea they had all that information on the athlete and the sport’.”

The message to coaches is that a practitioner may know more about your sport than you think and that knowledge (combined with their domain knowledge) can be used to generate deeper insights.

Does it come down to role clarity?

“That’s probably too simplistic – ‘role clarity’ has this airy quality,” says Burns, who points to his research with his co-author Dave Collins.

“It’s not just role clarity because I can tell you what your job is, but you have to accept that this is the job, that you’re comfortable with what you need to do; and then you need the recognition, remuneration and reward for doing the actual job.” These three aspects, as he explains, aren’t often discussed.

How do leaders ensure everyone is delivering the same messages?

Through a ‘shared mental model’, which Burns describes as “a common internal understanding held across a team about goals, strategies, processes, roles, and what ‘good’ looks like”.

This tackles the pervasive risk of mixed messages undoing your good work.

Burns adds: “If the coach says this is going to be a hard session but the physio puts an arm around the athlete and tells them to go easy, then it’s a problem.”

Athletes are as human as anyone else and some will look for a way out, if possible, “but if the whole performance team is like ‘no, this is really important for you’ then the athlete has no escape. The language is the same and there’s a clear outcome in mind.”

It “10Xs” the impact, as Burns puts it. “Every interaction with an athlete becomes an intervention and they keep hearing the same message and getting more and more reinforcement that ‘this is why we’re doing these things’. That speeds up how fast you can move as an interdisciplinary team.”

A shared mental model is also important when plans have to be adapted.

What about coaches resistant to change?

“Coaches,” as Burns says, “just want their athletes to deliver, perform, be successful and grow as people. So if you can contribute to that and demonstrate that you as a member of staff can contribute to that formula, they’ll generally listen to you.”

The shift is equally important for coaches themselves. “Opening the door to different expertise is not a threat to authority, it’s an expansion of it. The best coaches invite practitioners to become students of their sport, integrating their knowledge into performance decisions.”

He shares another real-life example concerning a talented athlete who was under-performing. “The athlete thought they had to be lean going into a competition,” he continues. “He thought: ‘if I’m leaner, I’m lighter, I’m faster’ and the coach reinforced that narrative.” The performance team unearthed the fact that the athlete’s PB came when they were eight kilos heavier. With both the athlete and coach’s consent, they adapted the athlete’s programme to great effect.

That evidence-based intervention earned the trust of that coach. “It’s not sports science and medicine versus coaching. At its best, it becomes one collective identity: the coaching team, sharing responsibility for performance.”

Burns is also ready for any coach who claims that something that failed ten years ago still has no place in the performance equation.

“It is sometimes about a simple reframe, such as: ‘Yes it didn’t work then, but do you know how much technology has advanced in ten years?’ It might have been the athletes weren’t ready for that, or the practitioner didn’t understand it well enough. I’d say ‘you’re a different coach because you’ve got more experience, the athlete cohort is different, and the concept might have progressed after ten more years of research and experimentation’.”

And what can help practitioners?

Burns suggests that all practitioners are given opportunities to lead projects that extend beyond their domain.

He says: “In one of our endurance sports, the younger athletes don’t fully understand general race day preparations such as: how do you manage a taper? How do you prepare on the day? What does your warm-up need to look like? What kind of food do you need to take with you? These are some basic fundamentals but rather than do one-to-one interventions, we decided to create a curriculum of education for this group.”

It has led to a situation where the S&C coach, despite not delivering on nutrition, is leading that stream. The contrast with the S&C Burns mentioned earlier in our conversation could not be starker.

“I’m holding them accountable to educating these athletes and pulling in the right people as and when needed to deliver certain elements of it.”

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Do you Feel your Team Has Plenty of Clarity But Still Suffers from Misalignment?

By John Portch

“I’m the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that’s an answer in and of itself,” said Eileen Gu.

The Chinese-American star, who had just won silver medals in the slopestyle and big air at the Milano Cortina Olympics, had been asked at a press conference if she saw those medals as “silvers earned” or “golds lost”.

She chastised the journalist for his “ridiculous perspective” but her wider comments were more telling.

“How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right?” she said.

“I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before. So, I think that is more than good enough, but thank you.”

It called to mind the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was similarly exasperated in a press conference when he was asked about the Bucks’ ‘failure’ upon their elimination from the 2023 NBA Playoffs.

“There’s no failure in sports,” he responded. “There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better.”

Gu, it must be said, won gold in the halfpipe just days later (making it three golds and three silvers in two Olympics) but she and Antetokounmpo (who won the NBA Cup with the Bucks in 2024) hinted at how unhelpful it is to frame high performance as anything less than first place or a gold medal.

Setbacks are inevitable, but as Gu and Antetokounmpo show, athletes, coaches and programmes can choose how they meet the moment. Those that prepare smartly, with the right focus and guidance, can give themselves improved chances of success.

These ideas came up time and again at the Leaders Performance Institute in February. Here is a flavour of what was said.

Insight of the month

The Winter Olympics are on the agenda across the Performance Hub, with high-performance specialist Richard Young telling us what happens when teams stray from their mission:

As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Read more here.

Quote of the month

This month its Peter Hodgkinson, who wrote of his time working as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team during the 37^th America’s Cup.

Given the youth and inexperience of his build team, psychological safety and intent-based leadership were the order of the day. He wrote:

Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news. 

INEOS Britannia in action at the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall

Good to know

Pressure doesn’t make you better, but it does reveal what is already here.

That is according to high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery, who led a virtual roundtable for members looking at how they can reduce their athletes and coaches’ allostatic load – that is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold.

The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).

Crucially, as Vickery explained, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”

Read more here.

Coach wellbeing

Though often neglected, members of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to share ideas on how they can better support their coaches.

In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.

This, their former manager explained, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.

Read more here.

Aussie rules

In early February we welcomed many of you to Brisbane for Leaders Meet: Australia, where organisations including the Brisbane Lions, Cricket Australia and World Rugby tackled the challenges of the day.

Chief amongst those was the ever-pressing need for alignment.

The Lions’ Senior Coach Chris Fagan favoured strong relationships with senior management; Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry espoused the value of psychological safety in cricket; and World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson, as an executive, emphasised trust built on clarity from the top.

We picked out five elements for your consideration.

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

One you might have missed

Ben Ashdown and Dr Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University pondered the behavioural elements of resilience in young players at football academies in this exclusive interview.

Their research has identified six resilience behaviours:

Their hope is to use these six to fashion a tool to help academy staff identify and develop resilience behaviours in their young athletes.

Read more here.

What’s coming up for members

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy