By John Portch

John Bull began the final Leaders Virtual Roundtable of 2025 with a provocation.

“One of the things I see, certainly in the corporate world, is that people mistake ‘good’ for high performing,” said the Head of High Performance at Management Futures. “In my experience, genuine high-performing teamwork is much rarer than people would admit.

“We know what it feels like when a team is dysfunctional and something’s not working, but when a team is harmonious and there are fairly good relationships, people mistake that for being a high-performing team.”

He presented this distinction between dysfunction and high performing as different ends of a continuum:

“In order to get to the right-hand side of this continuum, high-performing teamwork requires people to lean into behaviours that don’t come naturally,” added Bull.

He then explained that there is also a risk in over-collaborating. “This is about quality not quantity. Our efforts to get more out of teamwork can sometimes slow down performance.”

There is also a distinction between working within a ‘stable team’ (e.g. a department within a high performance team) and teamwork across boundaries, between people who rarely work together or don’t see themselves as one team (e.g. business and performance functions).

The aviation industry, Bull said, excels at cross-boundary teamwork.

“If you think about when you have a critical incident while flying, you’ve often got people in the crew who don’t know each other. The crew must collaborate with air traffic control on the ground, and they won’t know them,” he continued. He explained that the industry has long valued listening and speaking up.

It has also placed an emphasis on ‘diamond thinking’, which looks like this:

“In aviation, when you have to solve an issue, as a rule of thumb, you should spend 50 percent of the time opening the diamond up,” he said. “You get a lot of input but you’re then clear on who’s going to make the final call. Some of us in the coaching space struggle with the balance between democracy and a leader making a decision. Diamond thinking allows for that.”

Bull then led the table into a discussion on his four building blocks of team performance:

He explained each in turn and their different elements.

1. Unifying focus

“If you don’t have clarity you can’t create any of the other conditions.”

• Goals that energise: “You can have clarity but if people don’t care about that clarity, it has no purpose.”
• Strategy: “How good are we at saying no to stuff and letting go of the nice-to-haves in order to keep focused on the things that are going to make a bigger difference?”
• Energy: “Your unifying focus is working when you have team meetings and there’s a buzz in the room and palpable engagement, energy and a collective desire to do something.”

2. Quality of interaction

“Trust enables us to lean into more uncomfortable conversations and have the real performance conversations in a way that doesn’t put those relationships at risk.”

• Belonging: “The extent to which people feel valued has a huge impact on how much of their talent they bring.”
• High trust: “Trust enables us to lean into more uncomfortable conversations and have the real performance conversations in a way that doesn’t put relationships at risk.”
• Open dialogue: “A key thing that gets in the way of open, candid dialogue is defensiveness.”
• Good use of time: “When we get together, are we focusing on the right things and do we use time well? Do we have really good open discussions and close those discussions down with clarity around what we’re going to do?”

3. Quality of action

“High-performing teamwork emerges when people go for the gap.”

• Disagree and commit: “This is the notion that once you’ve had an open discussion and everyone’s aired their view, you have a cultural principle that once we make a decision, everyone commits 100 percent to that decision.”
• Empowered to act: “One of the symptoms of over-collaboration is where people start to think they can’t do anything without checking with colleagues.”
• Coordinated action: “Sometimes we see our focus for building high-performing teamwork within really formal structures, but when you get it really working that happens organically.”
• Honest reviews: “These have two purposes. One is about accountability for action, but the even greater purpose is about driving learning. What’s our cadence and speed of learning from action?”

4. Shared responsibility

“It’s getting people to recognise that when the team’s not performing they should feel empowered to step in and say something about it and not just rely on the team leader.”

• Clearly defined behaviours: “Put energy into defining the norms of behaviour we want to build the culture around. The fewer, the better.”
• Collective ownership: “When really good teams have a meeting and the session’s been going on too long or there’s a lack of clarity, that can be called out by anyone in the team.”
• Peer feedback: “Unequal contribution is an issue… invite feedback.”
• ‘We over I’: “To what extent is the collective purpose of the team operating in people’s minds as opposed to their own function or own needs?”

As a follow on, Bull highlights six human factors that can serve to inhibit team performance:

Again, he shared his thoughts on each:

Unequal contribution: “We know from research that if you have a group or a team of eight people 70 percent of the contribution will come from two or three… Status and personality has more of an impact on who speaks than who knows stuff, and that should scare you as a team leader.”

Groupthink: “It’s a hardwired principle of how our brains work that we will conform to the thinking of the group if we don’t have a strong view… One of the best ways to combat groupthink is to get people to think individually before a group discussion.”

Low psychological safety: “Probably the biggest thing that kills team performance is a lack of psychological safety.”

Fixed position: “One of the things that hurts psychological safety the most is defensiveness, where people are in a fixed position. The way you deal with the fixed position that I’ve seen work best is to deal with it one-to-one.”

Tribal or siloed behaviour: “We’re wired as humans to be tribal and there are two types of tribal behaviour. One is where you are deliberately trying to beat the other. What is much more common is you’re not competing but you just don’t think about the other ‘tribe’ as much.”

Poor use of time: “Humans tend to be pretty bad at how we use time together in groups. A quick win is to get the team thinking about when we had our best team meeting, what was it about that, what’s getting in the way of it.”

Bull then returned to the themes of psychological safety and fixed positions when sharing and describing the three types of “thinking environments” in groups and teams as revealed by Management Futures’ research:

“The bottom two points are ineffective,” said Bull. “The definition of open dialogue is where people are saying what they think, but as soon as they’ve put their view out they’re inviting disagreement. It’s not about trying to win the argument, it’s about trying to get to a collective insight of what we know as a group. It’s very different to trying to influence colleagues.”

With time running out, Bull shared a final slide highlighting four key skills to encourage collaboration, with a series of questions for members to ponder: 

By John Portch

The Australian children’s cartoon Bluey has inspired at least one international cricket team to greater heights.

“We used an episode to bring to life our ‘embrace change’ value,” said the team’s performance lead at a recent virtual roundtable.

It made sense. For one thing, the eponymous character, an Australian cattle dog (known colloquially as a Blue Heeler) puppy, is cute; secondly, the show’s themes of self-development and selflessness resemble the values often espoused in dressing rooms.

With his fellow Leaders Performance Institute members smiling, the performance lead explained that his playing group had gone as far as creating a ‘Rusty Award’, which is named in honour of Bluey’s friend Rusty, an Australian kelpie, to celebrate teammates.

He continued: “At the end of each camp, the players pass the Rusty Award to whoever they think has either embodied our values or has been a real good person around their teammates over that camp or weekend.”

That insight set the scene for a conversation on how members believe their own team cultures are evolving; what is working well and where the opportunities lie.

This is a snapshot of what they shared.

Firstly, there are five things that most teams on the call tend to do well:

1. Articulate their values in a resonant way

Values have to be more than words on a wall.

“Having consistent language has worked well for us,” said the aforementioned performance lead. “We have three values or pillars – ‘embrace challenge’, ‘evolve yourself’ and ‘enjoy the ride’ – and the coaches and support staff have been forthright in using that language within sessions so that the players can always draw back to that.”

A performance support specialist from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of her organisation’s renewed emphasis on transparency.

“We’re trying to communicate to athletes as frequently as we can to drive that connection,” she said. “If they feel like they’re well informed and they’re part of the planning, they can also hear reflected back to them things that they have potentially asked for in our feedback mechanisms.”

“We can’t leave any of this for chance,” added a head of coaching and development from the British system. “How intentional can we be with spending time on it? To start to label things so they aren’t subject to misinterpretation?”

2. Inspire personal accountability

It is a question of the standards you walk past being the standards you’re prepared to accept, whoever you are.

“That starts with leading yourself,” said the performance support specialist. “You’ve got to be able to look after yourself before you can look after your teammates.”

“When are we nudging?” said the head of coaching and development. “When are we realigning and checking and challenging the behaviours that we do not want to see or may not be in line with our desired options?”

3. Make their people feel safe

Whether you encounter resistance from long-tenured staff or you are dealing with rapid turnover, your people must feel that you are listening to them.

“Listen to the system and the system will tell you what it needs,” said the performance support specialist, adding, “I think a large part of where culture can get derailed is where people don’t feel heard and valued.”

In response, a sports scientist spoke of their institute’s desire to engender a collective sense of belonging in the pursuit of innovations.

“It’s allowed people to feel like they can make another level of contribution,” she said. “It opened the door in ways where some of our different support team members and our coaches have been given an opportunity to talk about their ‘why’ and talk about their own attachment to our values.”

From that place of interpersonal safety, teams and team members are ready to tackle the issues of the day, even if they end up down “rabbit holes” as an athlete support officer working in the UK system put it.

The first step is to establish the performance question. “That enables us to have challenging conversations without it feeling personal”. Then you must “make sure your people have the ability to express themselves, bring new ideas, problem-solve and make decisions and add their own flavour.”

3. Try new things in low-risk settings

Comfort in risk-taking cannot be separated from notions of accountability, belonging and safety.

“We have benefited from a strong, overt, and repeatedly iterated attitude from our new director and leadership team to take on and try new things,” said one long-tenured attendee presently adapting to new management at a new practice facility. “There’s a sense that we’re not writing a new story but a new chapter.”

4. Celebrate their people

The Rusty Award is a prime example, but gestures can be just as important.

“A lot of people probably perceive working on your culture as a grand gesture moment,” said one attendee, “whereas the little gestures and the little interactions matter way more because they stack and pound over time”.

On top of these encouraging signs of progress, there are three areas where teams can further strengthen their culture with simple tweaks:

1. Celebrate progress, not perfection

“I like to celebrate our imperfections and reframe expectations to give the team belief in its potential,” said a performance support specialist based in Australia. “We say pressure is a privilege, but expectation can sometimes make culture deteriorate because of the pressure and expectation to perform or to behave in a certain way.”

2. Focus on the small interactions

“Corridor conversations are key,” said the athlete support officer, “and I think we forget the impact that they can have.”

3. Keep challenging your assumptions and biases

One attendee suggested red-teaming, which is the practice of stress-testing ideas. He said: “How do we check our blind spots? How do we identify them? How do we systemise those processes?” Doing so is important because “what don’t know what we don’t know”.

What to read next

The Leader’s Paradox: the Closer you Get to the Centre of a Complex System, the More Difficult it Is to See the Whole

By Richard Young PhD

After years of school drop-offs, assemblies, and reading logs, one word has followed our family like a soundtrack: literacy.

It’s on every classroom wall for a reason: literacy is foundational. It’s the skill that keeps on giving.

In high performance, we need a different kind of literacy — one that helps us lead, perform, and sustain success amid noise, pressure, and constant change.
It’s the ability to navigate complexity with clarity and intent.

That’s what I call performance leadership.

Over eleven Olympic cycles, I’ve seen what separates one-off winners from serial champions. It isn’t more talent, motivation, or resources.

It’s three deeper literacies that repeat medallists — and the systems around them — consistently master. I call them The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems.  This idea is explored in my book Amplify: The Keys to Performance Leadership.

Beyond the surface

There’s a difference between reaching high performance and sustaining it. The first is an achievement. The second is an art.

Sustained success isn’t about pushing harder or repeating what worked before, it’s about finding and releasing the hidden friction — the small resistances that quietly wear performance down over time. Grit may get you to the summit, but clarity, alignment, and rhythm are what keep you there.

Too often, leaders chase short-term wins or mistake movement for momentum. These distractions drain energy and blur focus. Exceptional leaders rise above by cutting through the noise — focusing on the vital few forces that sustain performance over time. That’s where the Three Literacies come in: the disciplines that keep clarity sharp, alignment strong, and rhythm alive.  Let’s explore each of these.

Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes defining it and five minutes solving it.” Most teams flip that ratio.

1. Problem literacy

Problem literacy isn’t about tackling a high volume of problems, it’s about knowing which problems matter most and gaining alignment around them. It’s the discipline of naming the real issue, not just the visible one.

In medal-winning systems, people don’t confuse activity for clarity. They slow down to diagnose, ask uncomfortable questions, and map the terrain before they march.

I once worked with a cycling team convinced their problem was bike technology. Our analysis revealed the real limiter wasn’t the equipment, it was the decision speed between coaches and mechanics during live races. Once they solved that, medals followed.

Try this:

Before your next big decision, pause and ask: what problem are we really trying to solve?

Then get the people closest to the action to describe it.

If you hear ten different answers, you don’t have problem literacy yet.

2. Preparation literacy – building what matters

Once the right problem is named, preparation literacy ensures you build the systems, habits, and routines that hold under pressure.

A gold medallist once told me, “When I feel pressure, I return to my basics. That’s my anchor.” True preparation is quiet, repetitive, and often invisible — like a rhizome spreading beneath the soil. You don’t see the roots growing, but they’re forming strength, connection, and resilience long before anything breaks the surface. When pressure comes, those roots hold everything together.

When the right problem is identified, the solution becomes leverageable and sustainable.

As a great leader once told me, “Think once and deliver often.” That’s the essence of preparation literacy: finding the root issue and creating a systemic solution that can deliver again and again. It’s not about reacting faster, it’s about building better. The deeper the root, the stronger and more repeatable the performance.

Try this:

Audit your preparation. Ask, “If the pressure doubled tomorrow, would our routines still hold?” Preparation literacy isn’t about doing more—it’s about building deeper. Because when the surface shakes, only what’s rooted endures.

3. Performance literacy – delivering when it matters

Knowing what to do and doing it under pressure are two different skills.

Performance literacy is the capacity to act with clarity when the stakes are high and the conditions unpredictable. It’s the meeting point of preparation and reality where plans are tested, emotions surge, and choices define outcomes.
Champions train for this space. They prepare their systems, minds, and relationships to hold steady when the environment doesn’t. High performers don’t wait for calm. They rehearse in the storm. They build familiarity with chaos, practice decision-making under fatigue, and refine communication when time and pressure close in. Over time, they develop a kind of internal rhythm that holds even as everything around them speeds up.

Performance literacy shows up in the small details — the pause before reacting, the deep breath before deciding, the steady tone in the middle of noise. It’s the mark of someone who has built trust in their process and belief in their preparation.

Try this:

Pressure-proof your moments. Rehearse them. Run “what if” scenarios. Expose yourself and your team to the demands of performance before the real moment arrives. Each deliberate repetition builds readiness, confidence, and flow.

The best don’t rise to the occasion; they return to what they’ve trained for. Performance literacy ensures what you’ve trained for is enough when it matters most.

The Performance Leadership Triad

Together, the three literacies form a Performance Leadership Triad:

• Problem literacy focuses your energy on the right target.
• Preparation literacy builds the foundation to hit it.
• Performance literacy ensures delivery when it counts.

Miss one, and the system wobbles. Solve the wrong problem and effort is wasted. Prepare poorly and pressure exposes it. Neglect execution and planning stays on paper.

Literacy never ends

School teaches reading, writing, and arithmetic. High performance demands Problem, Preparation, and Performance literacy—the hidden grammar of sustained success. Because literacy doesn’t end at school — it evolves. And when you master these three, you don’t just win once; you create a system capable of winning again and again.

In my book Amplify: Performance Leadership, I explore these three literacies in depth, with stories from Olympic campaigns, diagnostic tools, and practical frameworks you can apply immediately.

Richard Young is an internationally renowned performance advisor. He has been involved with 11 Olympics as an athlete, coach, researcher, technologist, and leader working across more than 50 sports and seven countries focused on sustained high performance. He has won international gold medals and coached world champions. He founded international performance programmes including, the Technology & Innovation programmes for Great Britain and New Zealand, and a Performance Knowledge & Learning programme for the New Zealand Olympic, Winter Olympic and Paralympic teams. Across seven Olympic cycles he has researched the differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, support staff, leaders and the system they are in to unlock the keys that separate them from the rest.

Main Image: European Space Agency

By John Portch

Carole Mundell kicked off her presentation at the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London with a stunning montage.

The video depicted a range of space-faring feats performed by the European Space Agency [ESA] as it enjoyed its 50^th year.

Mundell, who is the Director of Science at the ESA , brought the room back to Earth again when outlining her efforts to bring together 23 European nations (more specifically their governments) in pursuit of the agency’s interstellar goals.

“Diplomacy is a contact sport,” said Mundell, who is a diplomatic veteran at this stage. She is responsible for a pan-European staff of over 45,000 people, with headquarters in five jurisdictions. You can also throw in the challenges posed by Brexit, the pandemic (when international diplomacy definitely was not a contact sport) and the war in Ukraine.

“The political churn at the moment is unprecedented,” she continued. “From one day to another, we don’t know whether our member state governments will continue to be governments or remain in place for another election.”

This volatility stands in contrast to ESA missions, all of which take decades to devise and tend to last longer than most political careers.

Then there’s the space-based challenges. In her time onstage, Mundell described a range of missions, from explorations of Jupiter’s moons to detailed observations to the surface of Mercury. All require incomprehensible precision.

Take the LISA [Laser Interferometer Space Antenna] mission. Its purpose is to detect gravitational waves in space; the ripples in space-time caused by cosmic events such as black hole collisions.

“They will have three spacecraft flying in convoy, with two and a half million kilometres between each spacecraft,” she said. “They will follow an Earth-Sun orbit and they will rotate and stay in that triangle.”

The lasers in question must be able to point with precision narrower than a proton.

““We’re going to measure the nature of space-time itself. It’s eye-watering technology.”

LISA measuring the properties of gravitational waves (Image: the European Space Agency)

Mundell has become adept at managing the external elements that could derail projects such as LISA. Thanks to her leadership, ESA’s creative and technical minds are able to do their best work in a climate of political uncertainty.

Psychological safety

In space, Mundell told us, things often go wrong. Take the Euclid mission, the purpose of which is to map the ‘dark’ universe. The lens of space telescope, which orbits the sun 1.5 million km from Earth, became contaminated by a strip of ice thinner than a strand of DNA. Mundell’s team had to find a way to defrost the ice without damaging the equipment’s sensitive optics.

Euclid begin its dark universe survey. (Image: European Space Agency)

But if you can reasonably anticipate microscopic space ice then you can devise a plan to defrost it.

“We did that last month,” she said almost matter-of-factly, but the ESA’s staff have built trust in their systems. “At a time of crisis, the first thing you do is check the process.” The system provides a layer of safety that goes beyond the interpersonal dynamics originally associated with the term ‘psychological safety’ (although these remain important; Mundell says: “Please create the best possible cultures you can. Please have the courage to really call out bad behaviour”).

“The cognitive safety comes from the fact that you know there is a process that you’ve all built together.”

This knowledge is also useful when navigating potential cultural differences present in a supranational organisation.

More creative, less expensive, more innovative

On her way to the Kia Oval, Mundell received news that one of an ESA contract negotiation was going backwards.

“My first instinct was to think of a solution,” she said. “And a very calm senior colleague said to me: ‘we don’t need to escalate this’. We don’t always need to go to the nuclear option.”

Such setbacks and budget cuts are par for the course. During his annual press briefing in January, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher revealed that the ESA budget for 2025 would be €7.68 billion. It was €7.79 billion in 2024, but Germany, Italy and the UK reduced their contributions by a collective €430 million.

“We have to continually innovate and make things more creative, less expensive, but more innovative,” said Mundell, who explained that the ESA must design to cost. While there is room for creativity in day to day problem-solving, the process guides the action taken. “We have a whole quality assurance system where we set our objectives and we say ‘what will we do?’ ‘What did we say we’d do?’ ‘Did we do what we said?’”

Enduring purpose

The ESA was founded to enable European nations to explore the cosmos and further the continent’s knowledge and understanding. It’s an enduring purpose that continues to appeal. On 1 January this year, Slovenia became the 23^rd member state, with several others still in the queue to join.

“Our missions are lifetime generational missions,” said Mundell. “You’ll see that people will give a significant fraction of their lifetime to develop, design and fly these missions, and ultimately protect them, to deliver science back to society. Children in school today will use data from our missions.”

She explained that once every three years there is a council meeting of ESA members at a ministerial level to decide the agency’s budget for the next three-year cycle. She shared an image from the 2022 meeting in Paris. It was taken just before she joined:

The official portrait of ministers at the 2022 ESA Council Meeting at Ministerial Level. (Photo: Stephane Corvaja / European Space Agency)

“This is a photograph of inspiration,” she said. “These ministers come from all different political backgrounds, they were facing various different challenges at this time. There was cost of living crisis and obviously the war in Ukraine was pushing all sorts of problems across these member states, and yet they all came together and they agreed that space is important.”

Hear more from Carole Mundell

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

The 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black provided a masterclass in how behavioural psychology determines team performance outcomes.

Whilst traditional analytics focused on individual statistics and course fit, the tournament results validated what behavioural economics could have predicted: personality compatibility matters more than raw talent in team formats.

As Europe secured a commanding 15-13 victory, several US pairings failed spectacularly despite strong individual credentials. These failures weren’t random—they were predictable through behavioural analysis. Equally important, Europe’s successful pairings demonstrated the power of complementary psychological profiles. Here’s how the science of decision-making under pressure explains both the failures and the successes.

Prospect Theory in action

Before examining specific pairings, it’s necessary to understand Prospect Theory, the Nobel Prize-winning framework developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The theory reveals that people feel losses approximately twice as intensely as equivalent gains, evaluate outcomes relative to expectations rather than in absolute terms, and shift their risk-taking behaviour depending on whether they’re protecting a lead (becoming conservative) or trying to recover from a deficit (becoming aggressive). Understanding these principles allows us to predict when players will make poor decisions, even when they’re emotionally calm and technically skilled.

The gold standard: Seve Ballesteros and José María Olazábal

The most legendary Ryder Cup partnership in history provides the perfect template for behavioural compatibility. Playing together 15 times between 1987 and 1993, Seve and Ollie won 11 points with a record of 11-2-2—the most successful pairing in Ryder Cup history.

Why they worked:

• Complementary leadership: Ballesteros (dominant/leader) + Olazábal (supportive/executor)
• Complementary pressure responses: Ballesteros (aggressive/risk-seeking) + Olazábal (steady/consistent)
• Complementary energy: Ballesteros (extrovert/generator) + Olazábal (introvert/stabiliser)
• Clear role definition: Ballesteros told Olazábal, “José, just play your golf and I will take care of the rest”

Ballesteros’ aggressive, risk-seeking approach was balanced by Olazábal’s steady precision. Different styles, unified purpose, perfect synergy.

At the 2025 Ryder Cup, Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood demonstrated the same principles, going 4-0 in their matches. McIlroy’s aggressive, expressive leadership paired perfectly with Fleetwood’s steady, supportive presence. It was a modern validation of the Ballesteros/Olazábal template.

The English-Morikawa disaster

The most glaring failure at the 2025 Ryder Cup was the Harris English and Collin Morikawa pairing, which DataGolf retrospectively ranked as the worst possible combination (132nd out of 132 pairings for Team USA).

They lost 5&4 to McIlroy/Fleetwood on Friday and lost 3&2 to the same pair on Saturday.

Behavioural analysis tells us that both players share problematic psychological profiles for team play.

These include:

• Introverted processors: Neither naturally communicates or generates energy
• Similar pressure responses: Both become conservative when stakes increase
• Analytical personalities: Both overthink rather than trust instincts
• Internal focus: Neither provides external motivation for their partner
• No leadership dynamic: Both are supportive personalities with no natural leader

When facing the aggressive, crowd-energised McIlroy/Fleetwood duo, they had no mechanism to generate counter-momentum or break negative cycles. Their conservative tendencies amplified each other, creating a downward spiral that traditional coaching couldn’t address.

The contrast with Ballesteros/Olazábal is stark: Where Ballesteros told Olazábal “I will take care of the rest,” English and Morikawa had no such clarity. Both waited for the other to lead.

Scheffler’s team format struggles: when strengths become weaknesses

Perhaps more surprising was Scottie Scheffler’s continued struggles in team formats. Despite being the world’s most dominant individual player, his Ryder Cup record tells a different story: 2-4-3 overall, 0-3 in foursomes.

The behavioural explanation is that Scheffler’s individual strengths become liabilities in team play.

More specifically:

• Control orientation: His need for complete control conflicts with shared decision-making
• Perfectionist mindset: Partner mistakes trigger frustration and tension
• Internal processing: His quiet confidence doesn’t translate to team energy
• Self-reliance: Dependency on partners creates anxiety rather than support

The same psychological traits that make him unbeatable individually (complete control, perfectionism, internal focus) become obstacles when success depends on partnership dynamics. His pairing with Russell Henley (both introverts, both analytical, no clear leadership dynamic) lost 5&3 to Jon Rahm and Sepp Straka, the match effectively over after the front nine.

These Ryder Cup results offer crucial insights for organisational team building:

1. Complementarity over similarity

Traditional thinking suggests pairing similar personalities for harmony. Behavioural economics shows the opposite: complementary traits create stronger partnerships. Successful teams need energy generators AND steady influences, communicators AND processors, leaders AND supporters.

Evidence: Ballesteros/Olazábal (complementary) = 11-2-2. English/Morikawa (similar) = 0-2.

2. Context changes everything

Individual excellence doesn’t guarantee team success. The psychological skills required for individual performance (self-reliance, internal focus, personal control) can become liabilities in collaborative environments. Leaders must assess team readiness separately from individual capability.

Evidence: Scheffler is world No1 individually but 2-4-3 in Ryder Cup team play.

3. Role clarity is essential

Every successful partnership has clear role definition: who leads, who supports, who generates energy, who provides stability. Without this clarity, decision-making becomes paralysed.

Evidence: Ballesteros told Olazábal “I will take care of the rest”—instant clarity. English/Morikawa had no such definition.

4. Pressure responses are predictable

How individuals respond to pressure in team settings follows predictable patterns. Some become more conservative (loss aversion), others more aggressive (risk-seeking), some internalise stress, others externalise it. Understanding these patterns allows for better team composition and intervention strategies.

The Prospect Theory twist

Interestingly, as the US fell further behind, Prospect Theory predicted they would become more risk-seeking (people take more risks when in the domain of losses). This psychological shift actually improved some performances in singles play, where individual risk-taking could be an advantage rather than a team liability.

Practical applications for leaders

Team formation:

• Assess personality compatibility, not just skill compatibility
• Ensure complementary rather than similar psychological profiles
• Define clear roles: who leads, who supports, who generates energy, who provides stability
• Consider context-specific team requirements

Performance optimisation:

• Recognise when individual strengths become team weaknesses
• Build relationships before high-pressure situations
• Develop context-specific training programmes
• Monitor team dynamics for early warning signs

Crisis management:

• Understand how teams respond differently to pressure than individuals
• Prepare intervention strategies for different psychological scenarios
• Use behavioural insights to predict and prevent failures
• Apply Prospect Theory to understand risk-taking shifts under pressure

Conclusion

The 2025 Ryder Cup demonstrated that in high-stakes team environments, behavioural compatibility often trumps individual talent. Whilst the US had superior individual players on paper, Europe’s better understanding of team psychology—whether intentional or intuitive—proved decisive.

The evidence is compelling: Ballesteros/Olazábal’s 11-2-2 record and McIlroy/Fleetwood’s 4-0 performance demonstrate the power of complementary psychological profiles. Conversely, English/Morikawa’s 0-2 disaster and Scheffler’s 2-4-3 record show the cost of ignoring behavioural compatibility.

For leaders in any field, the lesson is clear: team performance is not simply the sum of individual capabilities. It’s the product of psychological compatibility, complementary strengths, behavioural synergy under pressure, and clear role definition. Understanding these dynamics isn’t just useful, it’s essential for consistent high performance in team-based environments.

The most successful organisations will be those that apply behavioural economics principles to team formation, recognising that the science of human decision-making under pressure is as important as technical skill in determining outcomes.

Dr Benjamin Kelly is the Head of Behavioural Economics & Social Impact at Kavedon Kapital. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

What to read next

What Behavioural Finance Teaches us about (Bad) Decision Making in Golf

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

In professional golf, where margins are razor-thin and pressure is immense, success hinges not just on physical prowess but on decision-making under duress.

While technical skill and conditioning are paramount, behavioural biases frequently derail even the most talented players. For leaders in sports, understanding these cognitive shortcuts and emotional responses is crucial for optimising athlete performance, coaching strategies, and mental resilience.

I believe that golf, much like financial markets, is fertile ground for behavioural finance – a field integrating psychology and economics to explain irrational decisions. While behavioural finance has profoundly reshaped our understanding of investment behaviour, its application to sports decision-making, particularly in golf, remains remarkably underexplored. This is a significant oversight, as the very same biases impacting trading decisions equally affect decision-making on the golf course.

By examining cognitive shortcuts and emotional responses that derail golfers, we uncover profound lessons applicable to high-pressure environments across sports and business.

My work with investors has consistently demonstrated that reducing ‘bad decisions’ incrementally improves investment returns. This same principle applies directly to golf: eliminating poor choices on the course directly translates to saving shots and enhancing performance.

Overcoming behavioural biases is notoriously difficult; our innate cognitive architecture makes us highly susceptible. Therefore, the optimal path to mitigation is not to fight the bias directly, but to create a step in the process that prevents us from succumbing to it. In trading, a simple yet powerful example is the stop-loss order – a pre-defined instruction to exit a position if it falls to a certain price, removing emotional discretion from a critical decision.

This methodology, involving structured interventions, is evolving for golfers of all abilities.

Below, I illustrate these points with compelling examples, including Robert MacIntyre’s dramatic final round at the 2025 BMW Championship, and propose actionable strategies for correction.

1. The pain of losing: loss aversion and the ‘choke’ phenomenon

Loss aversion describes our innate tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains; the psychological pain of a loss is often twice as powerful as the pleasure of a gain. In golf, this bias is a primary contributor to the dreaded ‘choke’ phenomenon, particularly when a player holds a significant lead. The shift from playing to win to playing not to lose is a classic manifestation. It leads to tentative play and costly errors.

Consider the ‘final day phenomenon’ in golf, where approximately two-thirds of leading players fail to convert their lead into a win on the final day of a tournament. This represents a conversion rate of roughly 33%. My work with investors has consistently shown that even a modest improvement in decision-making, leading to an increase in success rates from 33% to 45%, can yield material benefits. For a professional golfer, this translates directly into more career victories and significant financial gains. For investors, it means incrementally improved returns and enhanced portfolio performance. This isn’t a sudden decline in skill; it’s a psychological battle. A player leading a tournament, especially on the back nine, often shifts from an aggressive, winning mindset to a conservative, loss-averse one. Instead of continuing the attacking golf that built their lead, they focus on not making mistakes, which leads to tentative swings, reduced pace, and increased unforced errors. The fear of losing the lead becomes more potent than the desire to win. It paralyses their natural game.

Robert MacIntyre at the 2025 BMW Championship provides a vivid illustration. MacIntyre entered the final round with a commanding four-shot lead, having played exceptional golf through the first three rounds (carding 62, 64 and 68 for an average of 64.67 shots). However, in the final round, under immense pressure and with a significant lead to protect, he shot a 73 – eight shots worse than his average for the preceding rounds. This stark difference, which ultimately saw him lose the tournament to Scottie Scheffler, is a textbook example of loss aversion in action. The desire to protect the lead likely led to a more cautious, less assertive approach, resulting in a performance significantly below his demonstrated capability. His post-round comments when he expressed a desire to “smash up my golf clubs,” underscored the emotional toll of such a collapse, which was rooted in the psychological pain of losing what felt like an assured victory.

Correction strategy: process-oriented thinking and positive aggression

Mitigating loss aversion requires a conscious shift from outcome-oriented to process-oriented thinking. Golfers should:

• Concentrate solely on the mechanics and execution of the current shot. Treat each as an independent event rather than dwelling on the score or the implications of the outcome.
• Employ positive affirmations and visualise successful execution. This can help to counteract negative self-talk.
• Recognise that in situations where a conservative play is tempting but suboptimal (e.g., a short putt on a downhill slope), pre-committing to a firm, aggressive stroke can prevent the tentative actions often born of fear. For MacIntyre, a pre-defined strategy to maintain his aggressive, attacking style, regardless of his lead, might have yielded a different outcome.

My methodology, applied to investment, focuses on establishing clear, unemotional exit strategies to prevent such value traps, which directly improves returns by eliminating these ‘bad decisions’.

A victorious Scottie Scheffler shakes hands with Robert MacIntyre at the BMW Championship 2025 at Caves Valley Golf Club. (Photo: Kevin C Cox/Getty Images)

This translates to a pre-shot checklist that includes a deliberate assessment of risk vs reward. This ensures the chosen shot aligns with a pre-determined strategy rather than emotional impulse.

2. The illusion of control: overconfidence on the green

Overconfidence bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s abilities, knowledge, and the accuracy of one’s predictions. In golf, this often manifests as the infamous “hero shot” syndrome. Picture a golfer, slightly out of position after a wayward drive, facing a daunting carry over water or a dense thicket of trees to reach the green. A more prudent strategy might involve laying up, accepting a bogey or par. However, the overconfident golfer, convinced of their exceptional skill or believing this is their moment of glory, attempts the low-percentage, high-risk shot. The result is often disastrous: a ball splashed into the water, lost in the woods, or a double bogey that unravels a promising round.

Three-time major champion Pádraig Harrington has openly confessed that overconfidence cost him dearly at the 2025 Senior PGA Championship, particularly on a crucial 15th hole. Despite his vast experience, he felt his confidence and arrogance led him to an ill-advised approach shot, costing him a crucial hole. This mirrors countless amateur golfers who, after a few good shots, attempt to carry a 200-yard water hazard with a 3-wood, only to find their ball sinking to the bottom, convinced their recent success grants them an infallible touch. The allure of the ‘hero shot’ often blinds players to the higher probability of failure, driven by an inflated sense of their current capability.

Correction strategy: objective risk assessment and pre-shot routines

To counteract overconfidence, golfers must:

• Cultivate a rigorous pre-shot routine and an objective risk assessment process.
• Have a standardised sequence of actions before every shot – assessing the lie, wind, and distance; visualising the desired outcome; taking a practise swing; and committing to a target. This acts as a mental anchor, grounding the player in the present and preventing impulsive decisions.
• Objectively evaluate the probability of success versus the cost of failure, using data rather than gut feeling, can guide players towards higher-percentage shots, even if they appear less heroic.

My investor checklists include a mandatory step for a ‘devil’s advocate’ review of high-conviction trades, forcing a re-evaluation of assumptions. This translates to a ‘reality check’ step in their pre-shot routine, where they explicitly consider the worst-case scenario and whether the reward truly justifies the risk. This step prevents the overconfident ‘hero shot’.

Pádraig Harrington at the 2025 BMW PGA Championship. (Photo: Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

3. Seeing what we want to see: confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses. On the golf course, this can lead to flawed self-assessment and persistent errors.

A golfer might believe their slice is due to an ‘outside-in’ swing path, and subsequently only notice instances where their swing appears to confirm this, ignoring other potential causes like an open clubface. This selective attention prevents them from accurately diagnosing and correcting the root cause of their swing fault. Similarly, a player might attribute a good shot to their skill and a bad shot to external factors (a bad bounce, a gust of wind), reinforcing a biased self-perception that hinders genuine improvement.

Correction strategy: objective data and external feedback

To address confirmation bias, golfers should:

• Actively seek disconfirming evidence and diverse perspectives.
• Use shot-tracking technology (e.g., Trackman, Shot Scope) as it provides objective data on performance, revealing patterns and weaknesses that subjective perception might overlook or rationalise away.
• Engage in open dialogue with a caddy or coach, actively soliciting their unbiased opinion on club selection, strategy, or swing mechanics, can challenge pre-conceived notions and lead to more accurate self-assessment.
• Conduct a disciplined post-shot review, where the outcome is analysed objectively without immediate attribution. This is also vital.

My investor checklists mandate seeking out and documenting opposing viewpoints before making a significant investment.

This means a ‘feedback loop’ step where they actively solicit input from their caddy or playing partners on their swing or strategy, or review objective data from launch monitors, rather than relying solely on their internal, potentially biased, assessment.

4. The power of first impressions: anchoring

Anchoring bias occurs when individuals rely too heavily on an initial piece of information (the “anchor”) when making decisions, even if that information is irrelevant. In golf, this can lead to rigid decision-making that fails to adapt to changing conditions.

A common scenario involves a golfer fixating on the yardage provided by a sprinkler head or a course guide at the start of a hole. This initial yardage becomes an anchor, making it difficult to adjust for dynamic factors like wind changes, elevation shifts, or a different pin position that emerges during the round. A player might stubbornly stick to a club choice based on the initial anchor, even when conditions clearly dictate a different approach, leading to shots that are consistently long or short.

Correction strategy: dynamic assessment and multiple data points

Counteracting anchoring requires:

• Dynamic assessment and the consideration of multiple data points.
• Golfers should continuously reassess conditions before each shot, rather than relying solely on initial perceptions.
• This means actively checking wind direction and strength, re-evaluating pin positions, and considering the exact lie of the ball. Instead of just the yardage from the sprinkler head, factors like temperature, humidity, and recent performance with a particular club should inform the decision.
• Consciously hitting a “reset” button after a previous shot or hole, preventing that experience from anchoring subsequent decisions, is also crucial.

My investor checklists include a mandatory ‘re-anchor’ step, where all previous price points are deliberately ignored, and decisions are made solely on current fundamentals and future projections.

For golfers, this translates to a ‘situational awareness’ step in their routine, where they consciously disregard previous hole outcomes or initial yardage markers, and instead focus on a fresh, comprehensive assessment of all current variables before committing to a shot.

Robert MacIntyre at the 2025 BMW PGA Championship. (Photo: Jasper Wax/Getty Images)

Conclusion: cultivating mental discipline for peak performance

Behavioural biases are an inherent part of human cognition, but their impact on the golf course need not be detrimental.

By understanding how overconfidence, loss aversion, confirmation bias, and anchoring manifest, and by implementing structured strategies to counteract them, golfers can significantly enhance their decision-making capabilities. The journey to mastering the mental game of golf is one of continuous self-awareness, discipline, and a commitment to process over outcome.

Just as my work helps investors reduce the incidence of “bad decisions” to incrementally improve returns, applying these behavioural finance principles to golf can directly lead to saving shots and elevating performance. The critical insight is that overcoming biases is extremely difficult; our innate cognitive architecture makes us highly susceptible.

Therefore, the optimal path to mitigation is not to fight the bias directly, but to create a step in the process that prevents us from succumbing to it. This methodology, evolving from investment to the golf course, empowers athletes of all abilities to make optimal choices when it matters most.

For sports leaders, fostering an environment that encourages objective self-assessment, embraces data-driven insights, and champions structured routines will be key to developing athletes who not only possess exceptional physical talent but also the mental fortitude to make optimal decisions when it matters most.

This approach not only leads to more consistent performance but also a deeper, more rational engagement with the beautiful, challenging game of golf.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

Main Image: courtesy of David Clancy

By David Clancy

On a Friday night in Phibsborough, Dublin, you can feel Bohemian FC before you see them. There is something different about this team and the atmosphere under the Friday night lights.

The murals around their home ground Dalymount Park (which is to be renovated in the coming years), the ‘home of Irish football’, speak of solidarity, diversity and inclusion; the terraces hum with the sound of supporters who are not just fans. They are owners of this proud club. The Gypsies. Bohs. The home where Bob Marley and Thin Lizzy played concerts years ago. A team rich in history, rich in story.

Different, rather than better

In a football economy dominated by multi-club groups, billionaires, private equity firms, and global TV rights, Bohs are a club who stand apart. They’ve become a story about what sport can be when it roots itself not just in performance, but in people that care about the team. Their budget isn’t as large as some other clubs’, so they are creative and intentional with what they do in the football market and community.

They offer something different and offer a surprising strategic case study. They show how sustainability and a long-term engagement advantage can emerge from fan ownership, cultural clarity, and humble leadership. They play differently off the pitch. They are a fan-owned club that has survived 135 years, not through scale or capital, but rather through culture, purpose, and belonging.

They recently commissioned and sold jerseys with ‘Oasis’ emblazoned on the front (building on the hype around the band’s August gigs at the Croke Park stadium). Half of the proceeds from sales supported Bohemian FC’s football and community projects, while the other half was split between Music Generation Ireland, which helps young people across Ireland access music, and Irish Community Care Manchester, who work with the Irish community (from which brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher hail) in that city.

This club truly embodies what category design means. They have effectively practised category design and owning a niche by positioning themselves not just as a football club, but as a cultural and social movement, blending sport with music, art, and activism. By creating and owning this unique space of ‘community-powered club’, they’ve differentiated themselves in the growing League of Ireland, attracting fans from Ireland and abroad, plus partners who share those values – rather than competing solely on wins and losses in the league table.

For leaders in leagues like the NBA, NFL, AFL, and Premier League, ‘Dublin’s Originals’ could be more than just a curiosity. A relative outlier, they offer an example of a model of sustainability for a team, one that challenges the dominant logic of growth in more unorthodox ways. Their underlying structure of fan ownership is worth studying. They are a collective of supporters who refuse to separate themselves from the team. Here, sustainability isn’t a corporate ESG initiative, it’s survival, identity, and continuity.

Alignment over expansion

Bohemians filter every strategic decision through a simple lens. They ask: ‘does this strengthen our bond with the community?’ This clarity allows them to stay relevant without necessarily chasing expansion, although supporter clubs are sprouting up across other continents. These fans want the team’s special edition away jersey featuring Dublin band Fontaines DC, which was released in support of the homeless charity Focus Ireland, or their Guinness-sponsored range of merch, the proceeds of which support Refugee and Migrant Solidarity Ireland.

Purpose alignment can be a sharper competitive edge than market dominance. Bohs remind us that sustainability doesn’t come from infinite growth, but from a cycle of reinvestment. Money goes back into facilities, players, and fan experiences, not siphoned off to distant investors. Fan-owned. Fan-run. Fan-driven.

Bohs pioneered blind football, amputee football and walking football in Ireland, and, in 2021, launched their Disability Supporters Association. They were the first League of Ireland team to take part in the Dublin Pride festival. They have teams and run events for young adults with intellectual impairments. They give back because it’s important for them.

For a team still seeking its identity in some shape and form, here are some inflection points from this club study. Replace relative transactional sponsorships with partnerships tied to a community identity (e.g., environmental groups protecting a part of a region). Give players structured time each season for community immersion, not as ‘charity golf appearances’ but as integral to the team’s ethos.

One could measure impact not just in brand impressions but in school programmes launched, parks built, and neighbourhoods revitalised, for instance. This piece of nurturing culture is not for decoration; it could be for leverage. Fans want their teams to win, but also to stand for something. To build something.

NBA franchises could issue community bonds or micro-shares, giving fans a symbolic stake and reinvesting proceeds into grassroots basketball. The result? Loyalty that outlasts market cycles. Premier League clubs could implement ‘golden share’ protections, ensuring fans safeguard cultural assets such as club colours, logos or stadium names. Food for thought.

Culture and ethos

Since the 2010s, Bohs, bohemian by nature, have adopted a left-wing political identity, which one can see in their club branding, language, public messaging and community initiatives. This resembles the philosophy and ideology of the Hamburg-based Bundesliga side St Pauli.

Daniel Lambert, their Chief Operating Officer, has positioned Bohs in support of causes such as Palestinian nationalism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, LGBTQ rights, refugee and homelessness advocacy. Jerseys carry messages from Amnesty International and the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland. This alignment further builds loyalty and that sense of belonging to something, a movement. When fans and supporters are engaged, they likely will spend more on team merchandise too.

The club doesn’t shy away from social concerns and makes a stance. Volunteers run matchdays. Players show up at community events because it’s expected, not mandated and instructed. This is the culture, and these are not just PR moves but deliberate signals. These micro-behaviours strengthen loyalty and differentiate Bohs in a crowded and competitive sports market.

AFL clubs, many still member-owned, could guard against creeping commercialisation by doubling down on symbolic choices that reflect local identity. Of course, one must look at a P&L and the revenue statements, but this is worth contemplating. NFL franchises could reposition sponsorships not merely as transactions but as cultural alignments (health, education, inclusion, etc.).

A team could link sponsorships to civic identity – environmental causes, education initiatives, small business partnerships. Instead of buying attention, they earn trust. In an attention economy, values may outperform advertising in some peoples’ marks.

Imagine if a big franchise used its platform not just for commercial sponsorship, but as a megaphone for the causes their community cares about most. The return on emotional equity might dwarf the return on traditional marketing.

Fans as stakeholders

Bohemians’ ownership model turns belonging into structure. According to the club’s Social Impact report, as of 2023 they had over 3,100 members, up from just over 900 in 2018. There is a ‘one member, one vote’ rule. Membership is open to anyone and everyone, although there are limited season ticket and membership numbers; between seasons if a member does not renew their membership, it is sold on a first-come, first-serve basis. As well as match access, a member can attend and vote at the club’s AGMs and EGMs.

Once a member has hit three years of consecutive service, they are permitted to run for a board position. Thus, there is no outside control. Clear, values-driven, long-term thinking is encouraged over short-term profits; and growing the club and the community always remains the priority. Fans are shareholders; players feel the weight of representing not a brand, but a people. The ethos at the club is that belonging is the bottom line.

Could a Premier League club, say, recapture that intimacy? Could the NBA, with its superstar ‘big player’ economy rediscover the power of collective belonging? Bohs show us it’s possible, although the scale of operation is, of course, different. A team could give fans voting rights on heritage roundel designs or community projects. When supporters are allowed to co-create, membership renewal becomes almost automatic.

Stewardship, not ego

At Bohemians, leadership is custodianship. Senior management, coaches, and volunteers alike work with humility. The aim is not public visibility but leaving the club better than they found it.

Picture a club, now acquired by a new ownership group, flush with new wealth. They could embed ‘custodianship leadership’ programmes for academy coaches and staff, thereby reinforcing the idea that the club belongs to the city, not just its new owners.

Reframing success: The Bohs Scorecard

Bohs prove that success can be measured differently, and how one can rethink what success is. Yes, they want to win games. Qualify for Europe. Fill the stands. But they care about community impact, inclusivity, and the stories they leave behind.

In the NBA or NFL, where victory is often measured in ring counts, marquee signings or franchise valuations, this can sound quaint. But consider the long arc – which clubs will still matter when television deals shrink, when fans demand authenticity, when climate and social pressures force a rejig of what ‘sport’ contributes to society? Bohemians have already answered that question. They matter because they belong to their people.

This scorecard which, for the record, is not affiliated with Bohemian FC in any way, could unpack:

1. Performance scores
2. Financial health
3. Community impact
4. Cultural fingerprint

Potential examples of cases in point: cross-league applications

• NBA: The Portland Trail Blazers created a ‘Belonging Index’ to measure cultural connection.
• NFL: The Green Bay Packers double down on authentic fan ownership as a gold standard.
• AFL: The West Coast Eagles reinvest a percentage of revenue into grassroots participation.
• EPL: Brentford FC expand their analytics model to track cultural as well as performance metrics.

 The 4-step Sustainability Playbook for leaders in sport

1. Align strategy with purpose – Test every decision against community impact.
2. Treat culture as currency – Use values, not just marketing spend, to build loyalty.
3. Build belonging – Give fans structural roles in shaping identity.
4. Lead as custodians – Think generationally, not transactionally.

 Why this matters

Front offices, director boards and ownership groups are under scrutiny and pressure: escalating player salaries, volatile media rights, and restless fan bases.

Bohs offer a reminder. Sustainability in sport is not just financial. It can also be cultural. The clubs that flourish in the next era will be those that treat belonging as an asset, culture as leverage, and leadership as stewardship.

David Clancy is the CEO of The Nxt Level Group and host of Essential Skills 2.

One for your diaries

Seán McCabe, the Head of Performance & Sustainability at Bohemian FC, will speak at Essential Skills II at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin on 28 October as part of a lineup of speakers across high performance sport, business and healthcare.

Tickets are available here.

By John Portch

“I tried planning out my days then I realised there was no point,” says Michael Italiano.

The Head of Athletic Performance at the Royal Sports Group is telling the Leaders Performance Institute about his first season working with the Rajasthan Royals in cricket’s most prestigious Twenty20 competition the India Premier League. The year was 2024.

“Every day was different,” he continues. “The IPL is so dynamic, there’s always something going on, whether it’s some sort of virus that’s hit the team or there’s some underlying niggling issue.” Throw in the compressed nature of the league (75 matches between mid-March and the end of May), plus the travel demands in a country the size of India, and minor problems can quickly escalate.

In Italiano’s first season, the Royals reached the play-offs and played 16 matches in just 62 days and travelled more than 10,000 km (6,214 miles) in fulfilling their schedule.

High player and coach turnover is baked into the format too. Ahead of the 2025 season, the Royals released 17 players and bought 14 in the IPL auction. Just six players were retained from 2024. Rahul Dravid was appointed Head Coach in the off-season and, 12 months on, has departed. His successor is yet to be appointed.

As for Italiano, during the course of an IPL campaign itself, he rises at 7am to prepare for the day ahead. He is often the first at the breakfast table and meets with his staff daily at 9:30am. The players tend to wake up at 10:30 or 11am and, during the course of the afternoon, they begin to trickle in for prehab, conditioning and recovery work before training begins at 6pm (to match the rhythm of the league’s evening-based playing schedule).

“It’s a pretty crazy tournament, I won’t lie,” says Italiano with a smile. “You spend the first two weeks back at home just catching up on sleep.”

Which is not to say that Italiano and his colleagues work without structure. Their morning meetings are designed to bring together the disparate elements of the performance team. “We run through any data and we run through all the players just to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

This intense schedule goes someway to explaining why our interview was necessarily postponed until the off-season. As we speak, it is mid-summer in the UK. Italiano has just completed a “review week” in London with his colleagues at the invitation of the Royal Sports Group’s majority owner Manoj Badale.

In a rare quiet moment, he tells the Leaders Performance Institute how he works to ensure everyone in the performance team is on the same page.

‘I felt like I was going back to school’

Italiano arrived in Jaipur having spent six years working as a high-performance coach for McLaren F1. He had no prior experience of cricket when he was appointed the Royal Sports Group’s first Head of Athletic Performance in 2023. “I had to get up to speed on bowling loads and the other physical demands of cricket,” he says. “I felt like I was going back to school.”

Performance systems, at least, can be transferrable. Italiano wanted to replicate the effective interdisciplinary communication he enjoyed at McLaren.

“We had 85 people travel to a race weekend and everyone is just so aligned and everyone knows what the driver’s saying in the press conference, everyone knows what the car upgrades are”.

It would not be the same in Jaipur. “That was something I noticed straight away at the Royal Sports Group: a very clear cultural sensitivity in the Asian culture where people feel they’re not allowed to make a mistake and, if you do, then you don’t say anything.”

Italiano felt an instant lack of trust, from both colleagues and sceptical players. “I felt I had a really low level of compliance on a personal level, which I wasn’t used to.”

Yet from day one he used his inexperience of cricket to build bridges. “I told them: ‘you know what, I don’t have the answers right now and I need you guys to help me because you’ve been in this culture and environment way longer than I have and so I’m sitting here asking you for help’; and that was a big shift in our team because I could see them thinking ‘oh wow, he’s asking for my help’ and it got the ball rolling.”

Honesty and transparency underpinned all of the good work Italiano’s performance team did in that first pre-season.

‘You should make it safe to fail, with the right intention’

Italiano admits he had a lot of ideas of how things could be improved, but also realised he couldn’t change too much in one go.

“I just went for feedback,” he says. “I spoke to all of the players, all of my staff, I spoke to my coaches. I collated themes and then I prioritised them based on impact and execution. So what’s the simplicity of the execution? How relevant is it now and can it be done at a feasible cost?”

He compiled a list of 12 “parameters”, some physical metrics, others more structural in nature, and “brought them across to the leaders for discussion”.

Together, they decided on three or four elements that could be implemented in the first six months and a further four to be implemented over the next 12 to 18 months. “You could almost say we unintentionally came up with a three-year strategy just based on trying to fine-tune how we operate.”

Sometimes the performance team will take risks. Italiano candidly reveals that their new interventions have enjoyed no more than a 50 per cent success rate. “It never turns out the way you think it’s going to turn out no matter how much input you have.” He cites cultural, environmental and performance-based reasons. However, as he says, “once the execution phase goes on, there’s always learnings.”

Under his stewardship the Royals embrace these lessons. “When certain elements didn’t work you’d go back to the drawing board and that happens in business all the time. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of this role and you should make it safe to fail, with the right intention.”

‘You can’t be perky in every meeting’

Italiano admits he’s “not a big meetings guy”, but he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

As for those 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.”

That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything. In fact, ‘stay curious’ is one of a series of daily reminders that Italiano has noted on his personal “cheat sheet”. The others are ‘bring empathy’, ‘listen first’, ‘be self-aware’, ‘be transparent and vulnerable’, ‘bring my authentic self’, ‘check-in first’ and ‘do the one percent’.

All of these are important during the course of an IPL season. “It’s an emotional rollercoaster so, as you can imagine, we’re not all rocking up to every meeting perky. There’s about 75 meetings in 75 days and I can’t expect everyone to always be smiling and greeting me in the best place.”

The potential monotony is a risk that Italiano understands well. “When I feel there’s been a tense week, I may start a meeting by going around the room and asking ‘what pissed you off yesterday?’ and just let them go to town. You’d be surprised what they say.” Italiano will always help them if he can.

“Other times we’ll go the opposite way and I’ll say ‘let’s label something that we’re grateful for today’. We’ll also mix up the environment. One day we’ll meet by the pool, another day we might visit our favourite roasting coffee shop in Jaipur. That perks everyone up because they have amazing pistachio croissants.”

Additionally, Italiano gives each of his staff the opportunity to lead a meeting and set the agenda. “Why should I lead when we’re a team? I did that throughout last season and it kept us going. Those meetings were the best times of the day because we’re all like-minded and we have the same goals together.”

While the team strives for success on the field, Italiano is proud of how his performance team have acquitted themselves. “Rajasthan has a clear goal of being one of the leaders in high-performance in cricket,” he says. He retains the excitement that induced him to leave the world of F1.

What about his hopes when next season rolls around? “I’m most excited about sitting down with my staff and actually knuckling out career development pathways for our team.”

He mentions player data too. “How are we showing them data? Why are we tracking what we’re tracking? We haven’t nailed that flow yet but it’s one of our focuses this year. Also making sure that the players understand and buy into the importance of their data.”

Ultimately, his focus is on making the Royals’ performance programme be as good as it can be.

“I’ve had an interesting time in cricket so far, and if anyone has better answers, then I’m all ears.”

What to read next

Adaptability: ‘Change Is Everywhere and Leaders Must Respond All the Time. It’s No Small Ask’

By John Portch

In October 2024, Harlequins ended a run of eight consecutive defeats to their London rivals Saracens.

Quins’ 17-10 victory at the Twickenham Stoop ended five years of frustration and marked a complete turnaround from the 2023-24 Premiership Rugby season when they conceded 90 points in losing both home and away to Saracens.

Stephan Lewies, the lock who captained Quins to their long-awaited victory, had also endured every one of those losses. The run was particularly galling given the relative parity between the teams during that period. Quins were themselves Premiership champions in 2021.

So what was different this time? “Coming off a record like that in your derby game, in a way you go looking for answers in the wrong places,” Lewies told an audience several weeks later at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“In the past, we’d review what’d gone wrong, and the coaches – who often feel pressure in a different way to the players – would go ‘let’s change this and let’s add that’ because Saracens are brilliant.”

It took eight reverses for Lewies and his team to work out why. “We’d always changed our tactics for Saracens,” he continued. “We would change how we structured our week.”

Quins, he explained, usually worked off an 80:20 game model where it is “80 per cent us and 20 per cent we change for the other team”. However, “we often went 50:50 against Saracens; training 50 per cent on us and 50 per cent on them.”

They did things differently ahead of the October 2024 match. Firstly, the players and coaches met independently before convening to discuss what was needed. The club had adopted a similar approach in their successful quest for the Premiership title in 2021. Their director of rugby [the de facto head coach] departed mid-season and the players worked with the remaining coaches to devise a winning formula after the club decided to wait until the off-season to appoint a replacement.

Once again it gave the team clarity in their convictions. “We said we’ve been constantly changing for this opposition because of the pressure that’s mounting on us,” said Lewies, “and we agreed that we should go back to what we do and just try to do that better.” That meant “doubling down” and going almost “90:10” in the week building up to the match. “That created clarity and alignment from the coaches to the players. And when the pressure came in this game, we could turn to something we’d done for the whole season, and basically for years, versus something new in a pressured moment.

“It’s much easier to stuff up something new under pressure versus something you’ve done for a long time because it’s already second nature.”

Stephan Lewies in conversation with Rachel Vickery onstage at the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval.

Lewies’ reflections chimed with session moderator Rachel Vickery, a high-performance specialist helping teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

“So much of pressure is what happens off the pitch. When you’re on the pitch that’s actually your comfort zone in many ways and so you’re more prepared for that,” she said.

“Many teams have a monkey on their back around a particular opponent and that can change how the game is approached, which adds a lot of pressure.”

Lewies agreed and felt that being process rather than results-driven was ultimately what led to the result that day.

“It gives you freedom on the pitch to just go out and play,” he said. “You know your prep is done. Go out and express yourself. When you have clarity and alignment with the coaches you’re not asking yourself on the pitch ‘what’s the coach thinking?’ whenever there’s a tough decision. You almost know the answer to the question before it happens because you’re totally aligned in what you want to achieve in the game and at different stages of the game.”

It is an attitude Lewies takes into difficult conversations, which he faced often during his four years as Quins captain. The key was to be well prepared and, more often than not, those conversations would not be as tough as anticipated.

“If you kick the can down the road it can become a bigger problem. It can be scary to have that tough conversation in the moment, but that’s where growth happens, in that adversity. You grow closer as people and as teams.”

He recounted the story of a teammate who once skipped training and was suspended. Lewies endorsed the punishment but was labelled a ‘Judas’ by the player in question. The pair eventually made up after a frank exchange of views when it was clear that Lewies would listen to what his teammate had to say. It stopped matters escalating further and, as Lewies happily explained, made their relationship stronger.

“Getting him back on board and understanding him was critical for us.”

It was in such moments that the bonds, self-belief and confidence were forged that would eventually see off Saracens.

“There is so much value in creating opportunities to collaborate.”

What to read next

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

By John Portch

More than half of coaches and practitioners feel they could be better at balancing challenge and support for their athletes and other personnel.

That is according to a straw poll of Leaders Performance Institute members conducted at the outset of a virtual roundtable we hosted in late-August.

Some members – 42 per cent – rate themselves at four out of five, but everyone in attendance felt there was room for improvement.

With the scene set, members went on to highlight four factors that underpin a good balance of challenge and support, with reflections on how these look in practice in their environments.

1. Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

The idea of psychological safety was raised several times. Psychological services are a key offering in the provision of safe spaces. A member who works in a senior health and wellness role in a major US league, spoke of their organisation’s success in providing confidential counselling services that support individuals in their pursuit of performance goals.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Another idea proffered is to take steps to reduce the fear of (inevitable) failure by creating a low-support, high-challenge environment. “We’re trying to make our training environments more intimidating and challenging than the game would be, so that’s not only going to make those game environments easier and normalise failure, but it also allows them to fail in front of their peers and get more comfortable in that space,” said a coach from American baseball. “Then what the support side looks like to that is not just coach to player but player-to-player; figuring out those challenging environments and finding different solutions with each other.”

2. Set standards and expectations first

This provides clarity and should remove doubts. “The places that do this really well, without exception, spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a training block or at the beginning of a year discussing what the priorities for that thing are and what the standard is,” said a performance science advisor from the Canadian Olympic system.

With those standards in place you have a framework on which to build trust. “When you get to work with a player that you might not know as well, that’s just going to help you get to the trust piece faster and be able to challenge each other in that way,” the baseball coach added.

“One of the things that I see,” said a performance science advisor based in Canada, “is when it’s not just the coach that’s holding athletes accountable, it’s the athletes holding each other accountable as well. That’s much easier when there’s been some time spent talking about what the expectations for the standard are.”

The idea, as a wellbeing lead in motorsport said, is to create “better challenging conversations because it really is a massive coaching benefit. Just creating that space for challenging conversations, practising it, scripting it, and it becoming a natural part of our every day”.

3. Customised support

An attendee with experience of coaching in English football argued that challenge and support is more about the individual than the environment. They said: “Individuals need different things at different times, so if we understand an individual’s needs, then we, as a group, are best placed to cater to individual needs based on where somebody is.”

This is reflected in the psychological services provided by teams. “We are mainly here to navigate and help them navigate their career progression on an individual level,” said the aforementioned health and wellness lead. These services are increasingly integrated and perceived as a part of a holistic offering. “The fact that we have this space in and of itself is really hitting the nail on the head in terms of how much just caring on an individual level really does impact performance.”

It is also incumbent on coaches and staff to know their athletes. “I was reflecting on an athlete who’s getting three buses in order to just get to training, and is just struggling to feed himself,” said the coach in English football. “Lots of that wouldn’t be known unless we were properly getting to know somebody.”

“It literally is just needs analysis,” a member added. “I think just really understanding the individual, because there’s just so much variety and meeting them where they are in the correct language.”

4. Foster autonomy

This is critical in an era where, as one attendee put it, “we’re observing that student-athletes are almost afraid to try new things.”

“Getting athletes to engage in ‘what does this need to look like in order for us to have success?’ really helps foster autonomy,” said another member whose work brings them into regular contact with younger athletes. “They’re an active part of the process of deciding what’s going to happen next, what went wrong, how do we fix it.”

“Getting them to buy into their own responsibility is critical,” added a race engineer when reflecting on drivers in their motorsport. “They have to be ready to leave here with the ability to be responsible for their own actions.”

Another participant spoke of an idea they had while working in English football: “We put constraints in place that meant that the athlete couldn’t revert to his normal type. He had to go and find a new way to execute the same outcome.”

What to read next

Transparency, Empathy and Empowerment: Five Ways Teams Are Serving their People in 2025